The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end
customer experience
Lines
between products, services, and user environments are blurring. The ability to
craft an integrated customer experience will open enormous opportunities to build
new businesses.
Time was, a company could rely on a superior product’s
features and functions to coast for a year or more before competitors could
catch up. Or a well-honed service advantage could single-handedly buffer a
company from start-up challengers looking to nip at its heels. No more. As
digitization drives more and faster disruptions—and as customers increasingly
desire the immediacy, personalization, and convenience of dealing with
digital-marketing leaders—the business landscape is undergoing an upheaval.
Products, services, and environments—both
physical and online—are converging to anticipate and meet rising customer
expectations. That’s giving birth to a proliferation of new products, often
from unexpected sources. It is also stirring up a storm of new, unanticipated
competitors. In this novel mix, product companies will be pushed to create
services and service providers to incorporate products into their offerings.
Both will face the challenge of developing great user environments as part of
customer-centric strategies.
The signs have been apparent for some
time. Technologies regularly compound each
other’s effects, with a dynamism and speed of innovation that has become
unpredictable: for example, the combination of global positioning systems
(GPS), radar, video object recognition, and infrared sensors gave birth to the
development of self-driving cars. In smartphones, manufacturers once focused on
features and functions as selling points. Today that emphasis has shifted
completely to style, lifestyle, and simplicity of use. These permeate the
customer experience and define the value proposition for such products.
This evolving convergence of products,
services, and environments affects some industries more than others.
Telecommunications, automotive, and consumer-product companies, for example,
have already embarked on a convergence journey; other industries, such as
insurance, banking, and energy, lag behind them. Understanding the way this
phenomenon is taking shape can help companies prepare for the competitive opportunities and challenges. In this article, we explore some
of the places where the convergence is taking shape today and some key
principles for designing integrated, end-to-end customer experiences.
A
convergence triad
In our ongoing work, we observe three
basic types of convergences reshaping the landscape for customer-centric
strategies:
·
Traditional product
companies are transforming themselves into providers of services and
ecosystems. Some innovators, such as
Rolls-Royce, some time ago moved beyond merely selling jet engines to selling
engine hours in a lifetime service relationship with customers. Elevator operators, such
as KONE, emphasize the number of floors their products will serve over
time, not just their physical products. Microsoft Azure sells computing as a
service, not as software; Philips is transforming the home-lighting business
into a “connected business” to improve sustainability, cost of ownership, and
smart control by integrating applications such as scene personalization, home
automation, security services, and sleep quality into its core product.
·
Service companies are
integrating physical products into their customer experience. Amazon’s Echo, for example, provides quick access
to the company’s services. Evernote and Moleskine have collaborated to create
notebooks that seamlessly integrate physical notes; capturing handwritten ones
with the Evernote camera allows you to search and organize them digitally.
Progressive Insurance’s connected-car devices allow the company to charge
drivers according to their driving behavior.
·
Companies are investing
to create a customer environment that builds a connection with their products. Online players such as Amazon open physical
stores; car manufacturers (Tesla, for example) open fancy showrooms in shopping
malls and prime locations, with a completely transformed customer experience.
Electronics companies, like Apple, stage the customer experience with
open-space concepts, a sprawling Genius Bar, and diverse sales staffs.
In essence, highly successful companies
have realized that the boundaries between products, services, and environments
have blurred. They know as well that they need an integrated view to design
end-to-end experiences that are truly valuable to consumers and successful in
the market. It’s not just about designing the best product or service but
rather about striking the right combination and making sure the integrated
customer experience is compelling. This kind of successful,
convergence-designed strategy can deliver a durable competitive advantage. Done
well, the strategy will also make implementation more intuitive for the company
and more seamless for the customers who engage with the product or service. In
this evolving environment, maintaining an integrated customer-experience
perspective is necessary right from the beginning of any improvement or transformation effort.
Today’s consumers do not buy just products
or services—more and more, their purchase decisions revolve around buying into
an idea and an experience. This change in expectations will give product and
service businesses opportunities to create new revenue streams by expanding
into adjacent territories. Given these complexities, the shift also requires an
innovative approach to business models and a new look at how companies provide
value to customers.
Where
end-to-end experience design is happening
To better understand how some companies
are grasping the opportunity to design end-to-end experiences, it’s useful to
explore some examples of cutting-edge approaches and the techniques and
principles that underpin them:
Raising
the temperature in thermostats
For much of this decade the
smart-home-thermostat market has been under assault by new entrants using
world-class design approaches. Incumbents, largely embedded in
professional-installer sales channels, were left with little access to end
consumers.
Ecobee, which embarked on a design-led
strategy against competitors such as Nest from the standpoint of aesthetics,
usability, and features, believed that its technology was superior. But it was
missing a major component the company felt customers cared about—design. To
Ecobee executives, it was not just a matter of the product’s color and shape.
