Customer Experience: Strategies and Insights

Posted on Feb 9, 2025 in Other subjects

The Progression of Economic Value

The history of economic progress can be summarized in the four-stage evolution of the birthday cake:

  • Stage 1: Making cakes from scratch, mixing farm commodities (flour, sugar, butter, and eggs).
  • Stage 2: Looking for pre-mixed ingredients.
  • Stage 3: Ordering cakes from the bakery or grocery store – costing up to 10 times the packaged ingredients.
  • Stage 4: Parents “outsource” the entire event to stage a memorable experience for the child, which throws the cake in for free… at 10 times more the price (again).

What is Experience?

An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage and goods as props to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event. Experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, and even spiritual level. Thus, no two people can have the same experience!

Buyers of experiences are guests, and they value what the company reveals over a duration of time.

Companies will stage experiences but still charge for their goods and services.

Examples: Interactive games and chat rooms, motion-played simulators, virtual reality.

Example companies: Airbnb (Van Gogh room), Netflix (Netflix Army of the Dead Experience).

The Characteristics of Experience

The richest experiences encompass aspects of all four realms (a sweet spot around the area where the spectra meet). This sweet spot is reached when experiences meet a customer’s needs. This often involves an iterative process of research, design, and development: it takes exploration, scripting, and staging!

What is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing is a strategy that aims at customer engagement by creating real-life experiences that customers can remember for a long time (and link back to the brand). This type of marketing strategy lets the customer try the brand’s products and services to create an experience out of it. The objective is to create a closer bond between consumer and brand, typically by immersing them. This enhances the emotional connection with the brand, in turn fostering consumer loyalty and lifetime value.

The Dimensions of Experiential Marketing

  • Sense: Includes sight, touch, taste, sound, and smell. Example: Smell of a Stradivarius.
  • Feel: Inner emotions of consumers are made to resonate with the product offered. The objective is for consumers to experience a mood or feeling.
  • Act: Pertaining to the physical body, behavior or lifestyle, and social interactions. Example: Sprite shower.
  • Relate: Develop an emotional connection with collective groups. Example: Billie Eilish experience.

Target Audience vs. Buyer Persona

The target audience is the traditional approach to identifying ideal customers. It points to a group of people that may be interested in your products or services. A target audience considers demographic and physical traits such as gender, age, location, interests, annual income, attitudes, problems, and solutions.

A buyer persona is an audience segmentation approach that uses real data to identify and define customers interested in your product. It aims to give your ideal customers a face, names, occupation, challenges, and likes or dislikes, even though it is fictional.

Archetypes

Archetypes in marketing refer to widely recognized and common patterns, symbols, or character types that represent certain qualities, values, or emotions. These archetypes are deeply ingrained in the human psyche and can be used by marketers to create meaningful and relatable brand personalities, messages, and experiences.

Archetypes and personas used for UX work contain similar insights, are based on similar kinds of data, and differ mainly in presentation. Personas are presented as a single human character, whereas archetypes are not tied to specific names or faces. Personas and archetypes in UX are two slightly different ways of visualizing the same kinds of insights. Both summarize user research data: they are representations of audience clusters, capturing major areas of overlap in user behaviors, attitudes, motivations, pain points, and goals.

Archetypes are used to:

  • Build positioning and brand image.
  • Work on engagement.
  • Define the communication language.
  • Help to define marketing actions.
  • Help to define the content strategy.

What information do archetypes contain?

  • Name.
  • Sociodemographic description.
  • Description of competences.
  • Levels of use, knowledge, or experience.
  • Objectives, expectations, satisfiers, and unsatisfactors of the experience.
  • Specific information about behaviors in relation to the product or service analyzed.
  • Supporting elements that “bring to life” the character, such as name, photograph.

Customer Journey, Archetypes & Economy

Collaborative Economy

Collaborative economies consist of giving, swapping, borrowing, trading, renting, and sharing products and services for a fee, between an individual who has something and an individual who needs something—generally with the help of a web-based middleman. Examples: Uber, Airbnb, Vinted, BlaBlaCar.

Digital Ecosystem

A digital ecosystem is a network of interconnected digital technologies, platforms, and services that interact with each other to create value for businesses and consumers. In a business context, a digital ecosystem can also refer to the set of digital platforms and technologies that a company uses to engage with its customers, partners, and other stakeholders.

Customer Experience Management

Customer experience management (CXM) is the process of surveying, analyzing, and enhancing customer interactions with your business. CXM monitors different customer touchpoints along the customer journey and evaluates how you can improve the experience related to each one to bring users more value. Therefore, CXM is a fundamental component of a customer-first strategy because it demonstrates a clear investment in customer needs.

How to Measure Customer Experience?

  • Analyze customer satisfaction survey results: The NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures how likely your customers are to promote your company based on their experiences.
  • NPS scale:
    • Promoters (score of 9 and 10): Represent a company’s most enthusiastic and loyal customers.
    • Passives (score of 7 or 8): Are not actively recommending a brand but are also unlikely to damage it.
    • Detractors (score of 0 to 6, included): Are unlikely to recommend a company or product to others.
  • Identify the rate of and reasons for customer churn: Regularly analyze churned customers.
  • Ask customers for product or feature requests: Create a forum for customer requests.
  • Analyze customer support ticket trends: Review recurring issues for solutions.

Digital Customer Experience

6 laws on the operation of the customer experience:

  • Every interaction creates a personal reaction.
  • Focus on the customer.
  • Understanding the customer and sharing it encourages internal alignment.
  • Uncommitted employees fail to engage customers.
  • Generate a good atmosphere.
  • Committed to the customer experience.

Product Experience

Product experience requires a capacity for constant innovation. Product metrics to measure product experience:

  • Product usage metrics.
  • Product engagement metrics.
  • Product satisfaction.
  • Product quality metrics.
  • Product development metrics.

Brand Experience

  • Touchpoints.
  • Messaging & tone.
  • Products & services.
  • Personal interaction.
  • Business operations.
  • Environments.

Customer Experience

The customer experience is a complete value proposition of the company towards the customer that includes the use of the product or service and all interactions before and after the purchase process.

Interaction Maps

Interaction maps are used to measure the experience of customers and analyze aspects such as the complete customer lifecycle, the interactions that occur to respond to a specific need, and events around a particular interaction.

  • A Customer Experience Map (CEM) analyzes and describes the overall consumer experience.
  • A Customer Journey Map (CJM) analyzes and describes a specific experience in a specific context by a specific type of customer. Necessary elements to develop a good CJM:
    • People (customer persona maps).
    • Timeline.
    • Emotions felt by customers, their user experience.
    • Touchpoints or points of contact.
    • Interactions.

Decision-Making Models

AIDA Model

The AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) model describes the consequences of an advertising message throughout a consumer’s decision-making process.

ZMOT Concept

The “Zero Moment of Truth” refers to everything related to searches that our consumers do before buying online.

Customer Centricity vs. Experience

Customer centricity represents a set of strategies that places the customer at the center of an organization’s operations and is intended to help companies to better understand who their customers are, what they want, and how they can best benefit symbiotically.

Customer experience is the overall perception a consumer develops after an encounter (of any kind) with your brand.

Moving away from Product-Centricity to Customer-Centric is the key. Achieve Customer Centricity:

  • Understand who your customer is and which is the job-to-be-done.
  • Shifting the responsibility for the customer from marketing to the whole company.
  • Generate action, from innovation, co-creation, to everyday customer connections.
  • A strategy vs an approach, an attitude or a process.
  • Aim: long-term growth/long-term profit.

The Customer Experience Concept

Design Decisions Require Good Research

The least important are the surveys. The most important is why a problem occurs:

  • Describe the trend.
  • Define expectations.
  • Degree of satisfaction.
  • Understand pains.

Also, what people do –> observation and contextual interviews.

