How to win customers by designing a better experience

The ability to win customers and create a culture that delights customers first and worries about profit second has been a secret weapon for many innovative brands in recent years.

Getting it right across the board

It is important to understand that companies do not disrupt, people do!

This means organisations need to focus on a more customer centric approach to create better engagement that celebrates the individual. Across industries and sectors organisations are starting to understand that by working with customers they can design a better consumer experience. Leading to organisations staying ahead of the curve to ensures they can predict and react to customers changing behaviours in time to strengthen their brand in the eyes of the customers.

“Treat different people differently. Anything else is a compromise” — Seth Godin

Customers services have evolved from customer call centre support to understand the customer’s journey not just now but in the future. This has meant that organisations have focused on customer experience by putting them at the heart of any change.

Overcoming traditional norms

“How can we meet customer expectations in such a volatile and uncertain world”.

This has been a question many organisations are tackling at the moment as customers continually shift their level of expectations.

Organisations have been talking about the importance of customer-centricity for decades. However, many still have difficulty coming to grips with the notion of a better customer experience as their consumer’s demands grow over time. Sadly, this often leads to the level of service organisation’s offer not being on par!

This shift has affected many business models that in the past would push a solution on to the main stream market through advertising. Now, there is a shift towards focusing on customer’s unmet needs through insights. A great example of this can be the customer journey for renting movies as Blockbusters failed to understand the shift in not just technology but customers’ behaviours. Netflix, on the other hand, had the foresight to transform their business by listening to consumer changes from sending rentals to a customer’s door to a streaming subscription model.

The one thing that can define leading organisations is the willingness and ability to get what really matters to their customers. Whether it is in the form of predicting their need, building an emphatic connection or adopting a new business model.

Building a better customer experience

The organisation that will win in the future is those who are willing to take risks and do things that no one else is willing to do for their audience. By designing solutions around issues customers are trying to solve organisations can design new categories, business models, and revenue streams.

Just think of how Salesforce refined cloud solutions or Amazon for retail. All of these organisations have revolved around the customer’s needs!

In an age were transparency and trust are the most important assets to your organisation.

Organisations top priority should be focused on how to better engage with their customers to make them come back again and again.

“If you look after your customers the profit will follow” — Noel Homlmes, VP Customer Experience at Travelport

It is not just an organisations ability to acquire new customers but rather their understanding of what customers need from their journey to build retention and loyalty for the brand.

Well-designed business models are becoming more integral when creating a more human offering for your customers. By testing out ideas with customers and getting feedback before they are launched into the market.

Theory into Practice — Brands that bring customers into the conversations

The challenge for many organisations is that they still view their customers as a profit centre that generates money for them rather than a person with real individual needs. To delight your customers a human –to-human relationship needs to be cultivated. This is at the core of building trust and a long standing relationship.

Overtime some of the world’s most well-known brands have gone through a process of discovering to recreate value by bringing customers into the discussion:

To read the original post — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-winning-customer-experience-daniel-tuitt-