Rather, they believed that consumers would see value in the overall experience
of interacting with the device itself, its mobile app, and its Internet
presence. The “squaricle” shape of the device was decided in part by the need
to differentiate it from competitors’ round or square thermostats and to pair
up with Ecobee’s remote sensors, which have the same shape. Black was chosen as
the color for its practicality, unobtrusiveness, and understated high-tech
signaling.
Ecobee’s approach was to redesign the
thermostat with sensors that work over Wi-Fi systems, so it can moderate the
temperature where the user (as opposed to the thermostat) is located. The new
design made it possible to launch the product in new channels, such as Apple
stores, Best Buy, and Home Depot, gaining direct access to new customers.
Ecobee won PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award for smart
thermostats in 2015.1
Magic
bus
In late 2015, the Swedish public-transport
provider Skånetrafiken aimed to enhance the value of bus transportation. The
idea was to explore extending the travel experience beyond the bus with new
technologies. Designers thought about that experience from an end-to-end
perspective—before, during, and after travel.
The company’s approach took the form of a
design lab on wheels. A multidisciplinary group of technologists and designers,
with support from transport companies Transdev and Volvo, prototyped and
infused a bus with new technologies. The team employed an agile approach, with
iterative prototyping to generate more than 40 innovative ideas (based on
interviews with customers) in less than six months. Every two weeks, new ideas
were conceived, prototyped, and tested with users in a number of iterations.
New design concepts transformed the space, made seating more flexible, and
integrated technology into the bus. One example: a specific spot for standing
passengers—an integrated space divider with cup holders, phone chargers, and
shelf space. Another, based on the preferences of bacteria-wary passengers, is
a sensor system that lets riders send a stop signal to the driver without
touching a traditional button.3
Skånetrafiken’s concept bus took a major
step toward reinventing the urban-travel experience. Although it continues to
be an ongoing lab and project, it is also now ready to transport riders in
southern Sweden, who will provide ongoing feedback to inspire future work
redesigning urban-travel options.
A
telecom company gazes into the future
A leading Nordic telecommunications
company needed to replace its legacy technology infrastructure. It therefore
launched an extensive transformation program to develop more relevant and
valuable offers for customers and ways to meet their future expectations about
the end-to-end experience of service upgrades and changes. Better technology
would then serve these new needs in the most efficient manner.
The central question: What will customers
want in the future? Is it even possible to tell? In this case, design
specialists combined their experience with prototyping and “futuring”
techniques to project future scenarios and make them tangible for consumers to
explore. The team understood that some aspects of the customer’s behavior,
habits, and values tend not to change as much as technology or other solutions
do. Encouraging consumers to play around with prototypes and to cocreate ideas
with the team provided crucial insights about people’s functional and emotional
needs, dreams, aspirations, and views of the future. This highly collaborative
approach also made it possible to engage key internal stakeholders and to bring
in a diverse assortment of capabilities throughout the development process. By
listening, providing transformation tools, and engaging with stakeholders, the
company persuaded them to contribute their personal experiences and ideas to
the creation of end products.
Through such interactions between
consumers and the company, the transformation team developed a deep
understanding of what customers might expect from products and services five
years down the road. That became the focal point of the company’s vision of its
role in creating lifetime customer value. New investments and other decisions
to advance the company’s technology-infrastructure-related transformation
flowed from these insights.
A
design icon charges up the home
A key focus of IKEA’s effort to develop
its Home Smart line, which introduced technology-infused furniture, was
exploring the experience of integrated wireless charging of mobile phones in
homes. The ultimate goal was to design a solution that would eliminate charging
entirely. IKEA’s design team had to reinvent the research process to explore
how people would react to these new features in furniture. To support the
vision of a simpler, more human-centered home life, it was important that the
result not look like technology but still be understood as more than just
furniture.
The team launched an immersive process:
simple prototypes helped show where people would actually prefer to charge
their devices in their homes (users could place stickers anywhere). An
extensive, in-home testing process in several countries pinpointed the times
and situations when charging becomes an issue. The team expected new technology
to pave the way for completely new kinds of behavior, so it paid particular
attention to understanding whether consumers would intuitively understand the
underlying functionality of the products.
Home testing, which allowed families to
try products for several weeks rather than only during workshop sessions,
helped the company to see how the concept would fit into everyday life and
influence current habits and routines. In parallel, the team spent time with
consumers in stores to learn about the retail experience and the environment
where the new products were sold. To create the right store experience, it was
critical to get insights on how consumers would understand and perceive this
new integrated-charging feature.
The result was the world’s first line of
furniture with integrated wireless-charging capabilities—part of a successful
initiative to bring smartness into homes and make it accessible to the mass
consumer market.
