McorpCX Blog Delight and Engage Your Customers With Experience Design and Innovation

Why intentionally designing customer experiences is key to differentiating yourself from competitors and thriving in a customer-driven world. As customers' expectations of experience continue to rise, brands are changing the ways they work to keep up...because they must. They're working to keep up with their customers and ahead of their competitors, with experience leaders taking a systematic, customer-centered approach to design and innovation. These leaders (including brands like Apple, Google, and Amazon) deeply understand their customers, their goals, their journeys and emotions, and their wants and needs. And they use these insights to design innovative experiences that perfectly meet those needs while driving business goals. The success of design-led brands like these stems from making experience design and innovation a core business capability, having long understood that a customer's experience is too important to leave to chance. Great Experiences Don't Happen by Accident-They're Intentionally Designed. The capability of experience design is centered around-and the solutions it develops are brought to life through-several interrelated skill sets, and relies on empathy, curiosity, and a deep understanding of human behavior. Design thinking and human-centered design (HCD) are two of the most well-known ways organizations drive innovation because they allow people who aren't designers to use standard methods and tools that make the process of creativity logical. They guide teams through steps such as empathizing with customers and defining the problem. From there teams move to coming up with solutions to the problem, prototyping those solutions, and testing ideas before launch. By adopting these methodologies, companies avoid the pitfalls of reactive "find and fix" approaches, ensuring solutions that are solving the right problem by addressing the root cause of issues. This strategic design process also minimizes future rework and churn, driving tangible value and reducing operational headaches. \ If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about t problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." - Albert EinsteinThe human centered approach needs to be applied inside your organization as well. While design thinking will help you develop solutions that will be adopted by your target audience, to get these solutions to your customers you need to build partnerships with the stakeholders and teams who can make them real.