Are you experience-d, yet?

It must have been around 3PM last Saturday, when I hurriedly ordered an Uber from the office. We were preparing for an upcoming client workshop and I had to leave the team in between due to a personal emergency. In the midst of feeling anxious about making the workshop successful, I was consumed with guilt over having to leave my team high and dry at such a critical point. As a million of these thoughts ran through my mind, I heard a subtle ping from my phone - Ram Pratap had been assigned by Uber to drive me home. Nothing unusual, but then I saw the driver rating. It was 4.9! With over 7000 trips in the last 2 years, this driver was practically Delhi NCR’s favourite. Consider this, the champ must be doing about 10 trips a day, meeting all kinds of people with 7000 different situations and yet almost all of them rated him 5. I was intrigued, and so I decided to observe him. There had to be something special about him that made him such a wonderful driver. There had to be some differentiated customer experience that he provided.

As I took the elevator down, another notification came through - Ram Pratap had reached the pick-up point. As I walked towards the car, I saw him cleaning it. When I drew close, he said, “Sir, since I thought I had some time I decided to clean the car. Please give me a minute and it’ll be ready”. I waited happily. Within the promised minute, we were on our way. Ram Pratap barely spoke through the journey - he was completely focused on driving instead. More than half of the drivers I meet begin chatting nineteen to dozen in the first 5 minutes. Since he wasn’t speaking, and because I had recently been exposed to the art of ethnography, I decided to initiate a conversation. 

The guy was from Jodhpur in Rajasthan. He lived in Delhi with his family and visited his village once a month. He just wanted to do his usual bit and go home. He seemed like someone who liked to live in harmony and was content with his life - not very ambitious or aggressive. Nothing extraordinary so far. Yet when he drove, I experienced that bit of extra comfort compared to my previous rides. I felt safer with him at the wheel. As we came near my drop-off location I half expected him to pull out a bar of chocolate to motivate me to give him a rating of 5 like all the others before me did. But nothing of that sort happened either. He quietly pulled the car aside the drop-off point and smiled, "Thank you, sir". I got out and he quietly drove away. There was no observable difference but I felt happy for no specific reason and gave him a 5-star rating myself!

Then I started analyzing what he did and created my own hypotheses of what worked for an Uber driver’s rating. For about a week, I observed other rides. Luckily Uber was matching me with more high-rated drivers that week. I found that for all the top-rated ones there were a few things in common. Most of them never called to enquire what the drop-off location was. They just came to the pick-up point and then called only in cases when I wasn’t already waiting there. They did not initiate a conversation unless initiated by me. Their cars were clean and they all drove safe. Just like I did with Ram Pratap, I felt comfortable, safe and deeply content while being driven around by these high-rated drivers.

What is customer experience?

So customer experience in my own definition is the scope of emotions that one goes through when interacting with a person or a machine or the environment. Designing such an experience is not that tough but it needs careful consideration of the customer’s journey and interaction points. In my case the journey began the moment I ordered the cab. Ram Pratap did not make me uncomfortable by calling me unnecessarily before reaching the pick-up point. He gave a joyous surprise, however subtle it may have seemed, by keeping the car clean. He made me feel safe with his driving and he ended the journey with a smile. No bells and whistles, just simple day-to-day principles that he followed either knowingly or by the virtue of his personality, all of which evoked positive emotions in me.

Emotion, was the most important factor in these high-rated experiences. Like a behavioral psychologist friend of mine pointed out (not that it’s something we don’t already know) - decisions are usually made in two ways - deliberate and conscious, in which we use logic and thinking (like we do when buying a mobile phone or TV) and the second being involuntary and subconscious, which is driven purely by emotions. The latter usually happens rather quickly, giving us less time to think. The emotions we feel at that particular point is what helps us make the decision. For example, in the case of an Uber ride, usually one does not analyze too much before giving a rating - it’s more often than not triggered by a feeling. And this is what experience design is all about. Making the human in question feel good about you or your brand during their interactions. Now there’s a definite method behind it, which has evolved over time. Experts use various ethnographic or other techniques to unearth what really matters to an individual or a group of individuals and subsequently design the service or product to overwhelm them with positive emotions.

Why is experience design important?

That experience design is important is something no one can deny. New age digital companies realize it too. E-commerce specifically must understand it rather well. Consider Amazon for instance - when they launched their site back in 1994, the first page had 5 links to click. A user had all the time in the world to deliberate over the option he wants to click on, decide his journey and fulfil his utilitarian purpose of making the purchase. Fast forward to 2012, in the heat of rapid expansion and growth ambitions, the website had more than 100 links on the first page - the logic being that more choices will lead to more conversions. Soon, Amazon realized that nothing of the sort was happening. The company started to focus heavily on UX. The site now has customised journeys for their users and the page looks much more organized, clean and easy-to-use. 

Sheena Iyenger, in her book ‘The Art of Choosing” mentions that more options reduces the chance of making a purchase. The deduction is highly relatable because more options allow for subconscious decision-making to supersede the conscious or the logical one. And when you have not deliberately designed the products or services to provide subconscious delight, the customer or user is not going to accept them. That’s the core reason for why cluttered websites give lowest conversion rates and why a careful evaluation of customer journey is becoming highly critical. Just to give you a sense, a meagre 0.1% increase in conversion for Amazon in India could mean 180-200 crore increase in GMV!

How to make it work for you?

Some companies do understand it and few have taken it so seriously that they have changed organization structures and organized teams by customer journeys. While the understanding of the need is there, often what they don’t understand is something that I call as digital imposition. The digital novice companies need to understand that more often than not they are over communicating, they are imposing digital or other services which are counter emotive. They don’t have the correct call-to-actions, which makes a customer purchase when she’s most ready for it. In my experience, many companies embarking on such transformation journeys are either building what they assume would make sense for the consumer or copying something from other brands, which often does not work for them or still implementing a technology in the forlorn hope of customers readily adopting it.

I firmly believe that a superior customer experience helps organizations and brands streamline the process of purchase. In an ideal state the journey design should be at an individual level but few companies have achieved it at what’s called a customer persona level. The reasons for them to do so are many - aspiration for market leadership, customer centricity, efficiency improvement, higher customer loyalty, business model innovation, brand enhancement and such. I say that even if the desire for higher revenue or better conversions is not a driver for focusing on experience design, preserving brand image and existing customer base should be. Our studies show that 1/3rd of customers don’t purchase again from a brand after one negative experience, while on the other hand, some brands enjoy price premiums in the north of 15% for the experience they provide to their customers. It's clear that experience design and aligning growth strategy around it is important, especially for B2C businesses. So I ask, are you experience-d, yet?