The Future of CX is Rooted in UX and Human Centered Design

The thing about customer experience is that it happens with or without a formal CX strategy. In fact, it happens every day and that’s why the future of CX is more important than its value among executive stakeholders today. See, your customers have an experience through every encounter they have with your company—all day, every day.

The question you have to answer is, what is the experience they have today and what could or should it be tomorrow? You’ll find there is a gap between desired experience and reality. And more so, you’ll uncover opportunities to compete for customer loyalty and advocacy in ways not visible.

Why?

Empathy.

True customer experience is inspired by the empathy that develops simply by being human.As you develop and refine your CX strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in things like technology and efficiency audits, roadmaps, and budget and ROI debates. But exploring current experiences inspires new possibilities, which sets the stage for your vision, purpose, and work.Perhaps this is something you’ve already considered.

Perhaps you’ve invested in customer journey mapping work and have set in motion plans to optimize the customer experience and the balance between physical, web, and mobile.

Set that aside for a moment.

I propose that for CX strategies to truly matter, not just in 2015, but over the years to come, it will take empathy, design, and management. It’s a form of architecture that humanizes CX—and precedes and guides enterprise or systems architecture and all processes, systems, and metrics to support your work.

The real world of customer experience is reflected by the sum of all customer engagements in each touchpoint and in each “moment of truth” throughout the customer lifecycle. Depending on whom you ask, the definition of CX is embodied in the approach of emulating—in the business world—how individuals interact with technology in their personal lives.

It’s part human and it’s part technology. The connection between the two is yours to define. At its core, experience is emotive. To study today’s experience is to know it, but to feel it is to inspire its promise. If CX is to have genuine relevance at a human level, it must encompass a human- centered design approach not unlike how the elements of user experience are applied to visual or interaction design.

User experience (UX) encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s (or person’s) interaction with the company, its services and its products. As UX luminaries Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman once wrote, “The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use.” The same is true for CX. We must know what a customer needs or what it is they expect. But it’s not just giving them what they want or how they want it. We can also innovate to deliver something so unique, something so enchanting that once encountered, they can’t live without it.

Nielsen and Norman further wrote, “In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.”

Again, the same is true for CX.

The customer experience as it is and how it could be is fixed to legacy philosophies, processes, and systems that were defined for a different way of doing business in a different time for a different type of customer. It doesn’t matter how we rethink the customer journey or how we integrate mobile, social, wearables, the Internet of Things, or any new technology. Without understanding customers and how behaviors and values are changing, without aligning with a bigger mission or vision with what we are trying to do—something that is going to matter to people—we are just managing businesses the way we always have. We are not moving in any new direction.

I believe that a meaningful experience is something that must be first inspired, then imagined, then designed, and subsequently constructed and measured.

Asking “Why?” leads to “What if?”. And asking “What if?” leads to “What’s next?”.

The future of customer engagement and ultimately loyalty resides at the intersection of CX and UX, with social science and technology paving the way forward.

This is an excerpt from "The 2015 Customer Experience Outlook" brought to you by Kerry Bodine and Doberman, a new, complimentary ebook available today. It features original work on CX by some of my favorite thinkers including Joe Pine, James Gilmore, Brandon Schauer, Jeanne Bliss, among other greats.

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