How to Be Successful in Customer Experience Design

Being successful in customer experience design means deliberately shaping how customers perceive your company at every moment of truth across their journey, before, during and after the purchase. It starts with understanding the buyer persona, maps the customer journey, prioritizes the moments that matter most and closes the gaps between what customers expect and what your processes deliver.

It is no secret that a company's most important resource is its customers, since the success of the business depends on them. That is why the concept of customer experience keeps gaining ground, to the point that companies now have departments and roles dedicated to studying and improving it, from consultants, analysts and researchers to managers, supervisors and designers. For the C-level, the stakes are concrete. Experience design decides whether marketing investment converts, whether customers renew and whether service costs grow faster than revenue.

As time goes by, consumers have access to more touchpoints with companies through different channels and media, so the purchasing process keeps growing in diversity and complexity. Social relationships have also become an important pillar. Today it is easy, and almost essential, to look for reviews, likes and comments from previous buyers before purchasing a product or service.

It is therefore vital to involve areas such as information technology, human resources, marketing, sales, customer service, logistics and quality in projects dedicated to building, improving and managing the customer experience. But how do you design a customer experience? This article answers that question through two key tools, the customer journey and the moments of truth.

Think of the chief executive of a regional hotel group who reads the monthly satisfaction report and finds nothing alarming. Scores are stable, and the front desk, housekeeping and restaurant each meet their own standards. Yet the group's repeat booking rate has stalled. When the executive spends a weekend as an anonymous guest, the cause becomes visible in a few hours. The reservation confirmation promised a late checkout that the front desk had no record of, the room was ready but the key card failed, and the breakfast staff apologized for a delay that nobody had warned them about. Every department did its job. The guest experienced a chain of small failures that no single report captured.

Experience design exists to close that gap. It begins from the premise that customers do not perceive departments, they perceive a sequence of moments, and that a company which designs those moments deliberately will outperform one that manages them in isolation.

What is customer experience?

To understand what customer experience is, let's review a few concepts.

• Buyer Persona. A semi-fictional character created from hypotheses and validated with data. It represents one of the company's ideal customers. The recommendation is to identify at least three to begin to understand who your customers are and why they need the product or service you offer.
• Customer Journey. The buying process a buyer persona goes through to acquire a product or service, which is not necessarily the one your brand offers. It covers all the activities within three phases, before, during and after the purchase.
• Moments of truth. In a customer journey, the moments of truth are when your buyer persona interacts with some element of your brand, through direct or indirect contact. They can occur when your advertising reaches them, when they search and find your website or when they talk to a salesperson.

An experience results from the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, sensory and social responses a person has when interacting with a business. In other words, customer experience is the perception that remains in your buyer persona after going through their customer journey, and it is directly linked to the way they live each moment of truth.

This is also why experience design deserves a place in the strategy agenda, as explained in Importance of customer experience design.

What makes up the customer experience?

This topic is still under study. The elements we consider part of the customer experience today are the result of research that began in the 1960s, when the challenge of understanding the consumer decision-making process first arose. A decade later, researchers started evaluating customer perception, satisfaction and loyalty to companies. From the 1980s onward, service quality came into play and became the focus of attention with the study of customer journey maps. It was not until the 1990s that the scope of what we know as customer experience broadened, making it possible to study the effect of one element on another. Lemon and Verhoef's review in the Journal of Marketing traces these historical roots of customer experience within marketing and the growing number of touchpoints across channels and media.

Since the arrival of the new millennium, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has made it easier to study these effects. In the last decade, multidisciplinary challenges and placing the customer at the center of the business have given experience design a prominent place in the processes of many companies. Customer experience is a multidimensional construct that encompasses the cognitive, emotional, sensory, behavioral and social responses a consumer has to a product or service throughout the buying process. Its elements are all those that can trigger positive or negative responses in these dimensions:

• Perception
• Satisfaction
• Loyalty
• Service quality
• Commitment or connection of the customer to the company
• Trust
• Security
• Affection

For a broader introduction, read What is Customer Experience and what is it for?

How does the customer journey support experience design?

