The December issue of Harvard Business Review, Build an Innovation Engine in 90 Days, shares the important distinction of core and new-growth innovation. Core innovations enhance existing offerings or improves current operations. They enhance the current strategy and organization structure with the objective of offering rapid and substantial returns in the near future and funded … Read more
Personas, actors, and roles have been around for a long time. In Greek theater, the persona referred to the “theatrical mask” – a role played by an actor. The Romans expanded the term to indicate a role in a court of law where personas assume roles with legal attributes such as rights, powers, and duties. … Read more
Customer experiences must be contextually relevant, personalized, and synchronized across the channels that they frequent. Organizations need to go beyond demographic, psychographic and geolocation segmentation and capture, analyze and execute on behavioral data about their customers. Smart organizations deliver the right message or offer at the right time through the right channel to the right … Read more
If there is such a thing as a Design Thinking geek – I’m it. My new favorite Design Thinking technique is Empathy Maps. Empathy Maps are a tool to help synthesize your observations to discover insights about your target audience. Empathy Maps are to Design Thinking what SWOT Analysis is to business. They are simple … Read more
Just last week I ran a customer journey map (CJM) workshop at FICO World 2014. I always enjoy the enthusiasm for customers and engagement around designing better customer experience that happens at these workshops. The secret to any good workshop is to facilitate an environment of trust where the participants can be free to share … Read more
“We know that consumer purchase decisions are often made quickly and subconsciously, but there are opportunities where it’s possible to influence a consumer’s perception of a brand. People often make buying decisions by using all five of their senses and once product designers discover what each of these sensory influencers are, they can develop packaging … Read more
From mycustomer.com’s Voice of the Customer measurement: Which metrics are right for you? by Stacey Nevel, here are four “must dos” for a successful Voice Of the Customer (VoC) program: Engaging stakeholders – align your VoC program with the business goals and provide actionable insights to support those objectives like increase revenue, reduced costs, increase cross sell, increase customer-centricity, … Read more
A recent Nielsen Norman Group study found that organizations that have adopted an agile development process are more proficient in execution but some have abandon research and design best practices and degrade their customer experience. Unfortunately, the study found, that most organizations following the agile development process didn’t include research on a consistent basis, if … Read more
We are in the Experience Economy that Pine and Gilmore predicted – a customer-centric marketplace that Forrester calls the Age of the Customer where: “A customer obsessed company focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of an engagement with customers, and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.” We … Read more
Paul Brooks wrote this article for UX Magazine about developing personas for team. Personas are a stand-in for a group of people who share common goals. They are fictional representatives—archetypes based on the users’ behaviors, attitudes, and goals. Usually we make the distinction between Buyer Personas and User Personas where the Buyer is the person … Read more
This is one of the most frequent questions that Jeof and I get. If you have read our book or heard us speak than you know the short answer. For the record, I want to share the longer (and more academic) answer. Don Norman is most credited for coining the term User Experience while at … Read more
Jeofrey and I shared our aggregate views of what makes the best customer experience companies better, different, more profitable and sustainable at the SDL Innovate 2014 in San Francisco. We shared that these “Experience Makers” dominate their industries and change customers’ lives. We shared insights about leadership, best practices and decision making, based on the interviews … Read more