The term digital customer experience design, while gaining industry traction, is by no means universal or, on its own, entirely clear.
An excellent overview of the kind of thing we mean when we talk about digital customer experience design can be found in the opening chapter of This Is Service Design Doing:
Traditionally, companies have focused heavily on… technical and operational excellence and they want to “get it right.” To them, their job is to optimize the nuts and bolts of their activity – like the hamburger restaurant that invests heavily in new recipe development. Or they work hard at sales, telling the world that they have just what the customer needs to solve his problem – like the bank that strives to present a consistent image of trustworthiness.
But is this core offering what the customer really cares about? In one study, researchers asked tens of thousands of patients about the factors that led to their hospital stay feeling satisfying or not. Now, most of us would expect the “medical outcome” – the successful healing of the ailment – to be one of the most important things to patients. After all, “healing” is the key value proposition of hospitals; it’s why people go there. But in the study, none of the top 15 satisfaction factors related to whether or not the patient’s health improved while at the hospital. Instead, the top factors usually related to interactions with personnel, including things like information flow, complaint handling, empathic and polite nursing staff, patient inclusion in decision making, a pleasant hospital environment, and the feeling of being cared for by a well-motivated team.
Of course, if someone did not experience a good medical outcome, the situation might be different. When we become more sick, the medical part of the experience becomes eminently important. But until then, it seems that the core competency of the hospital – healing – is taken for granted by the patients. It’s not hard to imagine this in other situations. If you are a tourist, you don’t talk about your hotel room having a door, window, or bed until one is missing. If you are a CFO, you don’t rate your corporate accountants on their arithmetic skills until they lose you money. And at that point, the deficit becomes an issue. But otherwise, customers rate organizations on other factors.
So at the hamburger restaurant, eaters actually care more about a warm greeting than an exciting new burger recipe. At the bank, clients worry more about the awful login process on the website than about trusting the institution. As customers, it seems that we are less influenced by the core offering than by the layers of experience around it. So how might organizations understand better what their customers value, and use their knowledge of customers to systematically make that experience better?
The quote above pretty well covers the broad notion of what we mean by the experience design (as opposed to product design, etc.) part of digital customer experience design. And, in our class, we’ll be explicitly talking about digital experiences, which gets us three-quarters of the way there. But what about the customer in digital customer experience design?
Well, you could say digital user experience design, and that wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but it’s problematic. User experience design has come to mean designing flows within a given product, and while that work is absolutely a part of what we’re talking about, we’re trying to look one level up at the entire ecosystem surrounding a given product or product.
So, user is out. What about human? There’s certainly a field of human-centered design, and we’ll discuss many principles from that field. However, when you put the whole thing together, digital human experience design just sounds redundant. Of course we’re talking about human experiences! So why not just say digital experience design? In one sense, that’s not a bad option. But in my opinion, it comes up short in one key area.
The customer bit in digital customer experience design foregrounds the experience of a human trying to interact with a product/service/system/whatever designed by another entity. So, while customer is imperfect (voters aren’t really customers of a democracy, and it’s in many senses terribly sad that patients are customers of healthcare organizations, etc., and those cases are absolutely the kind of thing we’re talking about here), in my opinion, customer is the best candidate for the job we currently have in the English language.
So there you have it: digital customer experience design. Because I respect myself and all of you, we’ll abbreviate this term CX, not the horrifically unwieldy DXCD or dCXd or whatever. Of course, you might reasonably disagree with me about what we should call this type of work. I’d love to have that discussion!
At the end of the day, though, as the authors of This Is Service Design Doing note,
What all these terminology discussions have in common is that customers just don’t care. They pay their money (or spend their time, or give their attention, or exchange something else they value, like data or votes or permission), and they want organizations to co-create value with them – by helping them, by taking away their problems, or by realizing their goals. And while that is happening, they expect organizations to provide an experience that reaches or exceeds their expectations, fits in with their lives, and meets their emotional needs.