What does a successful customer do in your product?
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What does a successful customer do in your product?
“When somebody is happy, what are they doing, and how are they behaving?” said Richard Dalton , Head of Design for Consumer at Verizon. “Are they sharing the product with other people? Are they buying more? Are they spending a long time in your product or a short amount of time in your product?”
In this week’s Insights Unlocked, Richard shares his framework for designing sustainable customer experiences. He was interviewed at UXDX in New York, where he delivered his keynote “Structuring Teams and Portfolios for Success .”
“You can't just hire a bunch of designers and say, ‘Build me an experience,’” Richard asserts. He emphasizes that effective UX design requires more than hiring talented designers; it necessitates building supportive structures and investing in internal design teams to enhance both employee and customer experiences.
Richard's insights provide a valuable roadmap for design leaders aiming to elevate their UX strategy. Between money and the desired experience, he said, are steps along this “ziggurat of impact” that include:?
There could be dozens or hundreds of touchpoints where your customers may engage your product, brand or service.
“Design of the customer experience can be influenced by everybody in an organization,” he said. “The way that you bring people in and train people, how you hire people, the legal decisions you make, the policies that you set, pricing rules, business processes, procurement.”
“Everything that you might think of in the bottom of the iceberg of a huge organization can have this kind of domino effect on the customer experience at the top. And I think that it's our responsibility as design teams to not just try and make the top of the iceberg better, but to try and make everybody in the organization aware of the impact that they are having.”
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“Design of the customer experience can be influenced by everybody in an organization.” — Richard Dalton, Head of Design at Verizon
One step in Richard’s framework is measuring that impact. He is critical of metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) for being lagging, too broad and non-specific. Instead, he advocates for behavior-based metrics that offer more actionable insights.?
“NPS is a useful measure, but it doesn’t capture why someone is having an issue or why they like part of your experience,” Richard explained. “You need more specific measures that are much more actionable when you start to think about how to gauge the health of the experience.”
Richard references Jeff Gothelf’s approach which seeks to understand what successful customers do within a product. This method helps identify patterns, such as whether satisfied customers are sharing the product, buying more, or spending significant time using it.
Conversely, Richard also emphasizes the importance of understanding the behaviors of dissatisfied customers. “What is a dissatisfied customer doing in our product?,” he said.
“Are they leaving quickly? Are they calling customer support because they can’t figure out how to do it online?” These insights are crucial for making precise improvements to the user experience.
By shifting the focus to behavior-based metrics, Richard believes companies can obtain clearer, more actionable data to enhance their products and services. “Specific measures are much more actionable,” he noted, “and they allow you to start thinking about how to truly improve the user experience.”
“It's my dream someday to walk past a meeting room with an open doorway in any organization and to see a group of people in there, without a designer in there, having a conversation about, ‘hey, we're about to make this policy decision. What's the impact on the customer that that's going to have?,’” Richard said. “When you get to that point, you truly have what I would call a customer-aware organization.”
What metrics do you use for measuring customer experience at your organization? Share it in the comments.?
Listen to the full episode to hear more of their conversation.