Customer Experience Design: 5-Step Guide

What is a customer experience design?

There are a lot of theoretical explanations for the term. We will also give you one in a minute. But before, let’s have a quick imaginary exercise in understanding the statement. You may not know the definition of “what is CX design?” yet, but we assure you that deep in your gut, you’ll know what it’s about.

Picture this: you saw an amusement park ad on the street that looked fun. So, later on the weekend, you’ve arrived at the place, and the roller coaster from the ad looks exactly as advertised. But there is a huge queue, people are slumming, fighting to get in line faster, and a cashier is rude. You are overwhelmed by a cacophony of music from different areas.

All these various aspects on your way create “the atmosphere.” The roller coasters in this park could be the best in the world, but will it override all the other nuances from the visit? Then, you clearly understand what customer experience design is all about.

You receive a memorable experience, and it will be associated with a particular brand. Considering CX, businesses can improve the customer journey by implementing high-quality user research, mapping, and other practices.

Now, let’s return to the theoretical part.

Customer experience is a holistic perception a client develops when interacting with your brand. It encompasses every user interaction with your company, from social media posts to customer support. It’s not just about the quality of your product; it’s about meeting customers’ expectations at every step of their journey.

According to the research, companies that focus on CX have seen revenue increase by 80%. Therefore, if you want to build trustworthy relationships with your buyers, it’s better to pay attention to CX design.

Including so many touchpoints, it’s easy to realize that incorporating the CX strategy takes a massive effort. Not surprisingly, as you are about to craft what you want to happen at all customer journey stages. Hence, designing customer experience isn’t a one-time deal either; it’s a meaningful end-to-end experience that keeps customers engaged with your brand.

The tricky part about building and measuring CX successes is that it’s a subjective variable, as it deals with feelings and emotions. But not as emotional as you may fear! There are well-established processes to develop and maintain positive customer relationships, and we’ve gathered them below. As an experienced UX design agency in London, Limeup will guide you through the whole CX process.

Customer experience design process: what do you need to do?

As experiences vary from person to person, CX strategies differ from company to company. So, while there is no way to create a universal roadmap, here are some general goals that CX tries to pursue.

• Reachability: easiness for customers to interact with your business in every channel you are working on.
• Convenience: the ability to get any information on your product (for example, knowledge bases), its characteristics, and up-to-date prices.
• Personalization: the capability to meet your customer’s unique needs within product discovery.
• Simplicity: this point is related to UX (user experience) — optimized for mobile sites, straightforward steps to make a purchase, and similar.

As you can see from these goals, it all points to one roadmap you should already have — your task is to revise and extend your CX. So now, let’s figure out what steps you need to take.

Step 1. Do your research

You have to clarify and deeply understand your customer’s pain points and how you will solve their problems with your product or service. Receive in-depth insights about what your customers expect to receive from the very first interaction and further. This step includes various types of research: market, competitors, and users.

Step 2. Identify your users

It’s better to create detailed profiles for your customers for insights into their buyer behavior. For example, Limeup, when creating a project, refers to high-quality user personas, including the following information:

• Biographical data,
• Personality,
• Age, status, location,
• Goals,
• Needs,
• Motivation,
• Frustration, etc.

When creating a buyer persona, you solidify your typical product user. This stereotypical personage is an anchor point for all the decisions related to the customer experience. The goal is to create a character as like an actual client as possible.

That’s why you base the character on real-life data, not just on your assumption of who your clients may be in the customer experience design process. The data you are interested in includes customers’ demographics, goals, financial status, and preferred communication channels.

Step 3. Create a user journey map

It’s a powerful tool that is widely used by Limeup experts within CX design. Within the data you researched in Step 1, you will be able to define such information:

• Touchpoints,
• User goals,
• User questions,
• Solutions.

Here, you use Personas as inputs for the map. The main points of a map define customers’ actions, emphasize touchpoints, and clarify consumer problems and gains. Usually, the facts on the movement map consist of five well-known stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy, and there is a simple concept behind them:

• Before — what a customer is looking for and expecting to find.
• Beginning — how the first contact with a brand is initiated.
• During — how the experience develops.
• End — ending of the interaction.
• After — persona’s next steps.

Step 4. Identify performance indicators

Though you can’t measure everything in numbers, especially when dealing with such a unique variable as an experience, there are a variety of indirect indications of a successful CX strategy.

Firstly, KPI can measure this just fine. For example, there could be a lesser amount of dissatisfied customers on your support line as the user flow has become more friendly. Or the time for an answer to users’ questions will be reduced thanks to an internal knowledge base. Other metrics indicating the positive shift include:

• Customer churn — client losses within a specific time frame.
• Customer retention — continuous service usage.
• Monthly active users — monthly user engagement.
• Conversion rate — how many choose your product after demos or trials.

Step 5. Keep optimizing

There’s no perfection in the CX process, and you will need changes along the way you implement your solution. Keep tracking the metrics we discovered in step 4, and you may even need to rethink your user maps and profiles as time goes by.

What are the best practices for CX design?

As there are plenty of competitors to go to, 57% of customers change companies because another party provided them with a better experience. For you to prevent this situation, Limeup experts provide the best customer experience design principles and practices. Let’s explore the specifics of 10 best-in-case methods.

Stay clients-oriented

For businesses, putting their client first is essential, and we are talking about not only the user journey but also brand awareness and more. You have to collect customers’ feedback and process it to offer the best experience.

