Total Experience Formula

Why are we seeing Total Experience become so critical for our customers? The pandemic essentially left us with a three-year window of deep effort and investment into innovative and long-overdue digital projects. This trend has had very positive impacts on individual aspects of customer experience like online chat, chatbot functionality, and self-help tools. But those individual successes have now left us with a “big picture” challenge. With so many new touchpoints for the customer to take advantage of to reach your brand, you need to make sure you can measure, monitor and optimize those multi-channel experiences that cross different platforms and technologies.

It also means that you need to think beyond multi-channel. How are we creating cohesive and engaging experiences for the employees that need to leverage the other side of all those new tools and channels? For every digital project that was designed to create an exceptional customer and user experience, there’s a good chance there’s a relatively unconsidered employee experience on the backside. Or even worse, the employee that needs to support your customer might not have clear visibility into that new digital channel.

In parallel to these emerging digital challenges, the ways that customer experience leaders think about and measure success have been evolving for the past ten years. The transition from CSAT to NSP and today’s customer sentiment is a reflection of the increasing sophistication, proliferation, and intricacy of our digital platforms and tools – more great tools, but also a lot more to measure and manage. How easy is it for your customers to engage with you, buy your product or service and become loyal to your brand?

The way we work through this with our customers at ACT is through the lens of our Total Experience Formula. Essentially, we take a broad look at all the interdependent moments, touchpoints, and experiences that create the total experience for every customer, user, and employee that engages with your brand.

The 2020-2022 window was a time for businesses to double down on digital investments and UX projects. That was money well spent, but now we need to take a step back and think strategically about how these pieces fit together to enable customers while also simplifying and adding value to customer-to-employee interactions.

There is plenty of evidence in this report, where we see these major takeaways:

1.Don’t Overlook the Human Factor – Employee Experience Matters

89% agree that customer care agents need to be “very passionate about the brands they represent” (page 85) and 44% of consumers “prefer to speak to someone” (page 81).

2. Multichannel Strategy Needs to Be a Priority in 2023

39% have no cross-channel initiatives started, which is up from 35% a year ago (page 42)

3. The end-to-end CX Tech Stack Needs to Be Mapped to Your Total Experience Strategy

Only 31% are satisfied with their CX tech stack (page 64) and “Legacy systems, processes, and tools” were the #1 challenge for CX operations (page 47).

We also believe that empowering agents to make decisions and solve problems dramatically improves the customer experience. Too many times we see agents being handcuffed by not being allowed to make simple process decisions and having to transfer the customer back to the captive center creating much friction in the call and outcome.

If the past three years have been about doubling down on digital platforms and UX investments, then it’s clear that 2023 is about unlocking more measurable value from those investments by focusing on multichannel, employee experience, and most importantly, the broader Total Experience.

If you’re ready to learn more about Total Experience and understand how to simplify multichannel and employee experience, we’re here to talk. Visit our website: https://www.acttoday.com/solutions/

Guest blog post written by ACT. To learn more about the report, you can view it here.

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Traditionally, user-focused activities have been conducted by specialists who either move from research to design directly themselves, or who pass the baton to others. This is partly a factor of history, but with UX now in the business mainstream it’s increasingly important to bring others closer to customers and their lives. Collaboration with stakeholders is king, but how do you do this smartly when we all have too much to do and too little time to do it in?

Why is collaboration so important?

Often product managers and those responsible for success are primarily understanding their customers via metrics such as CSAT and NPS. These are deliberately simple, but create a challenge in understanding the why behind the what, which is crucial for identifying low-level change that makes a difference.

Involving users is the key to overcoming this, but techniques for doing so owe a huge debt to an academia and rigour in experimental design. Anything involving real users or customers is moderated by specialists, with stakeholders disconnected behind a one-way mirror or getting their understanding from an after-the-fact synthesis. There are very good reasons for this, as anyone who has seen stressed product managers observe their ideas being casually dismissed in a user session can testify.

