The power of a great user experience (UX) team and customer experience (CX) team working together cannot be underestimated in our increasingly digital world.
Since the activities in UX are done mainly by product management, engineering, research, and design, and the items under CX are often accomplished by marketing, the chance of working in silos and not coordinating is high. Ultimately, CX and UX need to work together to deliver a great overall experience. It’s not about the user or customer. It’s about both.
Designing great, seamless experiences is a critical competitive differentiator, especially in this world of digital acceleration, where products (like apps) are never finished and constantly evolving. And it’s challenging, too. That’s because businesses gather and store experience insights in silos that fragment the total picture of the digital experience. But your customers don’t care why their experience of making a purchase, contacting customer support, or returning an item is disjointed – they’ll just go to a competitor who offers a smoother experience (whether they’re users or customers).
It’s fairly challenging to connect the dots among the different teams in an organization and the insights they gather from customers and users and to do this continuously across all states of the product development lifecycle and customer journey. Whether it’s a research team, product team, marketing team, or sales team, all these people collect valuable insight. However, the problem is that often, the information is stored in different places and can be inaccessible to teams that should benefit from it. This leads to inefficiencies, waste, and, ultimately, a fragmented experience for the end user.
Making data manageable across the entire business
Before the move to customer relationship software (CRM) and then cloud-based technologies, businesses had no centralized way to seamlessly automate and manage customer relationships across departments and business units. Data such as customer contact details and purchase records lived separate lives in accounts departments, filing cabinets, and salespeople’s heads, creating unnecessary inefficiencies and a poor customer experience.
Today’s businesses are facing the same challenge with managing their digital experience. Critical customer journeys (such as signing up for a free trial, returning an item, or making a purchase on a mobile app) increasingly touch multiple business areas within a single digital session – from marketing to product to support and beyond. And the multitude of data gathered from this is as overwhelming as it is valuable.
The challenge is bringing all the data together, winnowing it, organizing it, classifying it, sharing it, and making it searchable – so it can be accessed and used by anybody who needs it at the right time. To add to the challenge, this data is flowing into separate silos across the business, where it remains inaccessible to the various players that must collaborate to improve these customer journeys. For example, too often, the research results found in one area of the company are never shared with other areas of the company. I’ve been told by customers that they’ve discovered that two parts of their company were running the same kind of research on the same application.
By eliminating those silos and increasing collaboration and data sharing, teams can gain better visibility on the overall quality of the digital experience at different stages of the product life cycle. Leadership, meanwhile, can get a top-down view of how their business’ digital experience compares to that of competitors. This means introducing processes around how these insights are gathered, structured, and used in a holistic way to inform efficient, measurable impact. To succeed in the digital experience economy, the digital experience company must understand and improve its digital experience as a whole. The way to do this is through experience insights management (XIM).
The value of Experience Insights management
The ability of a business to improve its digital experience is based on both the quality of the insights it has to make these improvements and how effectively it can mobilize and act on these insights across the customer journey in a coordinated fashion and at scale. Experience insights management (XIM) brings these requirements together as the combination of processes, strategies, and technologies that enable businesses to manage the gathering, analysis, and sharing of user and
customer experience insights across all digital touchpoints – a central source of truth for experience insights transformation within businesses.
How do you mobilize and scale these insights programmatically across the business to break down data silos and provide a singular view of the digital experience? The first step is separating the signal from the noise with user and customer data, making this structured, shareable, and actionable. Digital teams face the challenge of quickly locating and applying the right data to provide insight into what they’re doing. The data can reside in a computer or on a server, but to make sense of it all, they have to be able to get to the particular kinds of data they need quickly and easily. This requires the organization and classification of experience data and insights to connect them to the needs of digital teams – without having to run new research or trawl through databases in search of answers.
The next step is to use this integrated and centralized source of truth to realize
efficiencies between experience strategies to deliver the seamless digital
experience that end users expect. As companies mature, they realize there is no significant difference between UX and CX from the end user’s point of view. Users are only focused on the quality of their X (experience), regardless of which department or strategy was employed to produce it. The way things are headed, there won’t be the separation of these roles we have today; users will be users, whether they’re prospects, customers, or employees.
This is where leadership must take the initiative to drive digital experience transformation, putting the end user and/or customer at the center of their operations, partnering with third-party experts and internal stakeholders across design, product, marketing, support, engineering, and ops to bring digital experience under one roof and place it in the center of their strategy.
