Author: Admin

Introduction to Customer Experience

A PWC survey found that 73% of customers consider experience as one of the most important factors in their purchasing decisions.

Customer expectations are increasing and customer experience is rapidly driving the decision-making process. Put simply, an exceptional customer experience improves brand value, trust, and positively impacts the bottom line. 

As a startup, it’s easy to forget about the customer experience early on when the focus is on raising capital and building the product and hitting the market. However, several studies suggest that customer experience, when integrated early on, can lead to phenomenal success when a product launches.

So we suggest you start with a great customer experience right from the get-go. How can startups strategize for an enhanced customer experience?

1. Sketch a detailed customer journey map 

The customers of today interact with a brand through numerous touchpoints. Therefore, it’s important to sketch a map of all avenues of interaction and define what a customer is trying to achieve at each stage.

Then, all you need to do is optimize the service you deliver at each touchpoint. At this stage, it’s important to empathize with the customer. 

• How are they feeling? 
• What are they doing while interacting with your brand? 
• What information do they have at hand right now?
• How much time are they willing to spend on this interaction?
• What are they expecting from you?

All this information will come together to yield a cohesive customer experience that reduces friction and increases engagement across the board. For instance, Zoomcar built a detailed customer journey map with key points in the rental journey to proactively support their customers.

2. Share customer data across departments 

Let’s consider Jitterbit, the software company that proactively avoids internal silos. They share customer data across departments to create a consistent image of each buyer, leading to a streamlined experience across all avenues.

Broken customer data can lead to an inconsistent experience, hindering engagement and devaluing brand worth. Enable your employees to offer personalized service and recommendations by sharing data across departments.

You can even choose to automate workflows to work smarter, not harder. Email automation, templated responses and other workflow automation tools help streamline operations and speed up the service delivery process, improving the overall customer experience.

3. Create an emotional connection and an empathetic CX

The best and most memorable customer experiences are born out of genuinely caring about your customers. Human decisions are based on emotions a lot more than we’d like to believe. A research piece by the Journal of Consumer Research found over 50% of an experience is about emotions.

Your customers may forget what you said or did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

If you’re a startup in the Insurance industry, empathizing with your customer would mean fewer fields on forms and a gentle tone of voice in the copy where your customers are applying for a claim.

For instance, when someone calls CD Baby about selling their music through the site, a customer service rep would take time to view their website and listen to their music, proving that they deeply care about their customers.

Engage with your customers emotionally, and you’ll likely never lose them.

4. Build the Contact Center of Tomorrow

The contact center plays a critical role in setting up an exceptional customer experience. More often than not, it’s the first and the only point of contact between the customer and your brand. Therefore, rather than viewing it as another cost, startups should see it as an instrument to further enhance their CX. Use modern technologies to build the contact center of tomorrow.

• Move to the cloud – Cloud-based contact centers can easily scale to serve more customers during peak hours. Agents can even offload repetitive queries to bots to reduce call volumes and engage with customers 1:1.

• Leverage data analytics – Collect, store and process valuable customer information for detailed analytics and sentiment analysis. That allows you to uncover feedback and make changes to the CX accordingly.

• Get creative with AI and ML – With access to customer information across your company, you can implement AI and ML tools to a wide variety of use cases to further automate and enhance the CX.

As a side note, all of this not only improves your customer experience but also allows employees to work at their best in tandem with technology.

5. Measure the right metrics

It’s impossible to succeed at something you don’t measure. So, choose the right metrics to track to gauge how superior your CX is. Two commonly used metrics are the Customer Satisfaction Score (or CSAT) and the Net Promoter Score (or NPS). 

While CSAT is a great way to measure one interaction with a customer, for instance, a singular shopping experience, the NPS metric allows you visibility into the customer’s entire journey with you.

Using NPS as an indicator, you can develop products, adjust pricing and apply processes and technologies to prevent churn and increase customer loyalty.

Conclusion

Customer expectations are on the rise, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Customer-obsessed companies such as Amazon have shown that it’s possible to deliver a truly outstanding customer experience while also taking care of everything else.

As a startup, integrate CX strategies early into your processes so that you can deliver great service right from the get-go.

