Why customer experience matters
The harsh reality is that designing a great product or service isn’t enough. No matter how cool, functional, and usable it is, you won’t make an impact unless people anticipate and remember the experience meaningfully.
That’s why we talk about customer experience at Concrete – every touchpoint in awareness, brand-building, communications, sales, and support makes a difference in how your product performs. And it requires specialist expertise to deliver the components and orchestrate them.
Layered, not linear
So far, so obvious. It’s not shocking to think about people's experiences with your business being more significant than their experience using the product. Where things tend to go wrong is when you imagine that these touchpoints are linear and isolated.
A journey map or customer story is an easy way to understand an experience because it is presented as a timeline, a series of linear events, like a meeting agenda or a movie. But it’s not enough because it doesn’t represent how people make sense of the world they encounter and navigate it via a complex web of thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Instead, Concrete thinks of experience like a three-layer peanut butter sandwich. We call them anticipated, actual, and remembered experiences. These layers are distinct, like the bread, the peanut butter, and the jam in a sandwich. But you experience them in delicious bites, which makes something so much better than eating a slice of bread, followed by a spoonful of peanut butter, then a dollop of jam.?
Breaking it down
Recent discoveries in neuroscience have fueled our understanding of the human brain as a prediction machine. This article in Psychology Today gives a good overview of the research, but for our purposes, it’s sufficient to consider that, as humans, we are constantly anticipating.
This predictive engine enables us to focus on what we believe will matter the most to us. Without anticipation, the world would be impossible to navigate.
It’s the same with a product. Before a customer even knows that your product exists, they anticipate what they need and desire. Then, as your product enters their consciousness, they imagine how it will change their lives. Then, as they prepare to purchase and use it, they form expectations and predict how it will work.
领英推荐
Actual experience is that linear journey of touchpoints and interactions we discussed earlier. But the path people take with your product will be formed by their anticipation, and the problems they encounter will highlight where there are gaps between those expectations and reality. The alchemy between anticipation and actual experience creates a cascade of emotions – like surprise, boredom, frustration, delight, bitterness, disappointment, or triumph.
Together, these help us form memories. We never remember things exactly as they happened. Places with a more significant gap between anticipated and actual experiences (for the better and the worse) are likelier to stay with us. We retell the experience, so it makes more sense of who we are or how others perceive us. And these memories create new predictions, changing and reframing our subsequent encounters with the product.
This cycle is continuously looping, like the sandwich in our mouths as we bite, chew, swallow, and digest, setting off the sensory pleasure of salty and sweet, triggering a reward circuit in the brain as the sugar hits our system, building some muscle with the protein, and leaving us feeling sated and able to concentrate on the next task at hand.?
Building it back up
Intuitively, this model makes sense of how we experience our lives. Our memories of the past and our hopes for the future are just as immediate, authentic, and impactful on our thoughts and feelings as our actions in the present. But how do you design for this type of customer experience? And how do you measure, manage and control this type of experience in your business?
Luckily, it’s not more complicated or more expensive to design for anticipated-actual-remembered experiences. You’re already creating the touchpoints; it’s about how you:
For example, consider how to holistically develop a new product's marketing communications, organizational training, and user experience using a common strategy and an integrated, interdisciplinary team. These are often distinct areas of responsibility and budgeting in a business. Making more impact across them might call for consolidating activities with a vendor with deep expertise in working across these areas of responsibility.
Or you can explore different ways of researching and understanding experience in your product development lifecycle. For example, usability testing is a fantastic way to optimize the real-time experience. Still, it becomes even more potent when integrated with approaches from depth psychology and semiotics to understand what people do, why they do it, and how to influence those behaviors differently.
And always remember to tie these back to the business metrics that matter to management. Intense, pleasurable emotions while shopping, driven by anticipated experiences, increase spending, translating into units sold and market share. Feeling positively surprised is a significant predictor of customer loyalty while feeling regretful predicts disloyalty. Feelings of satisfaction drive not only sales but the likelihood of using the product over time. This makes optimizing subjective customer experience not just a nice to have but an essential toolbox for growth.?