Your product experience is only as good as its weakest moment
We all know the story of Goldilocks and the three bears: the little girl wants to find the perfect porridge. Not too hot, not too cold, but juuust right. If Goldilocks was a business and the porridge an experience, you end up with the question: how can businesses find the just right experience for their customers?
According to a recent Accenture study, 77% of customers feel a brand earns their loyalty if it takes immediate action when they are unhappy.
Conversely, the same study found that after a bad experience, 38% of customers gave a portion of their wallet to a different business, and another 39% stopped doing business with the brand.
Those numbers are astonishing, and it got us to the realization that:
Trust is earned when brands are there for customers in the moment, and
It takes only a moment for brands to lose their customers’ business.
Moments are emotional, and emotions dictate behavior. By designing for moments — for the emotions we want customers to feel when using the product — we can be sure to achieve that elusive ‘just-right’ experience.We refer to these as Product Moments, and they form an overarching theme to our design philosophy here at YML.
“In today’s fast paced and increasingly competitive environment where customer expectations continue to rise, it is essential to get these moments that matter right.”
How do you capture the right product moments?
Designing the right thing, the right way
Identifying the most important moments in your customer experience is just as crucial as designing for them.
In an ideal world, we’d kick off a project, come up with great ideas, design them, develop them, launch them, and get it all right the first time. Luckily, and you’ll see why in a moment (ha ha), our world doesn’t work that way. Rather, in our world the best and most efficient way to design the rightproduct is by doing the right research. We’re not talking about a drawn out 6-month-hire-a-consulting-firm-with-100-page-reports type of research. There’s a time and place for that.
For capturing moments, we stand up and leave the office. We spend time with people in their space as they interact with the product (or your competitor’s). We ask the right questions that help us get to the right information. We’re lucky that our jobs require us to interact and empathize with people, face-to-face, so that we may design a part of their life to be just a bit more delightful. The crux of capturing the right moments lies there: do the research that helps you understand the behaviors, attitudes, desires, and frustrations of your customers.
Gathering that wealth of information helps create a future forward story with customer needs at the heart of the to-be product, and allows you to design for moments that drive better experiences and better business outcomes.
“Experimentation focuses on understanding user expectations, behaviors, intents, and motivations through methodical, investigative approaches. Insights are then used to ensure that all product design decisions do benefit the user.”
How to keep a customer focused mindset when designing for product moments
In their book on customer centricity, Peter Fader and Sarah Thomas lend us their definition of product centricity and how it vastly differs from customer centricity in practice:
Product Centricity is the practice of selling as many products as possible to as many customers as possible, no matter their level of anonymity.
Customer Centricity aligns the development and delivery of a company’s products and services with the current and future needs of its highest-value customers while also recognizing — and celebrating — customer heterogeneity. This practice maximizes these customers’ long-term value to the brand.
Let’s unpack these for a minute. A product centric business strategy is not inherently bad. For some, it works.
A perfect example is the classic side of the street souvenir shop you see in tourist hotspots around the world. Owners of these shops don’t really care who you are, as long you buy their product, and as much of it as possible. For them, all customers are made equal and generally have an equal chance of a transaction.
We don’t really expect shops like these to transform with a customer centric business strategy because it wouldn’t be a worthwhile investment. Their value isn’t different enough from their neighbors to warrant a strategic overhaul (although admittedly, it would be a fun thought experiment).
On the flip side, key to the definition of customer centricity is the recognition, acceptance, and celebration of customer diversity in the broadest sense. It’s the belief that in fact not all customers are made equal, and therefore don’t always deserve (or need) an equal share of your company’s valuable resources.
A customer centric brand seeks to understand the qualities and characteristics of its highest-valued customers, and strategically aligns business operations to meet their needs.
The culmination of these efforts leads to boosted CX metrics across the board, but most importantly to an increased customer lifetime value, or the value a customer brings to your brand over their lifetime. Achieving true customer centricity of course doesn’t happen overnight.
Transitioning from product to customer centric requires an organizational culture shift with a forward momentum increasing in maturity. We see our clients in various stages along the customer mindset maturity scale.
Orchestrating moments across the organization
Connecting the dots
At YML, we take pride in design not living in isolation. A great solution can only be great when it fits within the holistic brand experience. When designing for moments, we take a service design approach to align internal services like roles, processes, and workflows including all physical and digital touchpoints.
It’s important to start with defining who the consumer of the service is — and we intentionally say consumer because Product Moments can apply externally (customers) or internally (employees) — and knowing the moments that matter to them. Then we define how the different parts of your organization can work together to support those moments.
We treat products like theater: there’s a front stage with actors performing for an audience. Behind the curtain are backstage coordinators that support the actors in putting on the show. Those backstage do just as much to shape the final performance as those in front.
Your customers, employees, technology, products, processes and operations, your business model… all these “relationships” formulate who you are as an organization. The backstage employees, technologies, and processes help to power the touchpoints, that are then delivered by frontend technology and frontline employees. All the pieces play their part in making the experience come to life.
The benefit of using a service design approach is that it guides decision making for the whole organization. Teams are able to see why their work matters and what value it brings to both the customer and the business. It brings to light the careful orchestration of all touchpoints, and the moments they’re designed to support.