And if your startup is struggling with your CX, speak to one of our user experience design specialists today.

According to 14 international accelerators, inadequate testing is one of the most common reasons for startup failure. Inadequate testing also means not knowing how to access the market and not understanding the barriers to entry.

What are we trying to test here?

In effect, the needs of the target market, the design that will solve the need for them in the best possible manner, and how to serve the solution to them so that they pay attention and buy.

A lot of successful startups offer a great user experience. More so, design elements and user experience often get sidelined in favor of sales and business development activities.

Subpar user research yields a substandard user experience, which sets up a startup for failure. So what does a user of a product need to stay loyal to it?

What Do Users Need in the UX? 

Today’s user compares every experience to every other. That means a small startup and the experience it offers is contrasted against that offered by Facebooks and Amazons of the world.

Therefore, to stand out and make a difference to your customer, you need to balance these-

1. Personalization- Is the experience you offer personalized enough for the customer? Hyper-personalized experiences can and will make a difference to how customers perceive your brand and interact with it.
2. Comprehensiveness- How comprehensively have you laid out the experience for your buyer across channels and touchpoints? A comprehensive UX does not break or lessen depending on the environment of interaction between your brand and the customer.
3. Simplicity- Are you confusing or overwhelming users with too much? A simplistic design and copy can greatly enhance your user experience by trimming out everything that doesn’t belong.

Good UX is an intricate balance of these three elements. Let’s look at a few tips on getting it right the first time.

How to Get it Right The First Time

Conduct UX Research Early and All Throughout Development

Early user research uncovers ideas and facts. Does the market even need what you want to offer it? Do they already have something they use and love? Why would they switch? At what price would they be willing to purchase your product?

What are the relevant features that need to be a part of the product? What are the features that may as well be left out of it?

It’s important to test your initial assumptions for the product and the users early on to save costly revisions down the line. On top of this foundational research, once you’ve started developing the product, you can continuously test each update, ensuring a stellar user experience throughout the development process.

UX is not the Cherry on Top

The user experience design process is not an afterthought but a central objective. UX should feed into every element of your business because users pay attention to it.

Products with design at their core are generally easier to use and integrate design across the buyer journey with the product. Design-focused products also enable startups to act on user insights immediately as feedback rolls in.

UX is not the cherry on top and something that can be fixed at the end of product development, rather something that continuously needs working on throughout the product life cycle.

Bust Jargon and Layer Information

No matter how complex your product is, customers like to be able to use it easily. Can they readily find the information they need? No matter which industry or problem you address through your product, you must make information accessible.

Good UX understands the information users need, how much of it they need and how to make it easily accessible.

In particularly complex industries such as Fintech, much effort goes into making information easy to comprehend. That’s when layering information helps. Starting with the basics and then swooping into more complex parts can help the UX.

Understand Drop-offs Early On

Identify and address where users drop off from your site, service or mobile app. This information can reveal parts of the product that are challenging, needless or overwhelming for the users.

For instance, if users drop off at a particular FAQs section, notice if you’ve stuffed it with long-form content and trim it for easy consumption.

It’s also important to foresee where and in what condition your users may be while using your product. That can help add empathy to the user experience, making it significantly more effective.

Finally, recognize the data and time users realistically have while interacting with your product and shape the UX to match.

Visuals Are Also for the User

Your platform’s overall look and feel should complement the user experience and not take away from it in favor of branding. Too much color and personality can be off-putting for your users.

So look for places where you can add personality a tad bit more and tone it down in places where you are dealing with, for instance, complicated personal information. 

All the insight you gain from UX research- customer desires, pains, mindsets- should now feed your design elements. Don’t lose important information in the design. 

Maintain the Experience Post-Launch

Once your product is live and in the hands of customers, it’s important to keep collecting feedback to maintain a product that’s as close to what your customers need as possible. With active maintenance, you can sustain a product that is continuously relevant to the users.

Conclusion 

Startups often fail to get UX right the first time because they value everything else over it. However, UX is an integral part of the development process and often dictates the success of a product.

Use the above mentioned tips to create an exceptional UX for your customers.

And if you’re looking for UX design services, trust KiwiTech to design an exceptional user experience for you, incorporating modern design principles and yielding a product that sticks.

