When asked to talk about customer experience, I always cite the same example: Porter Airlines. Here is what Porter figured out: What people hate about flying doesn't have much to do with the airplane. It has to do with the stress of fighting traffic to get to the airport on time. With high parking costs. With long lines, uncomfortable waiting areas and intimidating security check points. With disinterested and impolite check-in and gate staff. With delays and missed connections. With bad coffee, worse food and lacklustre service on board. And with long waits for baggage and expensive cab rides on the other end.
What people hate about flying is the feeling of being processed.
Porter painstakingly designed ways to either improve or eliminate the factors that evoke negative emotions in airline customers. Choosing the Toronto Island airport as its home addresses traffic, parking, time-wasting and flight-delay issues. Opting to give all passengers a well-appointed lounge – comfortable seating, free wireless Internet and premium coffee – normally associated with a small percentage of frequent flyers improves the preflight experience. And careful recruiting and rigorous service training bring, in Porter's words, “dignity” back to flying.
The point is not that Porter provides a consistently exemplary customer experience. The point is that their customer experience was designed. In fact, the discipline of design played a big role in their customer experience plan.
What is customer experience?
Let's start with an explanation of customer experience. It can be thought of as the sum of all experiences resulting from interactions a customer has with a company. It is emerging as an important discipline because of the rapid commoditization of products and services; customer experience can create differentiation and long-term competitive advantage by increasing customer loyalty, while reducing cost to serve.
According to Lewis Carbone in Clued In , customer experience is a three-part, cyclical process. It starts with perception, transitions into interaction, and finishes up or re-starts with recollection. In other words, the interactions between a customer and a company, good or bad, influence recollection of the experience after the fact, and in turn influence that customer's perception of the company, along with the perception of other potential customers he or she speaks with.
In plain English, customer experience relates to how people feel about themselves as they interact with a company. This is different from brand experience, which is more about how people feel about the company directly. And it is wider than customer service, since not all interactions are service-related, or even human-to-human.
What is design?
Design as a discipline is about planning with intention. It is a purposeful process of creation. It combines art and science, aesthetics and math, to arrive at a solution, normally an object (physical or virtual), or a process, which fulfills a purpose considered from the outset.
Design is guided by principles, such as harmony, balance, proximity, variety and emphasis. Principles help a designer organize disparate pieces into a whole vision. The principles, by definition, consider both the form of the creation – the sculpture or technology – and the user or audience. They account for how people will perceive and feel about the creation.
What role can design play in customer experience?
First, we must understand that the Porter example is the exception, not the rule. Most customer experience efforts are reactive. They are about fixing, managing and optimizing. They are about identifying troublesome aspects of the experience and either making them go away or finding ways to improve them.
The future of customer experience, however, is going to involve a lot more creation – of new, positive customer touch points, or of new experiences altogether.