The context in person –> ethnography

Online communities –> netnography

Understanding the Client: Insights

Ethnography

Ethnography is a methodology that acknowledges the complexity of human experience and the need to research it by close and sustained observation of human behavior.

Allows to watch from outside and interpret with observation (no words – know what is happening without asking) –> you immerse yourself.

  • What are people doing?
  • How do people do what they do? Example: Cauliflower.
  • What do they say they do it for?

An ethnography usually includes four elements of community life:

  1. Ecology: The context, the where → the landscape.
  2. Social Organization: What it is telling us about relationships and where kinship, inheritance, and power step in.
  3. Development Cycle.
  4. Cosmology.

Main characteristics:

  • Takes place “in the field”: It is immersive.
  • Observation is the primary data collection technique, even if not the only one.
  • Interviews will be used to clarify observations.
  • Attention will be paid to (1) the CONTEXT and (2) the ARTIFACTS.
  • Field notes will be coded and analyzed for themes and variables.
  • Documents and observations will be gathered to understand their culture-sharing behaviors, beliefs, and language.
  • The aim of the ethnographic researcher is to LEARN FROM (not study) members of a cultural group.

Advantages of Ethnography:

  • Direct observation.
  • Internal validity: Researcher experiences what the group is experiencing.
  • Detailed data.
  • Holistic: Able to see many facets of the group or culture.

Disadvantages of Ethnography:

  • Time-consuming.
  • Difficulty in presenting the results.
  • Reliability, since the researcher often works alone.
  • Invasion of privacy.
  • Requires sustainable effort and engagement.

A good Ethnography:

  • Pay attention to identifying a cultural issue to study.
  • Good ethnographers identify tools people use and decode rituals.
  • Select a group to observe or interview over time.
  • Note shared patterns of behavior, language, and beliefs that the group has developed.
  • The account must both describe the group and identify themes.
  • Provide evidence of being reflexive about the researcher’s role in the study.

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the first step in design thinking because it is a skill that allows us to understand and share the same feelings that others feel.

Through empathy, we are able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and connect with how they might be feeling about their problem, circumstance, or situation. Some questions to consider:

  • What is the person feeling?
  • What actions or words indicate this feeling?
  • Can you identify their feelings through words?
  • What words would you use to describe their feelings?
  1. Abandon your ego: it is not about YOU. It is about the other person.
  2. Adopt humility and be sincere: you are helping them, not the other way around.
  3. Be a good listener: block your inner voice/noise and allow the other’s voice to resonate.
  4. Hone your observation skills, observe behaviors, non-verbal expressions, body language.
  5. Care.
  6. Be curious, dig into unexpected areas, uncover new insights, explore all aspects of people’s lives.

Netnography

Netnography is an online ethnography that focuses on the study of online communities. It is framed to seek out cultural meanings and values. You must choose online communities in which you can participate, engage with the community, even contribute posts so you can write a thick description for these brief engagements with your community.

  • The WHERE: the location is Internet! It is open 24/7.
  • THE WHO: anyone who posts within a community is a participant.
  • The HOW: the method is data collection and analysis.

Stages of Netnography

Planning
  1. Who are the people that will be able to shed light on that information? Are there multiple groups of people you need to interview?
  2. Do your research objectives benefit from seeing the product or ecosystem (its’ context) in which the experience is happening?
  3. Is it logistically feasible to conduct all or part of your research in-context to gain this holistic understanding?
  4. How much depth of information do you need? How long will it take to achieve that depth in a session?
Prepping
  1. Consider the skills of the team: is there a language barrier? A cost constraint?
  2. Consider the Schedule: there needs to be enough time to schedule and conduct sessions.
  3. Consider discussions after each session: meet together as a team frequently.
  4. Consider the audiovisual: remember you will need to put together screenshots, clips, pictures, videos.
Fielding
  1. Consider documenting research artifacts: this includes photographing maps, canvases, card sorts, moderator notes.
  2. Consider fielding debriefs: plan a half hour to an hour at the end of each couple of days.
  3. Consider fielding coding: sort your data from the beginning, adding codes that arise during your debriefs.