CX Transformation - How to get CX right in an increasingly Digital world?

Going through a CT Scan or MRI machine is an excruciating experience for the adults. Imagine for a moment the pain children might be going through when they must take these scans. How do you translate this fear into an enjoyable human experience?

This is exactly what we will explore in this article of how we can go from this…

To this...

Exciting right?

Doug Deitz, Principal Design Thinker at GE, revolutionized and reinvented GE Healthcare Business and the way the CT Scan/MRI machines are used in hospitals after attending a Design Thinking course at Stanford Design school (d School), with his famous GE Adventure Series – Theme based CT Scan Machines for Kids in Hospitals where each child is given a mission or task to complete while they go through the machines for scans.

The boundary between digital and physical keeps getting blurrier, and emerging tech like virtual reality and AI-powered chatbots is going mainstream. This is raising the bar for customer experience (CX), it's not only about being omnichannel but more multisensory and complex to design. To adapt, companies must embrace a design thinking approach focused not on technology but on ease, effectiveness, and emotion.

Customer Experience Is the Key Competitive Differentiator in the Digital Age and Digital Enhances it

We are living in a hyper-connected, digital and mobile first world where the ease, intuition, personalization and trust rules. Every offering, product or a service, whether its an airline ticket or a bank onboarding signup, is judged experientially by customers. Today’s customers expect seamless, relevant experiences in the moment. To deliver, leading firms and CX leaders are blending digital interfaces, physical touchpoints and face to face interactions to eliminate friction, give customers control, and anticipate their needs. Starbucks eliminated paying at the register for millions of customers by automating payments via its mobile app. Currently, mobile payments represent 25% of all in-store transactions, up from 20% the previous year. Disney reinvented its guest experience by removing the friction of paying for shopping or dining using its MagicBand bracelets creating a more immersive, more seamless, and more personal experience.

Everything is experience, and where there is competition, it is the experientially better service, as perceived by the customer, that wins.

The trillion-dollar platform-based company, Amazon, embraced and embedded customer centricity deeply into the fabric of the organization. It’s the most important business imperative! "Day One" mode philosophy of the organization refers to Amazon always being in a startup mode which means always being close to their customer needs.

Build An Experience-centric Organization with a CX Vision

It’s not just about using cutting-edge technology or pursuing a one-off customer engagement project but rather it’s about a providing a seamless, frictionless and an enjoyable experience. Seamless experiences require seamless coordination inside the company focused on solving customer problems and needs. Top innovative and design driven companies are building cross functional teams focused on solving different customer journeys eliminating the bureaucracy and inaction as ideas move from one department to the other.

All the aligned functions and departments have to adopt an agile mindset by working and collaborating together and not in silos as depicted by the illustration here.

Strong leadership should set the vision, tone of the culture and emphasize the path they are willing to take to contribute and collaborate with the employees in creating immense value for customers through innovation. The snapshot below highlights how strong leadership (current and former CEOs) contribute to their companies performance.

Win with Human Experience with Empathy, Human Centered Design, Curiosity & Simplicity

Humans are inherently irrational. So, you may have the best CX processes or even the best product, but that may not be what your users or customers like. As in the case of GE MRI machine, just because nobody had ever thought about the patient experience in the healthcare industry doesn’t mean the patients did not want to be made to feel relaxed and comfortable. Empathy drove Doug Dietz to explore the hidden children and their parents’ worst fears and pains.

This is where design driven mindsets thrive, continually exploring and researching human needs to uncover valuable insights and use them to design experiences, products and services.

Look at Adjacent Industries

The experience your customers are having from using other adjacent or unrelated industries products and services will set the benchmark for your experience. Being able to easily book a car through an app like Uber will set a benchmark to expect the same level of experience from other brands and services. In Doug Dietz example, at Stanford D School he was exposed to different experiences of other brands. The same approach is used in design sprints and workshops where before proceeding ahead with ideation, teams are encouraged to explore the horizon and look outside their current industries.

Think Ecosystem Data Centric Approach

The proliferation of customer data available to companies about identity, preferences, purchase history, payment information, and more, lets firms customize interactions and act proactively on the customer’s behalf. This is why owning the entire end to end experience is crucial. Its why we see Fulfillment by Amazon or Netflix now creating its own content. Companies are trying to influence and work with their value chain partners by partnering, acquiring or going into alliances as they understand their customers use more than one company/brand/app to get their jobs done.