What are the best practices for CX design?

Starting with a financial framework before diving into customer experience (CX) design is a game changer. Many companies are great at collecting customer feedback and making incremental changes, but they miss the crucial step of tying these efforts back to financial outcomes. Asking yourself, "How does reducing friction or understanding the customer better impact revenue?" sets the stage for meaningful, impactful CX strategies. It ensures that your efforts are not just about customer satisfaction, but also about driving business results. This approach makes CX and ROI inseparable allies from the start.

Surveys are a good starting point. For you to know, how your customers feel about the service or product you provide. When you receive feedback you should also have the willingness and resources to make improvements. By doing this, you will show you care and value your customers. This will again boost the response rate. In the end, make your service or product better. Depending on the customer, you could have a constant survey flow. By having this, you can do data-driven decision-making. It will enable you to make faster decisions.

Conduct thorough research to understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points.Create customer personas to guide design decisions based on user demographics and behaviors

Know your customer and their expectations Deliver on their expectations Maintain and sustain your brand. Make sure you keep up quality control.

Make sure you co create with loyal customers. Don't spend too much time and effort on customers that only focus on their own benefit and who are not interested in a good relationship with mutual benefits

Feedback, feedback, feedback - iterative Omni-directional feedback and communication have been the most effective strategies for CX at all levels.

How a business delivers for its customers is just as important as - if not more important than - the products and services it provides. Best practices to optimize the CX include: - Customer Journey Mapping: describe the customer's end-to-end experience with a product or service - CX Measurement: understand customers to focus on their needs - Digital CX: Facilitate interactions that are holistic, predictive, prioritized & focused on value - Customer Service: support customers before, during & after a purchase - Customer Loyalty Programs: reward customers for repeat business - Employee Experience (EX) Optimization: engaged & satisfied employees provide great service Optimize the CX to attract and retain customers, while increasing sales.

Financial CX measures should also be used to raise awareness of the impact of improved CX on growth and profitability. This tends to give it a higher status. E.g. what percentage of new sales/repeat business/ complaints /referrals is from customers reporting improved CX etc

Ongoing measuring is closely linked to ongoing improvement. The right metrics, cadence and operating rhythm will help bring this top life in your organisation.

As CX experts, we do our best to advocate on behalf of customers, but let's be real --- product, design and CX experts (even business goals) aren't always on the same page. In my experience, "trade offs" are common, and while value achieved remains a top goal of most orgs, it's hardly achieved. Why? Because every customer's definition of "value achieved" differs/changes. So, I try to educate from the lens of focusing on customer signals (mainly non-verbal). When you focus on what customers do, it can help illuminate what they find most valuable (or not) about our experience. And when you see that experience falling short ofcustomer expectations, then there's your opportunity to investigate and recommend improvements to your stakeholders.

It is very important to elevate customer experiences through impactful design. My top recommendation is to host ideation workshops, harnessing collective wisdom to distill best practices in CX design. The focus should be on gathering insights from industry-wide customer experiences, using visual aids like Mural to enhance creativity and innovation. With the workshop, you can craft best practices that resonate and redefine excellence in CX design!