A product prototype is that critical piece between the concept and the final product that dictates how successful a product will be when it hits the market. A prototype sells your product to retailers or investors without you committing to the final product yet. 

While a prototype never hits the market like an MVP, it lands in the hands of a few users, helping companies steal a peek at how their customers will interact with the product.

Further, the prototype helps you test and validate your idea with real users and add features or eliminate from it based on their feedback.

Your prototype is a crucial part of the development process. And yet, many startups fail to build one that resembles their vision for the final product. Besides falling short of regulatory requirements, there are a few mistakes startups can steer clear of when prototyping.

Let’s look at a few common prototyping mistakes startups make that set them up for setbacks and how they can avoid them.

The Most Common Prototyping Pitfalls to Avoid

Striving for Perfection

Over-engineering, overthinking and chasing the perfect prototype for your product will kill a prototype’s primary function- to get validated quickly and often. Remember, prototypes are built for learning and not for scaling. 

By spending time perfecting a prototype, startups often miss the point. Prototypes should consume only so much time, energy and cost as is necessary to drive feedback from users.

The more you invest in a prototype, the more biased you get toward how it already is and the less likely you are to take feedback constructively and revise the idea to the tune of your customers’ experiences.

Find out the cheapest and fastest way to build your product prototype and all the perfecting can come later when you start building the final product.

Prototyping Without a Goal

It’s a mistake to start prototyping without first pinning down what you want to achieve with it. Do you want to check the flow of the website or app? Who are the stakeholders involved? What’s the timeline of prototype development?

All of these answers will act as the north star to the entire activity, steering you back into the lane if you go astray.

Additionally, include what success would look like for this prototyping activity. For instance, to one founder, lots of customer feedback on the UX can mean success, while testing the flow might sound like success to another.

Prototyping Too Early

Refrain your designers from rushing into the prototyping phase without a clear idea of the design solution they will be implementing. The design needs to be worked on before firing up a prototyping tool. 

The problem here is that a prototyping window forces designers to focus on the alignment and layout and the top-level design thinking is lost. While skipping the design process, you can get biased toward the design solution you come with the first time. And it may not be the best one.

A simple way to avoid this mistake is to brainstorm several design solutions with design thinking, involve stakeholders for feedback and come up with mockups and sketches for the main pages before prototyping them.

Not Prototyping Interactivity

A good prototype allows users to do more than transition between pages. It offers a realistic user experience to engage with. When creating a prototype for user feedback, ensure that the interface responds to user inputs just as the final product.

If you want user feedback on expandable menus or navigation flows, then you need an interactive prototype. Additionally, a fully clickable prototype makes the design handoff and development process easier.

And finally, an interactive prototype gives your users the full range of functions to interact with, making their feedback all the more valuable.

Including the User Too Late in the Process

Startups often forget to integrate feedback early and frequently in the prototyping process. One of the easy ways to take a prototype to the next level is to solicit reviews from different people throughout the development cycle. 

Asking for feedback from other designers, product users and stakeholders late means going in with a huge risk of losing time and money already invested in the prototype. 

Avoid the mistake of working in a silo until it’s too late and expensive to incorporate feedback. 

Not Weighing in Opinions That Differ From the Majority

As you start gathering feedback from various entities frequently, you find opinions that rather stand out. These rare opinions could reveal something you might not have noticed about the prototype so far. That could include a hidden customer need or specific feedback about navigation or flow in your app.

On the other hand, rare feedback could simply mean a bad fit. For instance, you are interested in hearing from software developers and this person is an HR.

Assess the feedback that stands out. Is it trying to show you something useful, or is it an opinion from outside your ideal user market?

Using the Wrong Technology

Another mistake startups make is choosing the wrong prototyping tool. One way to choose the right one is to start with your goal in mind. Do you need a low fidelity or high fidelity prototype?

When designers choose a tool they are comfortable with or one that their company provides, they create low-fidelity prototypes with the image-based approach as opposed to the code-based method.

Choose a tool that fits your purpose, whether you need a whiteboard and marker or an interactive, life-like prototype with advanced interactions.

