Where to focus the design of the experience you offer

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”–Jeff Bezos

The 'experience of your business' can make or break you; no, there's no real revelation in that statement.

We all know the statistics...'80% of customers have chosen to rather do business with a competitors after just one less than stellar experience with a brand' etc etc...

And yet - experience design and delivery still appears to be the most ignored aspect of business design - at least this is still largely the case in South Africa.

Many years ago, I worked on a new South African e-commerce brand, that at the time was hoping to build trust in the marketplace, by focussing intently on designing and delivering a remarkable experience.

The theory was that if we could differentiate the business based on delivering a great experience, our handful of customers would be more inclined to tell their friends about how wonderful we were, and the business would grow thanks to good word of mouth promotion.

There were four key areas of experience that got the design treatment:

Customer experience - this is the overall experience of what it is to be a customer on the journey of buying something, as well as not wanting to buy something anymore (in other words doing a return or getting a repair).

People experience - how are employees actively experienced and passively perceived?

Brand experience - what is the public, non-transacting, experience of the brand?

Product experience - how do I access the products, what is the unboxing reality like, how do I feel receiving the thing that I pay for?

All four count and all four need to be very carefully designed, delivered, monitored for consistency and integrity with design standards and then adjusted if needs be.

Just like the customer journey map, every business should also make use of the four quadrant experience matrix to better view and design the appropriate experiences for their business.

BTW that small e-commerce business that I mentioned in the beginning went on to do great things in the marketplace and became a leader in its category.

Experience design counts...obviously, right?