Jason is the Managing Vice President, Experience Design at Capital One.
It’s reasonable for business leaders to be driven by a desire to make sure the business succeeds, and it’s equally understandable that revenue, profit and expenses are the go-to KPIs. However, this approach results in an often exclusively inward view. It leads to questions about how the business is doing versus questions about what really matters: “Are our customers and employees happy, and are we making their lives better?”
The reality of doing business today is that experience is an integral part of the service or product being delivered. Customer interactions don’t have to be just transactional. Every interaction has the potential to cultivate deep, meaningful relationships that are built on trust. A superior experience is just as important as the price. Let’s consider why experience matters and why it’s such a crucial area of focus for all business leaders—even outside design.
Customer expectations have hit an all-time high. According to a 2020 Salesforce report, 80% of customers now consider the experience a company provides to be equally important as its products and services. Research by Infoquest (via Arif Harbott) found that “a totally satisfied customer contributes 2.6 times as much revenue to a company as a somewhat satisfied customer” and “14 times as much revenue as a somewhat dissatisfied customer.” PwC research shows that the payoffs for valued, great experiences are substantial—resulting in “up to a 16% price premium on products and services, plus increased loyalty.”
It’s in a company’s best interests to get the customer experience right. It can earn valuable customer loyalty—which, in turn, drives sales and customer engagement. However, it’s easier said than done. Delivering timely and effective services and products that meet quality expectations is great, but it’s also the bare minimum that customers have come to expect—and that baseline performance is rarely rewarded in 2023.
The dual challenge and opportunity that business leaders face today is to tap into the deep experience and knowledge of cross-functional teams to leverage human insights and work back from customer needs. From there, it’s about understanding how technical capabilities, combined with design best practices, can both solve the customer problem and generate a competitive advantage for the business. The key is keeping the experience at the forefront.
Getting Customer Experience Just Right
Ultimately, any customer experience agenda that doesn’t have a clear link to the core of the business is not going to have longevity. To put this into context, it’s helpful to understand what customer experience means to the bottom line in granular terms.
We know that great customer experiences create increasingly loyal customers—which, in turn, generate revenue via product usage and multi-product relationships. In other words, if a customer buys one product and has a positive experience, that customer is likely to do more business with the same company and buy more products.
The value customers place on a good experience affects their consideration every time they have a choice of whether to use your company’s product or an alternative. In essence, to compete in the market, businesses need to deliver great customer experiences to maintain existing customers and attract new ones.
What’s good for the customer is good for the business. Here’s how leading strategic designers today, including at Capital One, are connecting experience and business outcomes to deliver results:
• Co-creating experiences with business partners. Creating customer experience is a collaborative, cross-functional and multidisciplinary effort. Designers are the connective tissue that brings human-centered research, insights and customer-backed decision-making up and down the tech stack and across the business. That means they’re well-positioned to facilitate the creation of a future state, resulting in a customer experience North Star that disparate teams can rally around.
• Being bilingual in the customer and the business. Designers have the most influence when they talk about the customer experience in the language of business. It’s critical that designers understand the connection between customer behavior and business dynamics. Inevitably, cross-functional teams face hundreds of choices about the customer experience they’ll deliver, so it’s important that designers both understand and convey the implications of the experience on the underlying business model.
• Developing standards and systems for consistent experience applications. Standardized design systems, measurement and tracking, and perspectives on company-wide solutions lead to more consistent experience development. When applied effectively across the business, the result brings a more uniform, broad awareness of the customer’s needs and how to deliver on them as well as a clear set of best practices for every teammate—whether customer-facing or not—to work from.
It Starts From Within
Thoughtfully designed experiences don’t stop with customers. Our business leaders are keenly aware that our associates’ experiences matter just as much as the customer experience. By applying a human-centered approach to internal teams, business leaders today can build environments that foster an empathetic, powerful and resilient workforce. This creates the conditions to deliver insightful and impactful customer experiences that can offer more value for the customer and the business.
The Bottom Line
For any company seeking successful business outcomes in today’s highly competitive market, it’s essential to factor both the customer and employee experience into every element of the business. The upshot is that designing great customer experiences creates a flywheel effect on the company’s economics.
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