Insights

What is experience-led digital transformation

Satheesh Nair - Head of Product Design & Front-end Technology, UST Product Engineering

• The search term 'Customer Experience' reached its peak popularity in April 2022 – Google Trends
• 84% of customers think their experience of digital tools or services falls short of expectations – Gartner
• For hospitality, a 1-point increase in the CX index can result in $330 Million in incremental revenue
• For Retail, a 1-point increase in the CX index can result in $244 Million in incremental revenue

We are the sum of our experiences. Over time, these experiences define us and greatly influence our choices and decisions. Modern marketing and social media realize this and are capitalizing on it. In the data comprising our needs lie many fragments of our experiences, even subconscious ones. Personal or business experiences play a huge role in decision-making. It is even more critical today when businesses depend on technology for customer transactions. They realize that individual goals, feelings, aspirations, and expectations can no longer be alienated or deprioritized.

Importance of experience-led digital transformation

Today, Customer Experience (CX) is at the heart of any great business concept or technology. That's why experience-led Digital Transformation has made rapid inroads into global boardrooms. Business leaders understand the importance and need for customer experience for business success.

More businesses create products or services around human-centric parameters. Knowing the customer's behavioral patterns will help develop effective physical, digital, virtual, or phygital touchpoints. Success through these endeavors means delivering a flawless, positive, personalized experience, prolonged customer satisfaction, and sustained growth. Otherwise, a brand loses more than its reputation; it will damage the value it could provide to the customer.

In a hypercompetitive business environment, customer experience is more than a differentiator, its disruption. Emotions drive business, and experiences drive emotions.

Real-world experiences, real business disruption

Think of some of the great products or services we are deeply familiar with - the first iPhone scroll feature in 2007, the first Airbnb opening its doors in 2008, or the first Uber ride in 2009. These are classic examples of how design-led disruptions upended telecom, hospitality, and transportation. So, what was common to all three disruptors? They were created by keeping the customer needs at the core. They even followed a similar process:

• Identifying a desirable customer experience against a customer pain point
• Build a viable business and revenue model around the experience
• Introduce cutting-edge technology to make the idea feasible and sustainable

Convenience, safety, reliability, dependability, and ease of use are parameters they covered while addressing their customers' experience journey.

The role of design in digital customer experience

In a typical product development lifecycle, business focuses on viability and economy, and technology focuses on functional feasibility and development. The third and crucial tripartite to this is the designer's role, for they advocate for both customers and brands. They focus on the final product's desirability to promote adoption, loyalty, and brand advocacy.

The right approach for experience-led transformaion

• Bottom-up Approach: Business Solution > Technology Solution > Customer Experience
• Top-Down Approach: Customer Expectation > Experience Opportunity > Technology Solution > Business Solution

Experience design has changed the status quo. The bottom-up approach no longer holds sway. Today's successful businesses are the brands that have holistically adopted a top-down approach that puts the customer and their expectations at the core of everything they do.

For a successful top-down approach, it is imperative to understand that every product or service initiative starts with a market need that solves a customer pain point. It is here where revenue opportunities can be identified. While technology enhances the product or service function, the human-centric design ensures that there is no disconnect with customer needs, especially since the customer was never a part of the Product Development Cycle. Most businesses fail to grasp this missing piece of the jigsaw.

Today's digital experiences stem from a holistic digital transformation approach that prioritizes user experience at all digital touchpoints spanning the customer journey. Only then can one ensure meaningful and positive customer engagement.

The journey towards enhanced digital experiences needs more than just a mindset.

Organizational processes and policies are hard to change, and Change Management is complex. Conquering this mindset needs more than just a change in outlook; it needs a holistic approach to address challenges.

• For enterprises to succeed in their digital transformation journey, all business functions must work synchronously and in complete harmony, not in silos.
• New product features and functionalities need to be built from the ground up and not just tweaked to meet customer expectations,
• Usually, legacy systems are only compatible with major functional upgrades. Therefore, enterprises are hesitant toward experience-led digital transformation.
• They also need highly skilled teams and tools to commence such an undertaking, and talent can be hard to find or retain.

But no matter how challenging the process is, enterprises cannot afford to continue with an archaic state of operations.

They need an agile framework where all employees and teams work collaboratively and seamlessly using the right technology infrastructure.

Experience digital transformation with UST Product Engineering

The UST Product Engineering teams provide a dedicated design practice that rigorously follows the best SOPs while developing newer experiences. We begin with a comprehensive audit of your current brand experience by identifying potential gaps and usability risks and then explore possibilities for augmenting it. We aim to amplify customer value and growth by uncovering critical insights into target customers' thoughts, anxieties, and behavior, which our experts analyze. The strategies from these sessions lead to solutions that strongly leverage evidence-based design to visualize and validate new ideas. As strong proponents of intuitive digital experiences, we expand the horizons to transform customer problems into business opportunities demonstrated through digital narratives and interactive prototypes that comprise the whole digital ecosystem.

From re-imagining existing legacy experiences into personalized, desirable, and intuitive customer experiences, we're pushing the boundaries of experience-led transformation from the inside out.

As Steve Jobs aptly said, "It's not about being design-led. You've got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology." We couldn't agree more.