Designing Transformational Customer Experience

Recently I was in Harvard Business school for an amazing program on Leading Product Innovation. Thank you to all the professors, faculty and staff for providing invaluable insights. It helps us in building our expertise in developing strategies for continuous innovation in product, business model, GTM (Go To Market), pricing and many others. Amazing group of participants with diverse perspectives from different industrial verticals, countries and functional areas mixed with case studies, discussions and little bit of magic made this overall experience truly unforgettable. Taking this opportunity to share my learning's on designing transformational customer experiences.

Let’s Imagine that you are put in charge of transforming your organization customer experience design – which aims to ensure that customers have positive touch points with companies while buying and consuming their products and services. How are you going to approach this?

During the classroom session we were asked to:

• Narrate one terrible customer experience that we have had and reflect on what happened.
• Narrate a great customer experience that we have had and reflect on what made it so memorable

What comes to your mind on your most memorable experiences as customers?

While you have started to think, here are some fundamental design principle that emerged out of the classroom discussions that make customer experience great

• Frame the markets by “jobs to be done” (JTBD) and not by segments. One of the biggest revelations is that markets should be defined by the needs of the customer, not by product or industry. As Christensen argued that unless you truly understand the needs of the user of your product, you can never truly innovate (functional aspects of the product alone are not enough)
• Paramount for the business to have understanding on End to end touch points within customer journey map from the customer perspective and their goals, motivations and pain points
• Focus on creating great product experiences, cash follows you. We should always remember that cash is the lifeblood of a business, and without customer there is no cash
• Experiment often to validate the risks with customers and iterate on them to fine tune.

1. Think of existing customers – Can tell what works and what doesn’t
2. Customers captured by competitors – can help you understand market segmentation better and underlying JTBD
3. Customers not consuming in your market – growth opportunities that our competitors are not capturing.

• Front line employees have valuable insights: Garner insights from your front line employees (sales, service support engineers, pre-sales and so on), they have lot of insights to provide information about some of the touch points and biggest pain points associated with them.
• An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: do it right the first time, organization should focus on preventing issue occurrence or re-occurrence.
• Reliability matters more than wow moments: As we know negative word of mouth is more powerful than positive word of mouth in terms of influencing customer behavior.

Despite all the above principles, insights gained about customers through advanced technologies, and data analysis something still seems to be missing for most companies

The classroom discussions points to the missing ingredient: “Emotion”. We were surprised by the language each one of us choose to respond to "most memorable experiences as customers": made me feel special, showed empathy, really cared, personalized the process, trust, owned the problem, surprised us, didn’t argue or delay, killed us with kindness and made things simple. We weren’t using the standard language of business like functional value, efficiency and cost-value analysis, instead we were describing "emotional impact"

To conclude - you should infuse customer journey to alleviate customer's feeling of surprise, delight, happiness, relief, empathy and much more that defined most memorable experiences. Emotional experience will leave invaluable memories, increase customer loyalty and have multiplier effect in a world with emotion and the ensuing positive word of mouth – not extra features or value for money.