Speech Summaries

Paul Sonderegger Principal Analyst Forrester Research, Inc.

Investing In The Right Customer Experience

Paul Sonderegger, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, talked about the current poor state of many multichannel customer experiences and the process of redesigning the experience. The main idea that designing an experience is business, not art, was reiterated throughout the speech.

Many different customer touchpoints in multichannel experiences -- like Web sites, email, and IVR systems -- usually confuse a user and end in failed, broken transactions. Why do companies design these bad experiences? Often it is unclear objectives, siloed channels, blindness to actual customer behavior, and broken design processes that lead to such failures.

Companies should prioritize their design investments through the process of Iterative Scenario Design -- identifying optimal designs based on user goals and empirical testing. This redesign process can be accomplished in three steps: 1) Prioritize flaws by impact -- companies should target high-priority users, identify key goals, and balance user goals with business objectives to assess the impact of flaws on the scenario; 2) hypothesize goal-centric design solutions -- focus on goals, not tasks and use design personas to sharpen decisions; and 3) test and optimize -- identify specific metrics to test, establish a baseline, and run tests with control groups.

Redesigning for a great experience will not happen in one day -- begin by segmenting customers and choosing a primary persona. Then, use the process of Iterative Scenario Design as your guide to changing your experience. The key to this process is the establishment of a rigorous testing infrastructure to show if the results of the redesign process are successful, and to lead to future improvements in design.

Questions And Answers

Q: How can a company tie goals and objectives back to ROI if the Web site is not focused on eCommerce?

A: Even if a site is not based on eCommerce, the site consumers do have real goals -- the difference is that they are in the shape of information goals. The question becomes how you can measure the success rate of people accomplishing goals and how to determine what roles these different goals play in the overall consumer experience. In order to measure ROI, you need to establish proxy metrics suggesting that people are moving closer to your business objectives.