Customer Experience Design

Today, more and more products are connected, in the sense that they have some kind of communications capabilities to provide their location and other telemetry such as health, usage and other key datum.  These connected devices include smart phones and TVs, home automation and security products, and innovative new devices that are becoming increasingly common.  And, this is happening both in the home and at the office.

One of the most innovative of these products is the Nest learning thermostat (and now the new Nest Smoke Alarm).  This beautifully designed device is gaining rapid consumer acceptance, and is now even distributed by energy companies as an incentive to manage energy more responsibly.  Nest is a wireless-enabled device.  From the moment it is turned on, it searches and connects to the wireless network within the home, and even calls back to a cloud-based server to notify the company that it is on, at this location, and working. 

While this is all well and good, the designers of this product took everything a generational leap forward.  They designed the customer experience into the product itself!  Even prior to rollout, Nest executives seemed to know that they had to deliver a world class customer experience that included easy installation, quick and accurate problem resolution, and most importantly an army of independent yet certified Nest technicians wherever Nest was sold.  Through intelligent design and implementation of a contractor strategy, they have succeeded in mobilizing an entire field force, none of which are on the payroll, to become enthusiastic Nest evangelists.  Nest owners have their own digital place to report problems, open cases, seek out these technicians and even rate them post service call.

Most product manufacturers have little experience in a direct-to-consumer relationship, having been removed from the actual customer by retail channels, both on and off line.  To contemplate a direct-to-consumer experience, manufacturers must consider the following five key areas of that relationship:

Registration: How do you get customers to register their product(s) with manufacturers?  This involves everything from package design and in package forms, code-based on device registration.  Regardless, the manufacturer must have a carefully designed incentive to drive higher registration rates.

Engagement:  Once registered, how do you drive engagement with those customers?  Key here is the notion of strategic lifecycle messaging.  Contrary to accepted batch and blast emails strategies, lifecycle messaging is a formal and well thought out program that involves triggered, data-driven messages at key points in the lifecycle with a customer.  This can include post-purchase, at registration, pre-warranty expiration and any other event where an opportunity exists to provide highly targeted and relevant messaging.

E-Commerce:  At every point of the lifecycle, manufacturers have the opportunity to drive additional, hidden revenue streams through the complete integration of ecommerce.  This can be during the registration process, within each lifecycle message, and within an owner center, set up specifically for each individual customer.

Service:  With registered customers and within owner centers, manufacturers have the opportunity to provide self-service solutions to both increase customer satisfaction, as well as deflect service costs.  This requires having the knowledge and support assets ready to be delivered on-line.  Additionally, customers should be able to log support issues and initiate service cases directly from their owner center.

Support:   Should a problem occur, how does a manufacturer effectively deliver an in-field service experience that enhances the overall brand experience, and solidifies the customer relationship?  This is made harder when the manufacturer must rely on independent 3^rd parties for support.  But even with fully owned support, quality, reliability and customer satisfaction must be continually managed and monitored to deliver that experience.

Customer Experience Design involves weaving each of the above functions appropriately into the overall customer experience, in such a manner that the experience is optimized for each customer.  It is important to note that this experience must be considered in terms of many customer “flows,” with a flow being defined as the steps and process by which a customer accomplishes a specific set of tasks with a targeted goal in mind.  For example, there is a registration flow designed to minimize drop-off and maximize registration.  There is a service flow for each identified potential support issue.  And there are multiple purchase flows that result in add-on sales of both ancillary and related products based on current customer holdings.

The art of Customer Experience Design is to identify each customer goal, design flows for those goals and define and implement the content that is dynamically targeted for each individual customer, including the specific events and messaging strategies to support optimizing the results of each flow.

The benefits of Customer Experience Design are significant:

Direct, High Margin Sales:  By providing the ability to buy additional products and services, manufacturers can define new sources of high margin revenue, outside of margin crushing retail channels.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction:  Giving customers the tools they need to have a direct relationship with the manufacturer only enhances customer satisfaction.  This leads to customer advocacy in the form of reviews, recommendations, social sharing and many others.  Turning customers into advocates also increases the value of that relationship.

Decreased Support Costs:  By designing service and support flows into the experience, brands realize a significant decrease in support costs, including fewer phone calls and reduced return rates.

Designed right, Customer Experience should become a true profit center for the manufacturer, and pay for itself in just a few short months.  Also, this can be done as an enhancement to the retail channel, and not a threat to it, as that channel itself can be designed into the overall experience.  Today, every manufacturer, whether product be connected or not, can benefit from proper, strategic customer experience design to achieve significant and lasting benefits in the overall customer relationship.