While there’s no one way to get it right, avoiding these prototyping mistakes will ensure that you have a hiccup-free development experience with the right user feedback built into the final product.

Seeking to build a proof of concept / clickable prototype? Contact us for our software prototyping services!

Startups increasingly face rising customer expectations for immediate, personalized and convenient experiences. As digital disruption gets mature and more and more companies venture out to enhance the experiences they offer both online and offline, it can get hard to think of yet newer ways to achieve an edge in the marketplace.

Design-led product development and ideation to the rescue. Here are a few design-based principles and steps that startups can take to ensure that the experiences they offer are truly outstanding.

1. Identify and research end users

Companies often make presumptions about the solution they are aiming for, the technology that will go into it and what the innovation will mean for the business. However, to do innovation right, it must start with the end user in mind. Starting from a people perspective can make an experience truly customer-focused right from the start.

Startups can identify and factor in their customers’ perspectives by asking fundamental questions such as –

• What does the customer desire and aspire to?
• What kinds of consumer behaviors can be linked to this solution?
• What are our target customers’ unmet needs that we can fulfill through innovation and digitization?

Factoring in the customer right at the outset can make the final solution that much customer-oriented.

2. Draw inspiration from other industries

Creativity and inspiration can become original when existing ideas are put in a completely new context. For that reason, startup founders can look beyond their industry boundaries to find new ideas that can then fit into a new context.

An instance could be a hotel company drawing inspiration from executive assistants who proactively fulfill the needs of their executives by anticipating them. When a hotel company applies that to their services, you get an exceptional customer experience where even first-time visitors feel seen and heard when their needs are met before they have to voice them.

3. Define the problem you’re solving

Use the research from step no. 1 to ensure that you’re setting out to solve a problem that your ideal customers actually care about. Reframe what you are building from the customers’ perspective to get insight into how your end users feel and act.

You may also assign weightage in terms of cost to each problem surrounding and closely related to the one you’re aiming to solve. That will help you further determine which of the problems is the costliest one that your end users are willing to pay you to solve.

That way, the customer experience you offer will be centered on a really expensive problem and may or may not happen to solve other less costly issues.

4. Co-create with end users

Develop quick and low-budget prototypes for your ideas in the form of storyboards and sketches. Don’t get tricked by perfectionism. What you want to achieve is fast failures and many iterations so that you arrive at the right solution quicker, with the help of your end users.

Get target customers involved in the process early and often. Designing standout experiences can become rather easy when you have the end users directly telling what they do and don’t want in a solution.

Startups are uniquely positioned to successfully execute this step as they are not bogged down by an existing operational system or technology and are free to experiment and steer the wheel as per frequent feedback from customers.

5. Prototype experiences and business models

Besides prototyping the solution or service, also spend time prototyping the customer experience and the related business model. An experience can be prototyped using cardboard models or role-playing. 

Alternative business model prototyping can lead to insight into value addition, cost-cutting, efficiency improvements and new revenue development. Prototyping business models and experiences can be done in an agile fashion with frequent feedback from the end users.

6. Design an integrated customer experience

Combine convenience, personalization and quick servicing to design an integrated and exceptional experience for your users. Design-led product development allows you to integrate the experience across digital and physical touchpoints.

Moreover, an integrated customer experience across channels can remind your customers of your brand values, message and core principles no matter how they choose to interact with your brand.

7. Blur boundaries between products, services and environments 

As startups set out to take on giants in delivering exceptional experiences, there’s a need to realize that the boundaries between products, services and environments continue to blur in order to form an amalgamation to create an experience that’s truly holistic.

Consider Amazon- Amazon Echo provides quick access to the company’s services for a smooth and connected experience across all its offerings. And Amazon also opened up physical stores to create yet another touchpoint for its customers.

Traditional product companies now venture into the ecosystem space by emphasizing the services they offer instead of the product. Service companies integrate physical products and experiences into their offerings. And companies create environments to go along with their products and augment the experience.

As startups think about newer ways to set themselves apart in the market in not just their own industry, these design-led tips to tailor customer experiences can come in handy. Startups need to balance agile, design-focused development with continual refinement of the customer journey.

If you are seeking UX design services, reserve a consultation with one of our design experts.