Customer Experience Design

Is your customer experience maximizing the value of every brand-customer touchpoint?

Customer experience is how customers interact with your business and brand through touchpoints along the decision journey. Every interaction—advertising, website, in-store browsing, product packaging, and customer service— represents a brand touchpoint that can either enhance or detract from the experience.

Establishing the ideal brand-customer experience requires looking at the business through the eyes of the customer. Persona development and customer journey mapping are two useful customer experience research methods for understanding and improving the situation.

Drawing on customer experience research, our customer experience consultants work with clients to plan and align various marketing touchpoints within the customer decision journey. This typically results in significant changes to a client’s marketing approach, as marketing channels, media, messaging, and other efforts are realigned to better reflect the way customers approach decision-making.

Customer experience touchpoints alignment considers the business from three perspectives:

  • A diagnostic audit of where you are today
  • A vision of the ideal (including the potential role of new and emerging digital marketing assets)
  • The strategy and plan to get from the current state to the intended future

Customer Experience Research Approach

Drawing on prior customer experience research, client/consultant workshops are conducted to prepare, review and refine the recommended touchpoints framework, which encompasses:

  • Customer journey, created earlier, which articulates key steps that occur in the customer decision making process and establishes the overall framework structure
  • Value proposition, which breaks down the various products, services, and other components of your core offering. This could include your core product, services like training and support, extended protection, etc. These components are mapped to the customer journey where they occur
  • Marketing mix components, breaking out traditional/offline media (broadcast, print, retail, personal selling, phone) and inbound/online media (website, search, social media)
  • Messaging matrix, demonstrating messages that are being actively communicated, which could be a single message or a series of messages across the consumer decision journey

Customer Experience Issues

Moving from the current situation to the intended future, the following questions are considered:

  • Are we focusing on the right customers (as informed by customer personas and the customer journey)?
  • How well are current touchpoints aligned with that customer persona and his or her decision journey?
  • Do opportunities exist to better impact decision-making? Are we over-investing in certain marketing vehicles and under investing in others?
  • Are messages aligned to win at every point? Do we need more targeted messaging to reflect customer journey or will more general messages do?

Touchpoint alignment needs to occur both “horizontally” over time as well as “vertically” within each stage.

Horizontal alignment considers the optimal media mix and messages as customers move from one stage to the next (e.g., from awareness to research stage).

Vertical alignment occurs within any given stage (i.e., within the awareness stage, are various media and messages adequately aligned?)

In many companies, different parts of the organization manage different customer-facing activities, so gaining an integrated perspective will require cross-functional involvement and often outside assistance to improve the overall experience. Further, value propositions, marketing mix and messaging may need to shift and realign to deliver an improved customer experience.

Once the customer experience strategy and plan has been created , an experienced EquiBrand marketing consultant can assist with activating the plan, across website design and development, social media marketing, search marketing and other marketing tactics.

Related Service Offerings

  • Persona development provides insight into target customer needs and helps inform customer journey maps

  • Customer touchpoints demonstrates where and how to intersect customers as the purchase process unfolds

Customer personas are used to paint a mental picture of various customer segments. The strongest personas use qualitative and quantitative market research methods to ensure they are grounded in reality.

Customer touchpoints identify where along the journey customers come in contact with the category and brand. Our strategic consultants then work to align touchpoints along the journey through targeted media and messaging.

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Planning a customer experience that reflects customer input at every interaction is critical in today's fragmented marketplace. As a leading customer experience consultancy, we can help show you how.
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