Free eBook: People-Centric Experience Design
March 17, 2014 Leave a comment
A few months ago, I introduced a new concept called People-Centric Experience Design™ (PCxD™), which is defined as
Fostering an environment that creates positive, memorable human encounters
Since we believe that the concept can significantly help organizations deliver better customer experience, we’ve decided to publish the concept in a free eBook.
Experiences are all about people, the customers who interact with your organization and the employees who shape those interactions. Most approaches to customer experience, from voice of the customer programs to customer journey mapping, deal with the logical, left-brain elements of customer experience. But they often fall short on the right-brain, emotional side. That’s where PCxD comes into play.
To achieve PCxD, companies must master three principles:
- Align through Purpose. Just about every large organization has vision and mission statements floating around their hallways. But when it comes to making decisions on a day-to-day basis, these documents are nowhere to be found. They play NO ROLE in how the company is actually run. However, customer experience leaders operate differently. Rather than making empty promises, they create and sustain a clear sense of purpose that inspires loyalty from customers and alignment from employees.
- Guide with Empathy. People have a natural capacity for empathy. Unfortunately, companies often bring out people’s more selfish tendencies and suppress their empathetic ones by playing into their personal biases and arranging the organizational structure to reward self-centered behavior. For instance, while a typical customer interaction cuts across many functional groups (a single purchase, for instance, may include contact with decisions by product management, sales, marketing, accounts payable, and legal organizations), companies push employees to stay focused solely on their own functional areas. This myopic view is often reinforced by incentives focused on narrow domains, which creates a chasm between empathy and personal success. Companies must elicit human empathy, not selfishness, by sharing a deeper understanding of customers and their needs.
- Design for Memories. When it comes to loyalty, customer experience isn’t very important. That’s right, customer experience is not very important. What is important? Memories. People make decisions based on how they remember experiences, not on how they actually experienced them. This distinction is important because people don’t remember experiences the way they actually occur. Rather, people construct memories as stories in their mind based on the fragments of their actual experiences. An improved understanding of how people truly remember things can help you focus on improving the most important moments.
The bottom line: Tap into the power of purpose, empathy, and memories.
About Bruce Temkin, CCXP
Customer Experience Matters® 