Customers and users will pay more for a great experience.

Businesses exist only because they have customers, and those businesses that provide better experiences than their competitors will differentiate themselves in the market, so how customers/users experience your product or services holistically is crucial to success and sustainability, a simple but very true fact of business.

“Companies exist because they have customer, and the companies that provide better experiences than their competitors will differentiate themselves…”

If a product(s) or service is not a “must-have” for customers/users to achieve their *goals, they can simply move to another product that may be incrementally better or slightly worse but costs less. Because we know that customers and users do not care about features and only care if they can achieve their goals, it does not make sense to talk about features that are not measurable in the form of goals for your customers and users.

Goals = The improvement people want to feel in their lives and mental state, measured in feelings of accomplishment. (ex. being smarter; being more social; better physical shape; healthier; wealthier; wizer, less anxious; etc.) Sometimes goals are framed as “jobs”.

Must have = A “must-have” is something if removed from someone’s life, they would find it very hard to replace with another thing and would be faced with a lasting negative disposition.

This theoretical understanding by itself does not solve the challenge of staying competitive in the ‘experience economy’ but being able to ask the right questions and become a learning organization at the systemic level can. How your business makes decisions and designs experiences across the customer’s/user’s journey towards a customer and user goal(s) is crucial for a winning strategy.

The Landscape

We are seeing the challenge of simply meeting user/customer expectations becoming increasingly more challenging, and there is an ever-growing need to aim higher and find ways to delight customers/users in ways that differentiate a company’s offerings. This is where an Experience Strategy is crucial, otherwise, you may be relying on guesses or luck, and companies who see themselves as ‘too big to fail’ can find themselves becoming the fabled boiled frog.

“70% of customers would pay more if they knew they would receive a convenient experience.”

- Forbes

FYI: “62% of millennial and 60% of Gen-Z customers will pay more for great customer service vs 46% of Baby Boomers”

- Forbes

What is Experience Strategy?

Experience Strategy is the cohesive set of things your company does to provide a seamless and consistent experience across its ecosystem of products and services. Experience strategy encompasses CX, UX, Marketing, Services, and Physical Products and the orchestrating of a system of consistent experience elements, not simply miscellaneous interactions, which brings forth competitive advantage in the way these elements work in harmony.

Conclusion

As long as your customers/users are human beings, it would be best to design your interactions with them - whether human to machine or human to human - to feel like a conversation, and this can only be achieved with an understanding of their needs. The future of design is not about “new” technology but about how what already exists can become more meaningful. So, with just about every touchpoint in the world becoming digital we must design technology to feel human, and there is no better way than to approach this but through a designer’s lens.

Doing meaningful things is never easy, and sometimes having someone on your side who has been through the process many times before can help. If you need an Experience Strategist, have questions, or want to talk Experience Strategy, feel free to reach out!

Thanks!