What is customer experience design?

Simply put, CX design is the practice of designing your products, services, and interactions with an emphasis on the experience you provide for your customers. This means identifying and working on gaps and opportunities in customer interactions across the entire customer lifecycle—before, during, and after purchase - to create more positive experiences.

If you're looking to build a comprehensive CX design, you are in the right place. With this toolkit, you will learn how to assess your current customer experience, understand your customers’ expectations and pain points, and optimize the overall customer journey.

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Why is CX design important?

Designing a comprehensive CX strategy has multifold benefits for companies that crave to be ‘customer centric’. Customers are willing to pay extra for a product that offers a good brand experience than those that don’t focus on CX.

In an age when excellent customer experience is seen as one of the prime business differentiators, CX design matters for companies because

You’re prepared to meet customers’ evolving needs

The primary function of any CX design program is to collect customer feedback and insights that shape the experience a company aims to offer. With these insights, companies can closely understand shifting customer needs and work towards delighting customers.

It can mean improved revenue

About 84% of companies that have invested efforts in customer experience programs report revenue growth. Designing positive customer experiences influences purchase decisions and attracts more customers.

You increase the number of loyal customers

Over two-thirds of customers indicate that it’s CX that drives their loyalty towards a brand, beating price. Focusing on CX design helps build strong customer relationships that breed loyal customers.

You can create brand advocates

Once customers are happy with the experience you’ve designed and executed, they automatically promote your business to friends and family. Positive online reviews and word-of-mouth referrals bring in more new customers without any additional marketing efforts.

How to design a great customer experience

The first step towards improving your CX is understanding how your current customers feel about each of their interactions with your business. Here are the three fundamental steps required to understand your customer experience fully.

Step 1: Build your customer personas

A customer persona is a visual representation of your ideal target customer and is created using the data on your existing customers and market research. Buyer personas are effective in helping you and your team better understand your customers. 

Each persona should include basic demographic details, behaviors, goals, pain points, and buying patterns. Including pain points, goals, and any other characteristics will help you transform your persona from a list of characteristics to a realistic description of a person. If your business serves multiple industries or targets different niches within an industry, then creating multiple buyer personas will help you understand significant differences in each demography.

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Data required

For buyer personas to be effective, you need to back them with reliable customer data that reflect your target market accurately. Compiling data in two sets will help you define and create your personas better.

Data set 1: The first one is the profile of your buyer, which includes demographic and psychographic information such as:

  • Age
  • Location
  • Language
  • Income
  • Buying behavior
  • Interests and activities
  • Life stage (such as new parenthood or retirement)

Data set 2: The second set of data you need is buyer insights. This includes your customers’ feelings, motivations, and expectations relating to the area of their life that your product or service impacts. It should also identify your customers’ goals, doubts, and methods of evaluating products or services like yours. It can also illustrate what time of day your customers buy, under which conditions they tend to buy, and how long their buying process takes.

You can gather data for framing customer persons from most of the tools you currently use to store or process customer information. Digital analytics tools such as Google Analytics will automatically track and store audience profile information every time someone visits your website. Tools like Facebook Audience Insights help you gather information on the geographic spread of your customers, as well as behavioral data such as page likes, page view activity, and purchases. 

Customer service software such as Freshdesk collects pertinent customer data every time a support ticket is created, edited, and resolved. Using Freshdesk, you can also create feedback surveys to compile data on customer expectations, goals, and purchase evaluation processes.

Step 2: Map the customer journey

A customer journey map illustrates all the touchpoints your customers have with your company, both online and off. When you understand how your customers typically behave, it becomes easier to identify gaps in the CX design of your service and products.

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How to map the customer journey

Step 3: Analyze each customer interaction

Reviewing the reports and data you’ve gathered so far can help you identify precise points where issues appear to be cropping up. 

To help identify problem areas, ask the following types of questions:

Apart from identifying the challenges with these questions, here are five important metrics that can help you gather insights into your CX and potential problem areas:

1. FRT - First response time

FRT measures how long customers have to wait before someone on your customer support team reaches out to help them. Your response time will usually vary according to your support source and your industry.

Measurement - the lower the FRT, the better.

2. AHT - Average handling time

AHT is a measurement of how long it takes for an issue to go from initial submission to resolution, including any downtime where a customer is on hold or waiting for an email response. 

Measurement - the shorter the resolution times, the better. 

3. CSAT: Customer satisfaction score

Customer satisfaction score is a CX metric that measures how satisfied customers are after interacting with your product or service. You can track customer satisfaction for a product experience, support interaction, or any service you offer using relevant CSAT surveys.

Measurement - Higher the CSAT scores, the better the overall CX.

4. CES - Customer effort score

The CES is a measure of how difficult it is to complete any given task on your website. It’s generally measured by assessing your customer’s reaction to this statement: “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.”

Measurement - lower the CES, the better.

5. NPS: Net promoter score

NPS survey helps you group customers based on their scoring and illustrate how your customers feel after making a purchase, as well as identify your ideal customers. Customers who score a 6 or lower are labeled as “detractors,” customers who answer a 7 or 8 are considered “passive,” and those who select a 9 or 10 are your “promoters.”

