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April 6th, 2012
Posted by Les Boswell

We live in a world that is in the midst of monumental transformation. All these changes are requiring new ways of thinking. In so many realms, the fundamental rules and approaches that only a decade ago were our mantras are now meaningless.

One of the amazing transformations we’re seeing is in how and where customers interact with the brand. It wasn’t too long ago when brand interactions occurred at the time and choosing of the brand owner. Whether through magazine ads or in-store displays, brand owners were in a very strong position to manage all of the elements that controlled brand awareness as well as brand ROI.

With the proliferation of digital connectivity tools, all of this is simply no longer the case. Customers can now interact among each other to discuss your brand experience at will, and with very public and transparent efficiency. It has become a statistical fact that peer reviews have a significant impact on customer sentiment.

Some organizations have resisted change and have taken those tried-and-true “analog” methods (an “in-store display” concept is directly translated into a flat digital ad placement), but the returns have often been flat. Some media planners even coined the lack of results in digital by calling it “analog dollars to digital dimes.”

The greatest barrier to change for many traditional marketing organizations is that, to them, nontraditional interactive campaigns seem to be less about ROI and more about brand awareness. This is simply not true.

Instead of investing in moving “eyeballs” to direct sales, companies like Doritos, Nike and Disney are investing in the digital customer experience to generate loyalty, customer discussion and deepening interactions. This strategy has a very different analytics approach, but according to Forrester’s latest report, it’s efficient and trackable.

The digital realm is proving itself to be an ideal place to focus marketing dollars, but the strategies that are yielding the best results are the strategies that maximize the potential of digital technology: that is, interactive relationships.

Instead of approaching the digital realm with traditional return-on-investment methods, Nike and others are capitalizing on creating a unique, memorable and engaging customer experience. Below are some examples that capture their methods.

  1. Create memorable campaigns that engage the user and their interactions with your product.
    http://www.doritoslatenight.com/
  2. Create emotional, meaningful connections between your product and the customer’s world.
    http://www.nikebetterworld.com/product
  3. Create places where your customer can interact with other customers. The interaction can potentially become your most powerful marketing voice.
    http://www.toyota.com/camryeffect/

In each example, the brand effort involved interactive technology as a means to deepen relationships through creating experiences that reflect the brand promise.

The digital realm requires new thinking, and the sooner brands begin to understand the advantages of the digital customer experience, the sooner they’ll be ready to create deeper interactive relationships. Those relationships will have a lasting and profitable payoff.

January 11th, 2012
Posted by Les Boswell

Let’s face it – at one point or another, we’ve all had a bad user experience. For some of us, the memories appear in the form of a blinking red “12:00” on our VCR. For others, it’s the lid of your piping hot coffee cup that seems to crumble, popping off just as you pull out of the drive-through. For many of us these days, a bad experience can be an irritating remote control layout, while for others it’s called airport signage. And while we all have come to grudgingly accept commercials before a $15 movie, we all still feel somewhat victimized.

More often than not, we ask ourselves, “How could the designers have gotten this so wrong! I could have done better myself!”

To a degree, you may be right. At the end of the day, one of the many challenges of experience design is a disjointed process where the product or service is touched by specialists who don’t talk to each other or who simply see their own specialty as being “priority number one.” They all may have even seen the creative brief or statement of work – but, based on their specialties, they all translated it differently. The engineer may see “elegant” as exquisitely crafted with the finest chips. The designer sees “elegant” as the most beautiful shape, color or texture ever to have graced the human eye, while the salesperson sees “elegant” as whatever the data shows as selling most effectively this quarter.

So, how do good experiences get designed? A great house requires an equally great architect, and in that same vein, the user experience architect role serves to create good experiences. As a user experience architect, the fundamentals of good experiences are embedded in the study of human behavior. Here are some basic tenets that can be universally applied to any user experience:

  • Clearly define the end result of your product or service, the budget and the timeline at all phases. If you have more than one step in the process, it will be all too easy to lose sight of what’s being done, why it’s being done and how it will be delivered.
  • Define and categorize your users. Understand their priorities, the environment they’ll be in when they experience your product and service, and what’s ultimately important to them. User experience architects typically work with strategists to create “personas,” which are behavioral models for groups within your target market. These personas are referred to throughout the project as a sanity check to make sure that the user is always top of mind on project direction.
  • Understand your business goals and make sure everyone else understands them, too. Help the team understand roles and who drives at what point. You don’t want your engineer to design, and you don’t want your designer wielding a hot torch, but if both have ample opportunity to collaborate, the results can be wonderful.
  • Test your work early and often with actual users. Understand and study reactions to your product and service, and validate the work done. User experience architects understand how best to test and what to ask in moderated sessions.
  • Don’t leave each specialty to define and interpret the brand vision. Let your user experience architect work with the business analyst to clearly articulate the vision, through validated documentation that includes user-centric perspectives.

