The optimism of #Purpose & science of #design in forging #digital customer experiences! Opinions my own!

The science of experience is a rather ephemeral one.

It’s counter intuitive to measure experiences, yet we have yardsticks like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES).

There a whole slew of discussions how these numbers are linked to economics, to market cap and equity. Hence the chase for “pple like” NPS scores.

If we shade our experiences emanating from the various touch points (where rubber meets road), it’s clear where humans are involved, the potential for magical (and conversely, disastrous) experiences lie. A bricked iPhone call to customer service is Apple’s opportunity to do service recovery and leave you feeling “..it’s ok, I’m still with Apple”. How do they do that?

Perhaps bcos the Apple engineer on the other end of the phone sounds as if he or she really sympathises with our situation, but then there’s confidence they know (dropping hints here and there during the call) that they have understood our context. To finish, there’s the familiarity of gold class follow up. We are not sure exactly how they do it, but we feel innately, WHY they do it (borrowing a page from Simon Sinek).

Now back to experiential improvement opportunities. They’re everywhere, they persist throughout the entire customer lifecycle, and can be found in all personas. For example millenials find self service on their devices second nature, but still expects empathy for that crucial moment of truth – when something breaks, or when being sold a more complex product (advisory like). The Gen Xs might be a little of everything, we do our due diligence but would appreciate higher tough (generally), but in return we reward the brand of choice with more pronounced loyalty (and dollars).

The sheer number of data points supporting these hypotheses are non trivial; structured and these days, predominantly unstructured. We would argue most inferential value is derived from rich unstructured (and implicit) media such as videos, emails and social feeds.