Supply response

You have to respond to customers’ feedback and learn their requirements, your product’s solid and weak sides, etc. It’s essential to let clients provide you with testimonials in various ways — chat, phone calls, emails, and more, according to your target audience preferences.

Provide personalization

This option stands for offering services and products that are tailored to your users’ needs and cover their pain points. You build trust and can even retain your customers by customizing their experience with your brand.

Make it look easy

Notably, the fewer steps your customers have to make when choosing or purchasing the product or service, the better it is. The same when considering the responsiveness of your solution, it has to support mobile devices for easy access to your services.

Estimate the current situation

Your starting point is assessing the current customer experience design strategy situation: gather all available data and conduct extra research. Your sources here are online analytics services, such as site and user engagement metrics and heatmaps. A rich field of insights is data from customer support and sales teams.

To expand your knowledge and reference, check the data you already have and conduct customer surveys or even interviews. When the data starts duplicating the knowledge you already have, it means that you have enough data.

Analyze gathered data

Now, to give you a structural understanding, the gained information must be adequately framed. A helpful way to deal with data massives is to visualize them. This way, it’s easier to find and analyze the data clusters’ dependencies for drawing clear conclusions. Keep in mind that the gathered data is essential at every stage of creating a customer experience.

Balance the quantity

When designing customer experiences, try to balance the amount of user personas and other information: one is too little, but ten probably is too much. For example, you may take a few that will represent different groups of users. UX design companies also use such metrics to evaluate user experience.

Connect emotionally

This step is the main reason for all the previous hard work. Establishing emotional connections and winning your customers’ hearts, not just brains, is what the CX is about.

Consumers value a personalized approach and are more loyal to the companies they trust.

On the bright side, building a connection won’t be a mystery anymore when you’ve identified your target audience and its needs. The critical point here is to satisfy buyers’ need for belonging, be relatable and authentic for your target audience, and share the same values.

Things change. Market, buyers’ moods and statuses fluctuate. To track these changes, gather qualitative and quantitative data similar to the ones used during the research phase.

Train your team members

Ensure that your team understands customer needs and can relate to the practices you implement. For example, define your sales workflow, leads processing, and other aspects that are essential when it comes to selling your product or service.

Implement advanced tools

They will help you to provide the best customer experience design program that will simultaneously improve each user’s interaction with your product. For example, you can implement AI-powered chatbots for 24/7 customer support or analytic tools that will show you the whole customer journey.

Customer experience design benefits

We have come through the leading practices and what CX stands for. Now, let’s reveal the advantages you can receive within a robust customer experience.

• Improve customer retention. By creating more loyalty to your business, you simultaneously improve customer retention and satisfaction. The main goal is to keep your customers happy with your products and services within data-driven design.
• Implement client centricity. Previously, we have considered this point as a practice. However, it’s also a benefit that allows you to evaluate and prioritize your client’s needs.
• Improve marketing. With advanced users’ needs understanding and deep knowledge of your product from the client’s side, you will be able to reduce the costs spent on marketing campaigns. In other words, you can promote your products more effectively and precisely.
• Increase your revenue. An experienced customer experience designer can create a seamless solution that will expand your income and increase the number of clients.
• Stay ahead of the competition. By providing customers with outstanding services, you simultaneously keep them engaging with your offers and can remain competitive in the most busy niches.
• Increase user engagement. You will be able to build strong relationships with your customers and lead them through the whole journey.
• Enhance brand awareness and reputation. You can invest in your name and build a strong brand that will be heard among your customers.

A great CX leads to more revenue, happy customers, and constant business growth. Moreover, you will create an emotional connection with the buyers, increasing their loyalty and boosting sales. As one of the London design agencies, Limeup provides comprehensive services that provide your business with all the listed benefits.

CX vs. UX design: differences and similarities

To put it simply, user experience is a part of customer experience, which is, in this case, a comprehensive term. In this part of the article, we will consider variations and similarities of UX and CX.

Differences

First of all, these terms vary in the metrics you will use to measure your success. As we have mentioned above, CX stands for customer churn, retention, monthly active users, and conversion rate. Within user experience, you utilize the number of views, usability, etc.

Secondly, there are different target audiences, and a customer experience designer will focus on creating a holistic experience for each person who interacts with your products. Customer experience stands for clients’ perception of your brand, the whole idea, while user experience, as a part of CX, concentrates on delivering high-quality experiences.

Thirdly, CX focuses on the brand, while UX focuses on the product, its usability, navigation, architecture, etc. Also, UX design tools differ from the CX since they have different audience reach and focuses. When it comes to conducting research, customer experience requires a wide scale since it covers the customers’ overall impression of the brand.

Similarities

We have considered CX vs. UX design, but what do they have in common? First of all, both practices work for end users’ satisfaction. Secondly, by putting these two options together, the business will definitely increase customer engagement and retention rates. Both CX and UX are crucial when it comes to creating a memorable experience for users.

Moreover, designers in both disciplines have to evaluate the user experience and decide on any challenges and issues that might arise on the users’ journey.

To sum up

After reading this article, you will no longer be confused with CX and UX, leveraging your experience to reach the highest goals by implementing both practices. UX and CX can work together well. Still, it’s essential to differentiate and implement them properly.

Leveraging customer experience, you can focus on growing your clients’ loyalty and brand perception. To stay ahead of the competition and meet end users’ expectations, you have to operate UX and CX properly. We hope our article helped you to understand the way you have to come in order to receive an outstanding customer experience.