There is a method to creating a good user experience, regardless of whether it’s an e-commerce site or a multichannel marketing campaign. At the end of the day, your user experience architect can apply tried-and-true methods to advocate a positive experience for the user. Your customers will benefit from the constant advocacy of your user experience team, and you’ll find yet another key method for differentiating yourself from your competitors.  We may not be able to save you from 20 minutes of commercials before the movie, but we can help create the right kind of experience for your brand and for your organization.

November 1st, 2011
Posted by Les Boswell

All too often, disjointed brand experiences sneak up on even the most diligent of organizations attempting to effectively shepherd the customer experience. Fortunately, there are a number of methods and processes to map out how the customer sees the brand. One of these methods is called Customer Journey Mapping, or CJM. Here’s an example of a Customer Journey Map.

Click to Enlarge

Customer Journey Mapping is best described as a method to analyze all the experiences that your customers have as they encounter your brand through all of its touchpoints. From your customer service telephone line, to your website, to point of purchase and beyond, Customer Journey Mapping serves as a multidimensional approach to how real people experience your brand as a whole.

Your customer touchpoints are widely varied in their goals, approach, technology and intended reach. As well, those very touchpoints can often be managed by departments, external agencies and stakeholder groups that don’t talk to each other. For example, your digital agency launches a microsite promoting a new product; however, your customer service group wasn’t informed at launch date. New inquiries and technical questions pour through the customer service center, and your representatives struggle to find the voice in the organization who can script out answers and explain what a successful transaction is. As well, employees weren’t informed of the launch – an individual in Finance hears about the new site through a cousin, a loyal customer, first. This further reinforces her belief that the company doesn’t “live” its brand promise internally.

There are many actionable benefits to Customer Journey Mapping, but the most important benefit is that it can help you see how best to deliver a seamless experience that cuts across all product and service silos. It can also help cut across communication silos, breaking down barriers between interactive marketing and traditional marketing methods.

Before starting the CJM process, an organization must answer some key questions as honestly as possible: Are there brand champions in your organization that can drive the CJM process to create and refine a holistic experience for those experiencing your brand? These champions must be willing to question executive “pet projects,” departmental silos, traditional approaches and comfortable-yet-stale relationships with vendors. Every stone has to first be turned over to see where the brand is touching real people.

Your champion(s) can now start with this simple list to begin the CJM process:

Step 1: Take inventory of customer insights. What are those processes and touchpoints as your organization sees them now. At face value, this sounds like a very simple process, but quite often the effort reveals onion layers of touchpoints, knowledge bases and conflicting brand experiences.

Step 2: Establish initial thoughts about each part of the customer journey at each touchpoint. Document thoughts and supporting data, and use this as a base of operations to validate assumptions and debunk organizational myths.

Step 3: Make sure your vendors are actively involved. More often than not, a splintered customer experience can start at the outsourcing level. Internal silos can be exasperated when those silos each work with a separate vendor that touches your customer.

Step 4: Research customer processes, needs and perceptions from their perspective. Consciously step away from internal data that anecdotally assumes customer emotions. Effective social media outreach can often serve as a fantastic tool for gauging sentiment and buzz when there’s a limited budget for contextual interviews and ethnographic studies. Use this data to validate/debunk Step 1.

Step 5: Analyze customer research. Segment your data by laying out each touchpoint’s stages, as well as your customer segments. By breaking down each of these points, you’ll be able to capture a dimension of knowledge regarding what affects which customers the most, and at what point. There is no hard-and-fast formula for visually laying this out, but your key variables are constant:

  • Who is touching your brand?
  • How are they touching it?
  • Why are they touching it?
  • What stages exist in that touchpoint for both customer intent and touchpoint?
  • When is that moment of truth when the customer is most affected by that touchpoint?

Step 6: Map the customer journey. Below is another map you may find useful to model.

Click to Enlarge

Step 7: Go beyond the Customer Journey Map in analyzing only one silo. Take the CJM concept and apply it to the brand life cycle, touching all your services and vendors. This is where it gets really interesting for all of us!

A Customer Journey Map is a deep dive into the heart of the brand. We start at the introductory level, with the customer, and slowly dive deeper and deeper into the brand promises and the organizational context of how these are delivered. The CJM process is organic and is best used when it becomes an ongoing conversation between stakeholders, customers, vendors and employees with a visual map as a deliverable.

That deliverable has its greatest impact when it’s openly shared. Both customers and internal employees can benefit from a holistic view of the CJM map. It can enlist both as brand advocates, as they will clearly be able to see where your brand is going, where it has been and how it’s touching people’s lives.