I'm a coffee guy. It may not come as much of a surprise since I'm an early morning riser and I've worked in the technology business my whole career. My kids love coffee. Which can be quite interesting since energy is not something they are challenged with at the ripe old age of 8 and 10. But they see me drinking it and, of course, they love whatever it is that I love. As a group, we prefer the coffee from one of the major chains that has a location near my house. We also will eat from the food selection there as well. We each have our favorites and have special way we like our coffee prepared.
I'm not big with waiting on lines and my coffee shop is always busy. I get impatient with the person ahead of me who invariably must make each doughnut selection a process like they were buying an expensive automobile. My kids will be on line with me and they have the patience of squirrels. This ends up turning the experience at the coffee shop into a harrowing one. As a result I do not like to make many trips into the coffee shop unless I am having an extraordinarily patient day.
Some time ago, I discovered my coffee shop has an app. It's great. I can order my coffee the way my kids and I like it. We can order the food we like to the exact specification of how we want it. The app is plugged into GPS so it knows which coffee shop location is the closest to me and it's also hooked into my Apple Pay so I can handle the transaction with ease. From the comfort of my home, I can place the order, pay for it and if I am eligible for any offers or coupons I can easily apply them to my order right in the app. Once I am done with my selection it sends the order to the shop for preparation.
Here's the best part…I'll pack up the kids in the car and head over to the coffee shop. As we walk in to the coffee shop, we'll take a gander over at the line. We're bypassing it altogether. We'll pick up our order, and start enjoying coffee and food right away. You can image that I'm feeling pretty smug as I do this. I get a perverse pleasure with watching the poor saps waiting on line behind the office gopher who has an order list for the entire corporate staff of a small country while I'm enjoying my coffee and food.
Ever since I started using the app, my experience with this coffee shop has transformed from something I dread into something I relish. My spending with the coffee shop has subsequently gone up. I am delighted with their service now. And I know the coffee shop is happy with me as a customer. They've increased their inflow of incentives to bring me back in and spend more.
It is the experience that made the revolutionary change for me. And that revolutionary change is happening all around us. So much of the everyday services that we need and use are transforming into a new and lightspeed fast manner of service delivery. Experience is a huge driver in customer satisfaction. Multiple studies on usability and user experience have shown approximately 30% to 50% of a user's likelihood to recommend (as measured by Net Promoter Score) is tied to experience. A research study on the ROI of customer experience identified a moderate increase in experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 Million over three years for a company with $1 Billion in sales.
What was it that changed the experience for me? The service design embraced two key factors that drives experience: the interaction and the transaction. Consider my experience: the coffee shop provided me with an app that allowed me to easily place my order from my mobile device. Then they made sure that I could pay easily and processed my order in the amount of time it took to make the short drive from my home to the shop.
What should you do to help design a better experience that has great interaction and transaction fulfillment? A great place to start is to understand the persona of your users and customers. With personas, you are gaining an understanding who are you designing this experience for. The more you know about who your customer is, what they do, how they do it, and most importantly why they do it, the better you can think about how you can deliver an experience that will delight them.
A persona should be constructed so that they are compelling characters in your story. You are trying to design with your user in mind and so you must develop a deeper understanding of who they are. A good persona should address the following characteristics:
- Needs
- Goals/Motivations
- Expectations
- Thoughts/Opinions
- Feelings
- Attitudes
- Challenges/Pain Points
- Desires
When constructing personas, it is important to bring them to life. They should be based on fact and data. They should feel real and something that your users can identify with. There is no such thing as the perfect user, hence there is no perfect one size fits all persona. Try to avoid the pitfall of idealizing your persona. Keep them grounded in what's realistic. You may even need to create multiple personas to represent different contexts or competing mindsets and motivations.
As you understand your persona better you now need to apply context to how this persona will live through the process you are designing for them. A Journey Map is a good way to lay out and describe the experience they will go through. Simply put, a journey map is a visual representation of the persona's experience. It illustrates all the persona's interactions, the context of the interactions, the needs of persona, what the persona is trying to achieve, and the emotions that result from each interaction. The journey map reveals a lot about the experience. It details how each interaction impacts the emotions of the customer whether it be positive, negative or neutral. This illustrates where and what in your design needs addressing to deliver an experience that will delight your customer.
The design should keep in mind the two key factors mentioned earlier: the interaction and the transaction. Both are critical to the overall experience. The interaction focuses on how the persona will touch and use the app. It should be intuitive to understand, easy to use, and find the right balance of simplicity and robust functionality. While it's cool to offer a wealth of capability, you should only offer enough capability where it does not confound usability. Nothing kills great functionality like having something too difficult to use.
Next up, consider how you execute the transaction. This is the payoff for the user. They are using your app to gain some value. So, while it's great that you can make it a delightful experience for them to request your service, you must complete the transaction in a satisfying manner as well. The big moment for me in my coffee shop experience is that when I walked into the shop my order was waiting for me. I don't need to do anything else except enjoy my beverage and food. My transaction was complete at the point I picked up my order.
The transaction should be rapid and transparent. Make sure you can deliver as quickly as possible and keep the user engaged and informed the whole way through. In this age of the lightspeed app, no one has patience to wait for feedback and progress of fulfillment. Don't give your customers a perception that your fulfillment processes are a deep dark hole that stuff eventually comes out of. Leverage automation to deliver your service faster and more consistently. Leverage that same automation to notify the customer of your progress. Keep them informed, engaged, and empowered.
Experience is a huge driver of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Improving your customer's experience should have return on value that can directly impact revenue. When seeking to improve experience, look to personas and journey maps to gain the insights you will need to identify how and where you can design a better experience. As you design your experience, don't just look at the interaction but pay careful attention to the transaction. Usability is just a piece of the experience picture, delivery of service and engagement with your customer rounds out the overall experience as well.
So get out there and drive a better experience. Experience does matter. And maybe I'll see you at the coffee shop. But you better be quick, because I'm in and out real fast.
