Be the Scully & Mulder of your X files…

There are numerous literature around the User Experience and the Customer Experience… Taking care of the best way to address customers, enjoy and even delight them through their interactions in a tool, an environment or with a company.

More and more, data is claimed as the most valuable asset… You have the data, you have the power (if you know how to take the most of it). Collecting data through a smooth experience, avoiding the ? to better know you, please let me ask you 100 questions ?, is what I call the Data Experience.
Well, well, well… these are all true of course. And if you are working in the digital area, these are even more crucial.

I cannot resist… Build your CX to determine your UX(s) connected through the best DX. If you push that sentence to your relatives, probably most of them will consider you as insane.

But whatever… these must be done.
Is that enough? Allow me to push my idea… no, these are not.

If you have ever worked on any CX or UX, I am quite sure that you started with some personae (in short, a fictitious customer describing the customers you want to work on and/or to target) to describe their journey (for CX) or the way they use i.e. your site (for UX).
There are several ways to work on CX. You can imagine the ideal journey and determine what you should build, deploy and transform. Or you can describe the current situation and identify all pain points (here, you assume that you have already a CX).
But whatever the way you will work on your CX, you will consider only a subset of your customers… and only a subset of all interactions they could have. Why? because CX is a complex and wide work, no choice than to ? simplify ? it.

But you are good! Even excellent! And your personae cover 90% of your customers. Also, you considered 80% of all the interaction possibilities. Guess what… you cover ? only ? 72% of the possible cases. Aouch…
And what kills more the business than exceptions? Unforeseen and orphan situations where your customers feels alone and lost?

You get my point.

So… lets consider the Boring Experience (BX).
Boring Experience: accumulation of situations and exceptions that lead, through cumulative and snow ball effects, to profound dissatisfaction.

This is not about transforming a dissatisfied customer into a business opportunity.
This is not about solving (usually the critical) pain points.
This is about analysing the potential connections between all your pain points and points of failure to identify pain critical path.

You have worked your CX? A cold blood analysis should identify your points of failure or exceptions that will lead to other failures or exceptions until the fatal breach.
You have described processes (I hope for you)? You can identify exceptions and breaking (pain) points.
You register complaints? Analysing them will provide you pain points.

As you have now your exceptions and pain points list, you can analyse:

• How they are or could be connected: what is the potential probability to reach another pain point
• The probability to encounter several ones, even if they are not connected.
  Remember, accumulation of frustrations leads to breach level.

In this exercise, please keep in mind that:

• 1 + 1 = 3 (or even more) in BX
  Irritation grows exponentially… the elapsed time between could determines the irritation growth speed but you will always have 1 + 1 > 2 because…
• Bad memories last almost forever
• Small pain point + small pain point + small pain point = killing pain point
• Connections between pain points are as important as the pain points themselves

The final exercise is to put your efforts to eliminate connections, cure pain points occurring several times (even if their isolated effect is limited) and do all you bests to follow this customer perspective:

Shit happens… once.

The Boring eXperience highlights unexpected situations you must explore, and fully supports all the work you have done/are doing/will do on the User or Customer eXperience.
Work on your CX, UX, explore and explore again. Discover and...

Be the Scully & Mulder of you X Files…