Measurement - the higher the NPS score, the better. 

6. Churn rate

Your churn rate is the total number of customers who have abandoned your company during a set window of time. If your churn rate is high, it’s a sign of CX design problems. You can help understand customer issues and pain points better by segmenting churn by channel or customer segment. For instance, is there one demographic group or one platform that has higher churn than the rest?

Measurement - Average churn rates are around 6.12%, but they will vary based on business type, industry, market, and other factors.

5 Tips to improve your CX program


Once you’ve fully understood your current customer’s journey and pain points, you can optimize your design to exceed customer expectations. Here’s how you can go about that: 

#1 Analyze direct and indirect customer feedback

Customer wants, needs, and expectations continuously evolve. If you don’t update your CX design to reflect these changes, design aspects that once resulted in a positive experience could quickly create a negative one. To stay up to date on your customers and target market, it’s vital to listen to what they’re saying — both to you and about you.

While targeted, multi-channel surveys are one way to gather customer feedback, another efficient way to collect customer insights is through social listening. You can monitor social media channels for any mentions of your brand, product, service, competitors, or any keywords relevant to your business or industry. Advanced sentiment analysis techniques allow you to identify common customer emotions or problems voiced in the gathered information that you can use to improve your CX design. 

#2 Optimize your user experiences (UX)

When it comes to customer experience design, particularly in relation to the online customer experience, you may hear a lot about UX and/or usability. Usability, user experience, and customer experience are three distinct areas, but they are all interrelated when handled correctly. And good usability and UX design can create a better CX. 

Here are a few simple ways in which you can improve UX:

You can use A/B testing to measure the improvements of any changes you make to ensure they result in greater usability. Another excellent method for assessing usability is heat maps. They allow you to see where customers spend time and what actions they take on your site.

#3 Adopt personalization at scale to boost CX 

According to McKinsey, 71% of customers expect personalization from brands, and 76% are more likely to purchase from a brand that personalizes customer experiences. Understanding customer preferences across segments, addressing customers by their names in every customer communication, and sending targeted offers are examples of providing personalized CX. 

You can use segmentation to improve your CX at scale by creating unique services, offers, content, and ad campaigns aimed specifically at each persona that you’ve created.

You can empower your customer support team to offer personalized and contextual support by enabling them with tools that help them access customer data and history effortlessly. This way, they can offer the right resolutions without forcing the customer to regurgitate information your employees should already know.

By adopting a helpdesk system like Freshdesk, you can have a 360-degree view of your customer information at all times. Freshdesk’s Customer 360 allows you to log each customer’s purchase activity and interactions with your support team into their customer profile. With this customer information, agents can give personalized assistance at any point in the customer journey.

#4 Build an omnichannel strategy for seamless experiences 

Digital-first customers engage and interact with companies across multiple channels, including your website, email, chat, social media, SMS, messaging apps, and phone. Each of these channels may be used for different purposes over the entire customer journey. Moreover, research indicates that 43% of customers switch channels based on convenience and availability.

However, despite the growth in digital touch points and the rampant channel switching, customers want a seamless, cohesive experience across these channels. They expect brands to have complete context of their query irrespective of the channel they engage with.

To achieve this level of consistency, you need to be capable of providing omnichannel support across all potential customer touchpoints. And to achieve this, your CX design process needs to connect customer interactions across your business’ touchpoints and channels on one unifying platform.

Freshdesk helps you unify communication across channels into one single platform. This provides a centralized source of truth for your teams. Your team can see the entire customer journey and experience, no matter what channel they’ve switched between. Plus, this interconnected support allows collaboration among different departments and teams. 

#5 Focus on providing effortless customer support

Research shows that effortless customer service interactions are directly linked to revenue growth, with 94% of customers more likely to repurchase a product from the same company and 88% more likely to increase their spending with the company.

Prompt responses and fast, low-effort resolutions are vital in offering frictionless customer support. Tracking and responding to customer queries from one unified interface and having customer information easily accessible for agents help deliver faster support. 

Allowing customers to resolve simpler queries by themselves through an effective self-service portal makes resolutions more effortless. Additionally, AI-powered chatbots can provide instant responses and can also guide customers to self-serve with intelligent bot workflows. So, incorporating a chatbot on your website or support portal can help you offer quick assistance and also cut down on your costs.

Choosing the right customer experience management platform

Once you’ve got your CX plan in place, you need a scalable and comprehensive customer experience management software to bring your plan to life. The software  should be intuitive, easy to implement, and have all the features that let you deliver stellar customer experiences.  

Here are the essential features of a customer experience software that you need to look for when you’re selecting one for your team: 

With a robust solution such as Freshdesk, you get a holistic view of your customers across different channels of communication such as email, phone, chat, web, and social media. You can set up multiple self-service options, generate your reports, collaborate across teams in your organization, and more.

Discover The Power Of A Unified Omnichannel Solution

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