Consumer Behavior
Successful experience strategy means knocking down silos, building the right team
Retail success, and sustainability, is all about customer experience. While some retailers put experience strategies into silos, one expert explains why that may not be the best approach. The goal should be to foster an experience-driven culture.
October 13, 2021 by Judy Mottl — Editor, RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com
The retail customer experience is nothing like it was five years ago, two years ago or even a year ago.
Customers' expectations have changed as quickly as well and retailers are scrambling to not only get a good solid digital journey in place but advance that journey to meet all consumer demands. Shoppers are still intent on e-commerce but are also returning to the store and they want a rewarding journey in either scenario.
As digital rises in importance to the in-store journey, some instances retailers are taking a silo approach in which the the customer experience, user experience, digital experience and even the employee experience are treated and developed separately.
But as one expert shared in an email interview with Retail Customer Experience, taking such a silo approach is not a successful strategy.
Instead, as the 'experience' begins the moment a customer walks into a store, logs onto a web site, puts a call into a customer care agent, all those experience entry need to be treated equally important.
As Alfonso de la Nuez, co-founder and co-CEO of UserZoom, explains, consumers care just as much about the experience when buying a product/service as they do about the actual product.
For retailers, that means it's time to focus on 'experience' in a holistic approach. His firm has worked with top brands, including H&M, Ikea and Amazon, to help them understand and manage UX capabilities.
We asked de la Nuez to share further insight on why retailers need to focus on the big picture of experience rather than a segmented view and silo view.
Q. What is the best strategy in building a CX team and what are some do's and don'ts and maybe misconceptions?
A. When building a CX team, it's important to first look beyond just the personnel you want to build that team around, but rather ensure your company is building a CX-first culture that comes from the C-suite all the way down. CX should be a company's M.O., not just a siloed bucket of the business that is left for a single team to be responsible for.
Nonetheless, you do need to have a dedicated CX team within that CX culture. To ensure a company has the best possible CX team and approach to experience, businesses need to focus on the entire customer journey — that includes running research during the pre-live stages of product, web or app development, so you're optimizing CX before you go live with updates. Many companies actually separate their CX team into two separate groups; the CX team and the user experience (UX) team. However, it's important not to silo experience, because customers experience your brand holistically— internal siloes only threaten to fragment this end experience by fragmenting insights across departments. One dedicated experience team can also prioritize being proactive, rather than forced into being reactive through pre- and post-live stages.
It's also worth noting how important it is to build a proper research operations strategy to feed the CX team with the right information. This starts with high-quality participant recruiting and includes collecting their insight, empowering researchers with the right tools to properly collect data and insights at scale, and advocating how the value of research can impact the organization. Without this strategy in place, businesses can struggle to implement firsthand research and feedback into their experience game plan, leading to data overload and customers not having their voices heard — which ultimately leads to the overall experience suffering.
The best CX teams are able to look at the big picture and think broadly about how to manage experience through the entire customer journey by properly collaborating with Product and Marketing teams. There's no "I" in team, and that's especially true when it comes to building the best possible digital experience.
Q. Where does UX management land today within a retailer's organization? Is it in digital or branding or marketing and what common missteps are retailers taking with UX management?
A. Where UX management lands in a retailer's organization depends on the type of company; is it a brick and mortar retailer like Target, or a pure digital play like PayPal? But I believe it should ideally fall within the Product team, given that the quality of success for online engagement and retailing completely depends on the quality of its digital product experience. At the same time, we're increasingly seeing the need to collaborate with the Marketing team as well, since great experience is one of the best marketing campaigns a brand can deliver.
One of the biggest missteps organizations can make is to not give enough importance to Design for their digital properties. The front-end's UI (user interface, essentially the visual design, or how it looks) and UX (user experience, or how it works) are both responsible for how end users interact and engage with a brand. You'd think that due to this, brands would pay a lot of attention to it and assign the necessary resources to ensure great front-end design. Yet in 2021 I still see pretty subpar results and I truly believe they have a negative impact on brand perception and key business metrics, such as conversion rates and retention. The fact is that it's quite difficult to design and deliver great digital experiences and so one of the best things organizations can do is hire more UX Designers and UX researchers. I'd recommend spending more budget dollars on these profiles vs in pure Marketing ads and awareness campaigns.
Ultimately, as the disciplines of UX and CX increasingly converge within the digital realm and brand touchpoints extend across web, mobile and newer technologies such as voice UI and augmented reality, it will take a truly cross-functional approach to understand, measure and improve the total experience. This doesn't always fit neatly into existing departmental buckets, and so retailers will have to implement new processes and functions in order to execute against this effectively.
Q. Can you provide some 'mini' examples of how retailers have solved challenges in the CX strategy?
A. One of the brands we work with was traditionally seen as a brick-and-mortar operation that provided incredible in-person experiences, but recognized the need to digitally evolve. They decided to undergo a massive digitization project and heavily invested in digital experience (including dozens of UX professionals) and took their experience strategy to a new level across the board. One of the leading toy companies is doing the same thing. They realized kids are online just as much as their adult counterparts and built a completely new digital experience for their customers.
Many brands are realizing that it's time to digitally transform, and not just from an internal organization standpoint either, but how they're providing customers with the best possible experience through online channels. This is crucial for these businesses to stay competitive. Digital experience needs to be a priority of a brand's overall experience, or else they'll end up being the next Blockbuster in a world of Netflix's.
Q. Can you offer up some best practices for those starting new or revamped CX approaches?
A. One best practice that is critical for businesses and CX teams to adopt when developing experience strategies is to learn about agile, multi-method approaches that include qualitative data rather than just quantitative findings. Too often do we see CX teams only relying on hard data that comes from surveys and analytics. While that's understandable, since we are talking about a research team, and critical for identifying the "what," it's important for teams to also extrapolate upon the qualitative data they collect to properly identify and understand the "why" and "how" aspect around user interaction on a website or app. More than just data collection from surveys, research teams should be using 1 on 1 interviews and usability testing to understand the big picture, both from a left and right brain POV.
When implementing this agile approach, it's important to leave space for both strategic research, as well as summative research, formative research, benchmarking and quick iterative testing, in order to establish a 360-degree view on how users interact with digital properties, and how teams can improve that experience.
Q. Moving forward in this post-pandemic retail world, what should retailers be thinking of now to implement or drive in the next two to three years?
A. The pandemic resulted in tremendous change across all aspects of life, but one of the biggest impacts was on how consumers interact with retailers and how they buy their goods. Online shopping became the new normal, more people conducted their banking through apps, and the masses even turned to buying their groceries online and getting them delivered. This convenience is now going to be expected from consumers, and brands should be prioritizing that level of experience in order to retain existing customers and gain new ones. The fact is, now experience IS the brand.
As mentioned earlier, companies need to pay close attention to and invest in their front-end design and also on truly becoming customer-centric companies. In this new decade, we're seeing brands need to offer not only an optimized experience, but also killer design and UX that customers can look forward to interacting with. In order to achieve that, you need to foster an experience-driven culture, and build the right team of UX all stars that can conduct the right research and manage experience insights that will be turned into actionable data.
About Judy Mottl