The customer journey is fundamental for design. Drawing it is the first step to identifying the moments of truth and analyzing how to improve them to strengthen the elements that make up the customer experience. For practical purposes, these are the phases that compose it and some of the moments they contain:

• Pre-purchase. The consumer interacts with different aspects of the product or service before buying. This may include their daily tasks or processes, the emergence of a need, the search and the consideration of options.
• Purchase. All consumer interactions with everything surrounding the product or service during the purchase, including, but not limited to, the decision, the order and the payment.
• Post-purchase. A series of interactions with the brand and its environment, including use or consumption of the product, the company's after-sales involvement and service requirements such as training, repairs, adjustments or calibrations. For this reason, the product or service itself becomes a critical moment of truth and enters what is called user experience (UX). In customer journeys designed for B2B buyer personas, it is common to enter a loop in which the customer repurchases the same product. At that trigger, the customer either becomes loyal to the brand or starts a new buying process with another supplier.

Depending on the nature of the purchase, a consumer may need another product from the same brand, as happens with supermarkets, hardware stores, furniture stores, pharmacies and restaurants. The customer journey then becomes a cycle, and the post-purchase of one product becomes the pre-purchase of the next. That cycle is where lifetime value is won or lost.

To know whether your design is working, see How to measure customer experience?

What types of moments of truth should you design for?

A vital element of these maps is identifying the moments of truth, because they show where to concentrate design effort. There are different types, and each one calls for a different degree of control:

• Moments of truth managed by the company. Touchpoints designed and managed by the company, such as advertising mailings, websites, loyalty programs or marketing elements related to the product or service, including attribute design, packaging, service, price and the sales process.
• Moments of truth managed by strategic partners. Touchpoints designed, managed or controlled by the company together with a partner, such as marketing agencies, distribution channels and external communication channels like intermediaries. It is essential to watch what partners do, since a change in their processes or technology may require updates on your side, such as the dimensions of advertising designs or a shift in distribution capacity.
• Moments of truth driven by the consumer. Actions the consumer voluntarily takes that bring them closer to the brand, such as discovering their own needs at the pre-purchase stage or choosing a payment method during the purchase. Several critical touchpoints occur after the purchase, such as product use and consumption or the application of warranties. Influencers also play a part, with unboxings, user guides or video reviews that the brand does not control but can amplify, for example through affiliate marketing.
• Moments of truth from social and external sources. During the buying process, consumers are surrounded by other consumers, information sources, friends, family and co-workers. They may ask for word-of-mouth recommendations, check online reviews, look for positive and negative comments or look at the number of likes. This search can lead them to complete, postpone or abandon the purchase.

For executives, the practical lesson is that the company directly controls only part of the experience. The rest has to be influenced through partners, product design and reputation, which is why experience design cannot sit in a single department.

How do moments of truth differ by industry?

Every sector has a handful of moments that carry disproportionate weight. The scenarios below are illustrative and show how executives can identify theirs.

In retail banking, the moment of truth is rarely the day of the transaction. It is the first time a customer disputes a charge or needs help with a lost card, because the way the bank responds tells the customer whether the relationship is worth keeping. In insurance, it is the claim. A customer who has paid premiums for years without contact judges the entire relationship by the days that follow an accident, which is why leading insurers redesign the claims journey with the same care they give to the sales process. In telecommunications, the first bill and the first technical failure serve the same function.

In industrial and business-to-business settings, the moments are often less emotional and more operational. A buyer remembers whether the delivery arrived on the promised date, whether the invoice matched the quote and whether anyone warned them when something changed. In consumer goods, the decisive moment may occur on the shelf or on a retailer's website, where the brand has little control and must influence the outcome through packaging, information and distribution agreements. Recognizing which moments the company controls, shares or only influences, as the table above suggests, is what allows leaders to assign realistic responsibilities and to invest where the return is greatest.

How to improve the customer experience step by step

There is no single way to design the customer experience, but these steps can guide the design process:

1. Take the buyer persona's point of view. Draw and understand their customer journey from their perspective, not the company's.
2. Identify the moments of truth. Find the points of direct or indirect contact where the customer interacts with the company throughout the journey, and characterize them to analyze how much you can control.
3. Look at the company's point of view. Check whether you have the technology, communication, distribution, channels, processes and resources needed to meet the customer journeys of your buyer personas.
4. Prioritize the critical elements. Define the critical elements of each point of view and focus on them first, since changing all processes at once can hurt the project's cost-benefit.
5. Close the gaps. Address the gaps found in step three, gradually improving processes to meet customer needs, eliminate frustrations and exceed the expectations mapped in step one.
6. Start over. Consumers, technology and competition evolve, so the customer experience is dynamic and must be constantly reviewed and adapted.

