CX 101: The Classic Trap in Customer Experience Initiatives

Customer experience is often defined as the product of the interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. I like this definition because it treats experience as a product, and like any product, its quality is shaped heavily during design.

Customer experience improvement has become a common priority for commercial companies, government agencies and non-profit organizations alike. Its components include customer engagement journey mapping, touch points, pain points and emotional curves. The most important step in any initiative is answering one question clearly, which is the experience the organization wants to improve. The biggest trap sits inside that question.

If the team focuses only on what customers are doing and tries to improve those steps, the work becomes process improvement. Understanding why customers take the actions observed is what makes experience improvement succeed and opens room for innovation.

Consider a surgeon who checks monitors during an operation. In the experience journey this step should be described as checking the patient’s vital condition, rather than checking monitors. This example draws on Lance Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick, The Customer-Centered Innovation Map, Harvard Business Review, May 2008. If the surgeon struggles to see the monitors and the team simply moves them, that is process improvement. If the team treats it as a difficulty in checking the patient’s vital condition, it may arrive at a different solution, such as smart glasses that display vital signs without the need to look at a monitor. Framing pain points this way redesigns the experience as a whole.

There is no perfect solution in customer experience work. Technology and customer behavior keep changing, so it is good practice to measure the effect of improvements over time and revisit journey maps to find new unmet needs.