However as UX moves out of labs and into mainstream business, UX activities can’t be solely conducted on this basis. There are too few UX professionals, who are in evermore demand as it becomes a mainstream concern. Also, an increasingly multi-touchpoint world means that knowledge needed to make products more effective for their users becomes increasingly diffuse.

So why doesn’t it happen more?

Most product owners I’ve met are smart and keen to understand their audiences as much as possible, but commitment is variable. Making time is the key challenge. But there are a number of ways to bring them close to users and it’s important to offer options that are easy to access and calibrated to the time available.

Some suggested activities

Smart observation of user sessions

User research is often conducted in viewing facilities designed to make observation simple and comfortable. However, stakeholders often don’t have the time to watch them all.

You can help those dropping in by using post-it notes to construct a running analysis on the walls so anyone dipping in and out of sessions can get a concise understanding of what’s been happening.

If stakeholders can’t attend, sessions can be securely video-streamed live, or made available online afterwards. Time is always a pressure, so we’ve found its very useful to provide a one-two sentence summary of each session, pointing users towards key moments.

Attending ethnographic research

It’s becoming ever-more useful to understand user needs by observing them in their own environment. We’ve seen some revelatory moments for clients when they come with us. For example, the moment one client saw users find a helpdesk number via web search, rather than the Help Centre that had been built for them. They’d previously been mystified by CSAT complaints that the number was hard to find (it was on the Help Centre home page), until they saw in real time the many steps needed to reach that content.

Inviting stakeholders can give them a deeper understanding of user needs, but there are practicalities as observers meet them face-to-face. An effective observer briefing is very important in helping observers to attend without unduly influencing whats happening. We’ve also found it’s helpful to give observers a role and reason for being there (from the user perspective). Photos and video are immensely useful artefacts to gather, so giving observers the role of capturing these can be very helpful for all concerned.

Involving stakeholders in user diaries

Online user diaries are an immensely helpful way of capturing relevant user behavior over time. Diaries can be shared with stakeholders, to help them build their understanding, ideally in daily chunks. User photos taken by smartphones can be a particularly interesting and easily digested dip into user lives in unexpected ways. For example, on one project users supplied screenshots from an app which answered a design question we weren’t aware of – should they optimize for landscape or portrait views?

Stakeholders can also be encouraged to join diary studies as participants. While care is required in handling their results, diary participation can help even the most knowledgeable product owners reflect more on use.

Involving stakeholders and users in workshops

User needs and design workshops, synthesizing user experiences and identifying next steps are typically conducted without users being present. This is a missed opportunity. For example, in journey mapping workshops, we’ve seen stakeholders often able to identify customer touchpoints and possible issues, but have a much harder time understanding customer impact and so make changes that will really make a difference.

If you are trying to understand a user challenge, prioritize these, or design solutions, it can be immensely helpful to have real users participating in the exercise. We’ve seen vague design ideas discarded for internal reasons which triumphantly re-emerge and develop after working with customers. It requires careful briefing and facilitation, but it’s rare for participants to come away from these and not be genuinely stimulated by the event, particularly around emotive issues such as complaints handling or anything involving health.

Create informal programmes to understand users

Product managers, IT, Marketing and Operations staff may all be true professionals, but working on products they’ve not directly experienced themselves. Encouraging product use and particularly informally observing real use before a project starts can build invaluable empathy and knowledge.

A great example of informal product observation is the Follow Me Home programme run by Intuit, which has helped them to create industry-leading software. Staff members are encouraged to periodically visit real customers using their products.

Encourage a user-centred culture

Even periodic customer visits require a commitment and desire to understand the customer experience first-hand, so those involved need to perceive a value and make the customer experience the responsibility of all staff.

Internal training, mentoring and skills building workshops can be an important activity for a UX team. It increases commitment and also equips product teams with some basic skills to do some of their own research. While their time and capability to do so may be more limited, the more customer research, the better the product or service will be.

For more on this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas – February 6-8, 2017 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

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