When it comes to standing out among the competition, companies are up against both well-resourced enterprises, nimble and scrappy startups and everything in between. To compete, many businesses are refocusing their efforts to win market share by providing a leading customer experience (CX). By focusing on providing a seamless, frictionless CX, these companies make it easier for customers to find and engage with them, then buy and repurchase.
However, companies seeking to improve CX can often fall into the trap of relying too heavily on quantitative data that describes the what of the customer experience, but not the why. As a result, they lack the insight to understand their customer’s true needs, motivations and desires, limiting their ability to make their customer experiences more intuitive or impactful in a way that will drive positive business outcomes.
The most effective way to create a winning customer experience is to put the customer at the center of every aspect of your business—everything from your product and services to your back-office processes and technology stack. By leveraging a human-centered design approach, your business can help ensure that your CX leverages a complete, genuine understanding of your customer’s needs, wants and emotions.
How human-centered design enhances CX
Human-centered design makes products, processes and solutions more relevant by combining quantitative data with qualitative research to uncover a deep understanding of the customer perspective.
Starting with an understanding of what the customer wants instead of what the business wants, your company can then create solutions that deliver a deeper, more resonant and more engaging customer experience—which then drives the business outcome your company wants to accomplish in the first place.
While it may sound like common sense—of course the customer should be at the center of CX—many businesses still rely on traditional, data-driven approaches when defining the customer journey. Because data is relatively easy to collect, analyze and understand, many companies are simply more comfortable using hard metrics instead of taking the time to dig into the complex emotions of people. However, it’s these emotions that ultimately drive purchases, and thus business performance—ignore them at your risk.
While every practitioner leverages their own framework, a human-centered design methodology generally follows a similar process. The RSM approach to human-centered design is a four-stage framework that enables our advisors to delve into the emotional needs of people and create more relevant solutions: