Part two: customer experience problems and solutions

By Stuart Lauchlan, news and analysis editor

The basic problem stems from a lack of attention to customer experience management and conflicting agendas. Who has responsibility for the customer experience delivered across interaction channels? In all too many cases, no single person. So everyone chips in and the result is the proverbial camel-shaped committee horse.

In too many cases, project team members assume that users’ needs and preferences are their own. "It works for me, so it should work for you." "I’ve read the marketing theory so that will obviously map onto real world experience, won’t it?" But how many times are the programmers, designers, IT staff and marketing groups truly representative of the target customers?

Marketing is probably the single biggest point of failure. Marketing is the custodian of the brand and helps to define customer communication and interaction strategies. It should also be listening and communicating back on customer perceptions. Customer experience need to live up to and deliver on the brand promise. In too many cases, it does not.

What you’re really talking about when discussing customer experience is an emotional reaction. To design for customer experience, you need to understand what the emotional drivers are that will produce that reaction.

So how do you do that? Well, you can go to IT and consulting vendors for assistance. For example, IBM has its customer experience, branding and usability design team which can "create innovative solutions that address your customers' and users' desires so their interactions with you are engaging, relevant, memorable, easy and reliable."

To achieve this, the company breaks down the design process into four stages: assessments; strategy; design and development; and education and mentoring. It uses an iterative user-centred methodology for design and development with frequent and systematic user-based evaluation throughout all stages of the analysis, design and development process.

Over at Microsoft, they tap into the customer themselves with the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Programme. To design our products, the firm gathers direct customer feedback by conducting usability tests, surveys, focus groups and other types of field research, but it’s clearly impossible to talk to all customers. The Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) was created to give all Microsoft customers the ability to contribute to the design and development of Microsoft products.

It collects information about how customers use Microsoft programmes and about any problems. If customers choose to participate, Windows automatically sends information to Microsoft about how they use certain products. Information from your computer is combined with other CEIP data to improve the products and features customers use most often. (It’s also rather annoying and many customers fear ‘Big Brother’ implications about the way it works, fairly or unfairly).

Outside of these approaches, what can you do to help yourselves?

Part three, key customer experience questions, click here.