Five
principles of the design-led customer experience
Each company’s efforts to shape design-led
experiences will unfold differently. But it is possible to draw lessons—several
principles for shaping a design-led customer-experience strategy—from these
examples, unique as they are. As companies increasingly turn to design
strategies, it is helpful to keep the principles in mind to guide their
efforts.
1. Understand the customer’s needs and
perspectives.
Companies often approach innovation from a
technological point of view and already, at the outset, have strong ideas about
what the solution should be. To arrive at a new, integrated solution that taps
into the power of convergence, it’s better to start from a people perspective.
Companies can begin to study key aspects of the customer’s experience and try
to understand and resolve core pain points by answering a few questions:
·
What do customers really need, desire, and
aspire to?
·
What are they trying to achieve by
consuming a product or service?
·
What kinds of behavior are connected to
the experience, natural or constructed?
·
What do customers think about the product,
the service, and the experience? And why do they think the way they do?
Often a company ought to consider shifting
its mind-set: away from a technological solution (“what product or service can
we provide to the market?”) to a consumer-oriented one (“what customer needs do
we aim to fulfill through this integrated solution?”). An unmet need, even if
for the most part unexpressed, frequently turns out to be a company’s next
business opportunity.
2. Draw inspiration from other industries.
Companies increasingly look beyond
existing industry boundaries and try to adopt better approaches from unrelated
contexts. Some examples:
·
A hotel company that wanted to improve its
customer experience drew inspiration from the world of senior-executive
assistants. The company reasoned that the best assistants anticipate the needs
of their executives, sometimes even before the executives are aware of those
needs. By applying that principle to its customers, the hotel company
emphasized service that anticipated their needs, as though it already knew even
first-time visitors.
·
A software provider of e-trading platforms
wanted to redesign its core product. When it decided which information to place
centrally and which could be relegated to a peripheral view, it took a hard
look at airplane cockpits.
·
3. Get a glimpse of what’s on the horizon.
By definition, design is a creative and
exploratory process. Looking into the future allows a team to project an
industry’s circumstances as far as 15 to 20 years away by framing the landscape
of products and services. The primary elements to consider are typically
societal shifts, such as changes in behavior, demographics, and social norms,
as well as technological improvements.
The exercise can also be useful with a
much shorter time frame by projecting emergent trends that can already be
observed to a certain degree: for example, the new EU payment directives in
banking—PSD2—will remove the banks’ monopoly and allow nonbanking players to
initiate payments and access account information. How will this change the
landscape of the banking industry? What if you could use Facebook or Google to
pay your bills? What about the effects on other industries? What new business
opportunities could be created when these developments combine with other
shifts that happen simultaneously?
4. Empower multidisciplinary teams.
Designing a convergent, end-to-end
customer experience requires the broad involvement of stakeholders across the
organization and beyond. They will have expertise in fields such as design
research, anthropology, and business, and spheres of influence, such as product
development, marketing, or finance. Creating a multilayered experience requires
a variety of design capabilities, such as designing products, services, user
experiences, and interactivity. Such multidisciplinary teams can break through
silos and foster cross-disciplinary collaboration. Decision makers from all
stakeholder groups should align together and embrace uncertainty together,
developing capabilities throughout the entire design process. The use of
existing resources can keep the investment in time and costs low.
5. Use agile techniques to prototype
experiences and business models.
The challenge of mastering many convergent
opportunities is that solutions often reside in complex ecosystems that either
stand alone or depend on other, related systems. Think of air travel, for
instance, as a combined experience of products, services, and environments.
Despite this level of complexity, companies can achieve rapid progress through
prototyping, which quickly brings to life new opportunities and perspectives
for effective implementation.
An experience can be prototyped through
simple cardboard models, role playing, or clickable digital prototypes. This
approach focuses on eliminating mistakes and highlighting possibilities for
further development. Alternative business models can be visualized and
prototyped to explore where value is added, costs occur, and efficiencies or
new revenue streams lie in wait. We find that it’s most efficient to iterate a
prototype of the customer experience and the business model—these pilot efforts
can secure the best outcomes before scaling. The goal should be managing
prototypes in an agile way, through sprints and frequent feedback from users,
with a focus on developing business value.
The convergence of products, services, and
user environments is just taking flight. In this environment, large and
unexpected business opportunities will appear, along with unlikely competitors.
To prosper, companies must balance agile, design-led development processes with
the continual redesign of customer journeys.
By Raffaele Breschi, Tjark Freundt, Malin Orebäck, and Kai Vollhardt
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/the-expanding-role-of-design-in-creating-an-end-to-end-customer-experience?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1706&hlkid=bfa4539f4e124f59b77b9e368806d97d&hctky=1627601&hdpid=426c91b2-9594-41f2-b992-130a8fa18221
No comments:
Post a Comment