Want to serve clients well? Design their experience

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When asked to talk about customer experience, I always cite the same example: Porter Airlines. Here is what Porter figured out: What people hate about flying doesn't have much to do with the airplane. It has to do with the stress of fighting traffic to get to the airport on time. With high parking costs. With long lines, uncomfortable waiting areas and intimidating security check points. With disinterested and impolite check-in and gate staff. With delays and missed connections. With bad coffee, worse food and lacklustre service on board. And with long waits for baggage and expensive cab rides on the other end.

What people hate about flying is the feeling of being processed.

Porter painstakingly designed ways to either improve or eliminate the factors that evoke negative emotions in airline customers. Choosing the Toronto Island airport as its home addresses traffic, parking, time-wasting and flight-delay issues. Opting to give all passengers a well-appointed lounge – comfortable seating, free wireless Internet and premium coffee – normally associated with a small percentage of frequent flyers improves the preflight experience. And careful recruiting and rigorous service training bring, in Porter's words, "dignity" back to flying.

The point is not that Porter provides a consistently exemplary customer experience. The point is that their customer experience was designed. In fact, the discipline of design played a big role in their customer experience plan.

What is customer experience?

Let's start with an explanation of customer experience. It can be thought of as the sum of all experiences resulting from interactions a customer has with a company. It is emerging as an important discipline because of the rapid commoditization of products and services; customer experience can create differentiation and long-term competitive advantage by increasing customer loyalty, while reducing cost to serve.

According to Lewis Carbone in Clued In , customer experience is a three-part, cyclical process. It starts with perception, transitions into interaction, and finishes up or re-starts with recollection. In other words, the interactions between a customer and a company, good or bad, influence recollection of the experience after the fact, and in turn influence that customer's perception of the company, along with the perception of other potential customers he or she speaks with.

In plain English, customer experience relates to how people feel about themselves as they interact with a company. This is different from brand experience, which is more about how people feel about the company directly. And it is wider than customer service, since not all interactions are service-related, or even human-to-human.

What is design?

Design as a discipline is about planning with intention. It is a purposeful process of creation. It combines art and science, aesthetics and math, to arrive at a solution, normally an object (physical or virtual), or a process, which fulfills a purpose considered from the outset.

Design is guided by principles, such as harmony, balance, proximity, variety and emphasis. Principles help a designer organize disparate pieces into a whole vision. The principles, by definition, consider both the form of the creation – the sculpture or technology – and the user or audience. They account for how people will perceive and feel about the creation.

What role can design play in customer experience?

First, we must understand that the Porter example is the exception, not the rule. Most customer experience efforts are reactive. They are about fixing, managing and optimizing. They are about identifying troublesome aspects of the experience and either making them go away or finding ways to improve them.

The future of customer experience, however, is going to involve a lot more creation – of new, positive customer touch points, or of new experiences altogether.

Design is deliberate, and takes into account human factors. It starts with a goal, achieves a specific end, and worries about how people will feel along the way. It is, by its very nature, ideally suited to inform customer strategy. The idea that design has a place in the business world was adopted early by Ideo – a design and innovation consulting firm in the U.S. (www.ideo.com). They are ahead in this field, but other firms will grow along similar principles as "chief experience officer," or CXO, becomes a more prominent c-level position.

Design guidelines that make sense for customer experience

Customers tend to find the same aspects of customer experiences irritating or infuriating, regardless of industry. Customer satisfaction studies tend to uncover the same themes. Customers may use different words, but they mean the same thing:

• Access/speed: “It took so long to find what I was looking for.”
• Choice: “There were so many options that after a while I just didn't care.”
• Personal touch: “I just entered my phone number two minutes ago, don't you have my file up?”
• Quality: “It's 2010, can't they make this work correctly?”
• Billing: “My bill is always screwed up.”

In light of these themes, here are five design guidelines to inform customer experience as companies begin to reinvent themselves around the customer:

Clean and clear lines of sight: Applies as well for websites as it does retail stores. The key is to make ingress, traffic flows and egress easy for the customer. Remove barriers – such as crowded aisles that will bottleneck during peak periods, or sub-pages inside sub-pages on websites that make navigation confusing. In 2009, Wal-Mart decided to widen aisles and brighten stores specifically to improve this aspect of their customer experience.

Choice limitation: It is a common belief that more choice is better. Quiznos has proven that hypothesis wrong by intentionally limiting choice – they appeal to consumers who want to basically point and say "I'll have that." Choice limitation can also lower product and order errors, reducing the cost of service.

Customer-centric records: Customer records are often assigned numbers because they need to be catalogued and easily searched. But care in design should be taken to prominently link fields such as first name, and flagging important context-specific data such as children's names or birthdays. The Four Seasons knows everyone by name after a single visit.

Complexity reduction: Avoiding "feature creep" is important. A colleague and friend of mine, Jordan Banks, preaches, "If you are going to add a feature, make sure you take two away." This is good advice, and good guidance for design. How many examples of great customer experience are from companies with very few models or product/service lines? Lululemon and Porter come to mind again.

A side benefit of complexity reduction is fewer billing problems. The fewer the options, the easier it is for both people and systems to keep track of orders and prices. ING Direct's model and offering is simple, and they receive few complaints regarding billing compared with other financial institutions.