Customer at the heart of experience

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Think of the last time you had a bad experience with a service in a restaurant, even though the food was great. Or a deal that you picked online and was not delivered on time to you and the customer service person you called was unapologetic about it.  The chances are that you never went back to them or even posted your bad experience on the social media. Despite having a great product the brand was blacklisted by you.

Also think of the opposite case a place you love to go again and again, or a service that you frequent because they offered a great service and made your experience pleasurable. These brands then have not just made a customer they have earned a evangelist whose reviews and recommendations bring the new customers to their fold.

That is the impact that a great customer experience has on the business and brands.

This impact is much higher in the today’s digital world, the customer is spoilt for options. Their last best experience becomes the new industry benchmark and their bad ones are broadcaster globally. We live in an age where product & services are constantly outsmarting the previous one, technologies interventions are generating new possibilities everyday in how you engage with customers. So the product or services is no longer a sustained differentiator for the brand. Experience becomes the key to retain and attract new customers.

At the same time in the Digital world, brands have an opportunity to know their customer or even potential customer better and mass personalize the offering, which leads to creating “markets of one”. Today with newer cognitive technologies, brand can engage, interact and solve the problems of their followers intelligently and efficiently anytime anywhere. The engagement is no longer transactional but empathic.  The response is not just reactive but predictive. 66% of CMOs say developing deeper, richer customer experiences is their top priority.

We at IBM help brands build that empathic yet intelligent experience by keeping the customer at the heart of ideas. We explore not only what they do, but try to understand what they feel and think, to solve for even the latent desires of the user.

For example, once I asked audience how to “design a vase”, answer I got “you would figure out what the vase needed to hold and how it would blend with the environment.” This was the wrong question to begin the process of designing the vase. Using design thinking, we should consider how to “design a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.” Think about outcomes.

We don’t look at the market as target groups we look at them as individual persons with latent desires. We talk to them, shadow them understand their cultures and behaviors before solving their problems. We use human centric IBM Design Thinking to create unique user experience, a process where we even involve them in co creating the solutions. And this practice has helped us not only create great experience solutions for our customers, but also at times influence their decisions for product and business innovations (at times even creating new business opportunities).

We at IBM are also witnessing growing relationship between design and Cognitive, as Cognitive brings new ways to “discover, decide and engage”, with customers to generate exceptional experiences.

We understand that role of digital brands today is not just create customers, they create brand advocates. And advocates are created only by keeping their desires at the heart of solution offered to them.

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