Leading By User-Experience

Customers never differentiate products from their user-experience. And in today’s hyper-connected age, it’s extremely easy to share their product experiences very easily. So it’s obvious that companies should constantly absorb this feedback.

Many companies try to improve the user experience. But to truly engage with their customers, companies must incorporate this experience-feedback into their product design function.

The User-Experience Model
The user-experience led model uses empathy to put customers, clients & end-users at the centre of product design, evolution & management.

An age-old example is that of providing existing customers with free advisories, alerts, prescriptions related to the product. Another example is of revamping e-commerce websites for better customer experience, leading to increase of traffic & sales.

Then there is the case of a call centre executive who sticks to the script with no regard to the current state of the customer called. Instead, if the executive is able to respond to customers as human beings first, then there is a greater chance of engagement & long-term ‘connect’.

Finally, there is the example of a consumables company shipping material in advance, based on accurate estimates of refill date – thus saving customers time & effort.

Design Driven Culture
In this manner, design (based on customer-experience) can be a tool for organisation transformation – to change an existing situation to a preferred one. This is as true for brand-building as it is for product support or any other facet of business management.

This approach combines design, commercial strategy, technology, keeping  customer experience as a top-of-mind issue.

On a day-to-day basis, this design-driven process involves:

* Making product teams understand customers, their business & competitors.

* Extend customer-centric empathy to more roles in the organization. This can
   be achieved by sensitising more staff members to develop a feel for their
   customers, their business & the market.

* Set up multi-disciplinary product design team by picking resources from
   design, engineering, IT, operations, project management, research, user    
   experience, industrial design, visual design, service design & prototyping.
   Further, this team should be empowered to initiate design changes on a need
   basis, following due process.

* Encourage teams to act / react without delay. That means shortest possible
   go-to-market schedules, rapid prototyping, frequent iteration based on
   customer feedback. And an ability to release a product that is viable but may
   be far from perfect.

After all, the next release is round the corner.