#1: Getting Started
"I appreciate people who start because I know in time they're not going to be where they are."
Source: YouTube video
Welcome to the first issue of CX Swipe Files. (How do you like this name though?)
I'd be publishing my observations and learnings on the subject of Customer experience, User Research and Service Design on this newsletter.
I've been contemplating sharing these nuggets with the world, adding my perspective to it.
How did I land here?
Well, a lot of you know me from marketing and community management space. I am a community management professional (and I absolutely love this domain.) But that did not stop me from exploring the bigger picture.
Since the last two years, I've been dabbling into the world of Design thinking, User experience, customer experience and service design.
I'm no expert - and so, who is? I believe my past experiences and professional journey of 7 years bring in a unique perspective of my own. You never know what might click, who might be getting the required help and motivations while sharing these learnings.
Few of the things that I borrow from these spaces on to my job and way of working are -
Design Thinking - the power of collaboration and problem solving - When we employ the methods of Design Thinking - we embrace the unknown. Teams go on a journey together; to solve the problems - keeping customers at the heart when devising solutions.
Collaboration and partnerships - Community is an extremely cross functional job. Team alignment and collaboration is key to achieve the best results. I'm yet to crack the right partnership models - but boy do I speak to atleast 10 different teams every week?
UX Research - when it comes to working in an online portal, hardly you'd leave usability of that portal out of question. Most enterprise communities I know of have customised their portal design based on their own requirements. Whether you have go for new enhancements or audit the designs you're currently on - UX Research skills come real handy to get that job done.
As and when we go ahead with this newsletter, I'll be sharing my learnings on these research techniques. But for now, Richard Millington, my fav community guru, has an excellent blog post on this (This Is How You Identify Your Community’s Biggest Design Issues.)
Service Design and customer experience - These are vast topics by themselves. Let's just say for the sake of simplicity, Customer experience helps organisations be customer centric, while breaking siloes, within the organisation. One of the widely used visual tool is customer journey which is a visual representation of your customer's journey, showing the highs and lows of the experience through the eyes of your customer. They are created to get a shared understanding across organisation of the current state of the customer experience. (Adapted from the book - How hard is it to be your customer?)
A little bit about service design:
Service design is a process where designers create sustainable solutions and optimal experiences for both customers in unique contexts and any service providers involved. Designers break services into sections and adapt fine-tuned solutions to suit all users’ needs in context—based on actors, location and other factors. (source)
As I said before, I'm still learning about these areas of work. But here are some of my perspective to this.
You see, these fields may seem real vast but they are tools for us to become customer centric, at the same time keeping in mind the business objectives.
Service design is specially pretty close to my heart because through this government entity helps innovate and intervene in the public space. Look at how UK govt describes a Service Designer's role. Here's a video about being a service desinger helps make a difference in people's lives.
I can borrow so many things mentioned above to my area of work, i.e. community management, but that's a topic for another issue.
this issue is Getting Started!
Let me start by giving some of the examples that I came across few days back and what I learned from them or liked or disliked about them.
On to some of the web pages that invoked trustworthiness, great experience feeling.
领英推荐
NextLeap's Product management cohort page:
NextLeap's team is doing a great work with adding a lot of need-to-know information on their digital page. If you are someone who's looking at possible career in Product management. NextLeap's cohort based course, that lasts for about 1 month seems like a reasonable investment - because of the promises they are making on their website.
I'm someone who wouldn't trust any institution without actually getting too much information (because I've burned my hands, and money in the past :D), for example - who's my faculty going to be, how are the classes structured, what are other alumni saying etc.
NextLeap's landing page informs me of all of those pointers and much more. I really don't have the numbers behind this but wish I could get the conversion rate of this page.
The most promising thing that stands out is the little LinkedIn logo on top of testimonials.
That is giving me an indication that I could speak to that alumni if needed if I'm considering their course.
What a wee (Derry girls anyone?) but mighty way to help your visitor.
HDFC Bank change management - a little pop up that assures the banker that they haven't landed on a phishing site.
I'm a fan of HDFC bank, only because I love their netbanking experience. (Or call me old school, and an irony that I dont like learning new UI or process.)
I went to HDFC Bank's netbanking site to find that the UI looks a bit different. All that security training came flashing by on my mind to warn me that this site couldnt be original.
My eyes went to that digital SSL locker, to see it's locked, which means I'm probably safe. But I couldnt brush the feeling entirely.
I closed my window and went to HDFC's banking page to find a little pop up this time.
This definitely gave me a sigh of relief and I continued with my netbanking journey.
Links from the CX world:
(Download) 2023 Customer Experience Trends.
Some of the rad finds this week:
Principles.design - An open source collection of Design Principles and methods.
OpenIDEO: Through OpenIDEO, people worldwide come together to build on each other’s skills and ideas for good. Explore these resources and initiatives to learn more about the process.
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods: To help you know when to use which user research method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.