Keep in mind the elements that compose the experience, so you can see how your processes generate positive responses from customers. Experiences happen in social, physical and digital environments, and you should prioritize those that consumers prefer. It also remains essential to involve customers in the design process through surveys, interviews, focus groups, mystery shoppers and other activities that validate the hypotheses you raise at each stage.

Why do customer experience design projects fail?

Most failures are not about creativity. They come from governance and execution:

• Designing from inside out. Journeys built in a workshop without customer evidence describe how the company wishes customers behaved.
• Treating CX as a marketing project. When operations, IT, finance and human resources are not involved, the redesigned experience cannot be delivered.
• Trying to fix everything at once. Without prioritizing the moments of truth with the most impact on revenue or cost, budgets run out before results appear.
• No owner after launch. Experiences degrade when nobody is accountable for each stage and its indicators.
• Ignoring employees. Frontline teams deliver most moments of truth. If their tools, incentives and processes do not change, the experience will not either.

How should leadership sustain experience design after the first project?

The greatest risk in experience design is not a poor first project. It is a good first project followed by drift. Journeys that were redesigned with care begin to degrade as products change, staff turn over and new channels are added, and within a year the company is again delivering an experience nobody chose. The remedy is governance. Each critical journey needs a named owner, a short list of indicators reviewed with the same regularity as financial results, and a rhythm for revisiting the design with customers.

It also helps to be honest about trade-offs. Improving a moment of truth often involves cost, whether in training, staffing or technology, and some improvements will not be worth it for every segment. The executives who handle this best segment their customers by value and by need, and design differentiated levels of service on purpose, so that the investment goes where it changes behavior. A company that tries to delight every customer equally usually ends up delighting none of them and overspending on the wrong ones.

What this means for the C-level

• Attract. Manage reputation and review sources as moments of truth, because they shape the decision before your sellers are involved.
• Convert. Design the purchase stage to remove friction in quoting, ordering and payment, where customers who already decided can still be lost.
• Retain. Treat product use, onboarding and after-sales service as the moments that decide repurchase, especially in B2B loops.
• Serve. Align partners and distributors with shared service levels, since they manage moments of truth in your name.
• Efficiency. Prioritize improvements by impact, so the experience budget goes to the moments that move revenue or reduce cost to serve.

A final point concerns the people who deliver the experience. Frontline employees live the moments of truth every day, and they usually know which ones fail long before a survey reveals it. Leaders who involve them in the design, give them authority to resolve problems on the spot and recognize the outcomes that matter to customers find that the quality of the experience rises faster than any process change alone could achieve.

To get started, use the Customer Journey toolkit to map stages and moments of truth, and complement it with the Empathy Map template to capture what your buyer persona thinks and feels at each step.

How ICX helps

ICX Consulting designs customer experiences that leadership teams can execute and measure. Through customer experience design and customer journey mapping, we identify the moments of truth that matter most and redesign them with your teams. ICX Compass connects those moments to processes, owners and metrics, and our voice of customer programs keep the design validated over time.

Want to know which moments of truth are costing you customers? Request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between customer experience and user experience?

User experience focuses on how people interact with a specific product, app or website, including usability and accessibility. Customer experience covers the whole relationship with the company, from the first ad to billing, service and renewal. UX is one of the moments of truth inside CX, often the most frequent one in digital businesses.

Who should lead customer experience design in a company?

A senior sponsor, often a chief experience, commercial or operations officer, should own the program because it crosses departments. Day-to-day work is usually led by a CX team that facilitates design with marketing, sales, service, operations and IT. Without executive sponsorship, cross-functional changes tend to stall at the first budget or priority conflict.

How long does it take to see results from experience design?

Quick wins, such as removing a confusing step in the purchase or fixing a recurring service failure, can show results within weeks. Structural changes that involve technology, partners or new service models usually take several months. Measuring a baseline before the redesign is what allows leadership to prove the impact.

Customer experience design succeeds when it becomes a management discipline rather than a one-time project. Start with the moments of truth your customers care about most, fix them with evidence and keep listening as expectations change. If you want an expert view of where your experience is helping or hurting growth, talk to an ICX consultant and we will help you set priorities.