Designing The Total Customer Experience

What's the best way to plan a product strategy which ensures you're meeting the complex range of needs your customers have today and tomorrow?

If you examine the successful companies over the past 2 decades, many of them have replaced incumbents in mature markets. Examples like Amazon, Zappos, Chic-fil-A, Netflix, Apple, and Tesla have replaced existing products, services, and shopping experiences in multiple categories. Why? I suggest a primary factor involves a deep consideration and orchestration of a total customer experience for their clients. These recent successes don't just focus on features and products, but carefully plan their business around all levels of customer needs, from the mundane feature capability, to a client's needs in their career, their family, and life. Incumbents stuck to what they knew best, often too focused on the product and not the entire experience.

A few years ago, I presented a new model for total customer experience at SXSW, and the approach has helped us to create differentiated products and fostered a spirit of continuous innovation which ensures our offerings remain relevant for the long run.

The customer experience is a result of many intersecting messages, product features used, goals achieved, and emotions. The new model combines the Kano feature scale with a customer needs hierarchy in a new way that helps a designer, product manager, or a business ensure they're covering the spectrum of experience suitable for today and tomorrow.

Part 1: Kano Model

The Kano Model is a popular method for considering the balance between features and engineering or investment effort. It is illustrated as in the following diagram,

with degree of achievement or effort shown on the horizontal axis and the degree of customer satisfaction shown on the vertical axis. The model suggests there are three types of features or attributes in any product offering.

Basic features are those that have become ‘Must-Have’. A good example is seatbelts in cars. Any additional engineering effort or investment in regards to seat belts is not likely to improve customer satisfaction with the car. New investments here are also not likely to help improve sales. Performance features are those in which a product can compete. Customers will compare your product’s performance features with competing offerings, for example, the car’s roominess, the engine’s power, or the beauty of the car’s design. Additional investment on performance features is likely to drive higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales. And finally, innovation or additional engineering effort on Delight features can create a significant increase in customer satisfaction, loyalty, and recommendations through word of mouth.

Sticking with the automobile example, online connected services in the car and DVD players pre-mounted in the rear of headrests may be considered delight features. Important note: parents may think of these DVD players as delighters, but their children may actually consider them to be basic or ‘must-have’ features.

Part 2: Needs Hierarchy

Dev Patnaik, founder of Jump Associates and a lecturer at Stanford's design school has written about customer experience needs understanding in what he named a System Logics model. He starts with the Maslow hierarchy of needs, then goes on to formulate a correlary 4 level hierarchical model concerned with customer needs. He argues that a focus on the lowest 2 level of needs in his model, called Qualifier or Activity needs, leads only to incremental improvements and that companies that address the full spectrum of levels of customer needs will be more valuable, profitable, strategically aligned with the market, and enduring.

I've simplified Patnaik's model to 3 levels of customer needs:

Functional needs are there simply because you’re doing something with a product. Functional needs and the features that help satisfy those needs may disappear if the currently available solutions are redesigned or replaced.

Activity needs are about one’s immediate goals or activities. They are usually about the situation in which you live, work, and operate. For example, the need to plan a new Voice of Customer initiative, the need to deliver a new product design, the need to visit a customer in a city across the country, the need to keep employees motivated, the need to get customer support, the need I have to complete this article about the Total Experience Design model and help my reader learn something new.

Life needs are the most fundamental and universal of all. For example, the need to build a good relationship with that customer, the need to feel informed, the need to make a difference, the need for an emotional connection, the need to be loved, the need to not lose things, the need to avoid embarrassment, the need to save time and money.

Functional level needs and the features that address them can change or be replaced rapidly. Activity needs change less frequently, and Life needs changes least of all. Functional needs and Activity needs can become obsolete when new technologies or market innovations are introduced. Companies and products with highly engaged customers typically cover all three levels of needs to some degree. However, the degree of coverage at each need level varies by company. For example, a company may find that sales is largely driven by products that excel at meeting Life needs, and at the same time, those same products may only do a reasonable job at meeting Functional needs.

Some companies stay viable and healthy by having product lines that turn over quickly. These companies achieve success, in part, by having a pipeline of innovations that continuously replace outdated features and products. They recognize that their products and innovation investments must continuously improve to fulfill their customers’ higher level Activity and Life needs.

Technology will change and evolve. Features come and go. Design and art create fleeting trends. Short-lived companies focus on short-lived trends instead of making adequate investments to address needs that never change, or change more slowly. Amazon and Zappos focus on features that will always be in high demand, such as fast and low-cost shipping, great selection, friendly return policies, and affordable prices. Leading automakers focus on core principles that don’t change, such as reliability, affordability, practicality, safety. Customers wanted these things 20 years ago, they want them today, and they will want them 20 years from now.

A Combined New Model - Total Customer Experience Design

The Kano model and Systems Logics model are helpful means of thinking about customer experience design. But each on its own are limited in product design thinking horsepower. They are each missing something. We postulate that they are missing each other.

Let’s combine the two models as shown in the following diagram. In this new Total Customer Experience Model, the need levels are on the vertical axis and the feature levels are on the horizontal axis.

The new combined model suggests nine possible areas of consideration for products and service designed to address the full customer experience. For example, a company may address Functional needs with a mix of basic, performance, and delight features. Similarly for the Activity need and Life need levels.

Consider a recent trip you took that involved a flight. Let’s audit the flight experience using the nine intersection points of the Total Customer Experience Model. Each point will list something the airline did to address a need with a type of feature. The actual content may vary by your seat type, airline, goal of your journey, domestic or international, customer segment, etc.

Conclusion

The new 9 point Total Experience Design model provides a simple yet comprehensive means of auditing your product's entire experience offering. Needs-understanding coupled with the right product features are the key ingredients for architecting a great experience design. Enduring companies strategically invest and innovate at all 9 intersections of the model.

- Al Nevarez, wrote this while he was VP Data Science & Product Management at Allegiance (now MaritzCX). He's currently a Senior Manager on Linkedin's Marketing & Product Analytics team helping LinkedIn to bring forth innovations for Linkedin's members by combining data, analytics, member needs, and opportunity. We're hiring. Always looking for great data scientists.