CX Education 08: How to improve customer experience with Mike Wittenstein from Storyminers

Key insights

• A CX designer really cares about customers

  Customer experience is your customers' holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand. It encompasses every aspect of a company's offering — the quality of customer care, advertising, packaging, product and service features, ease of use, and reliability. Customers want you to commit to them, to engage with them, and according to Mike, that's what a customer experience designer does. "They think about the interactions, and they set everyone up for success. They don't just look at the little path of getting the transaction done, or buying the doll, or buying the clothes and trying them on. They think about everything — how people feel; what stories are they going to tell — it goes way deeper than just the surface."

• You should do things WITH customers instead TO customers

  Today, when everyone spends most of their time on their phones, people are completely cut off from personal experience, which is precious. Mike points out that keeping in touch with customers is important and explains how it makes a difference between companies. "We've become a group of people, and whether we're customers or employees or strategists and designers, we tend to think about doing things 'to people.' Like, 'Let's make the customer do this,' instead of doing things for them. When you do things for them, there's a whole different attitude and posture, feeling, grace, and harmony that happens when you do things with people. You have the opportunity to connect, to build relationships, to share, and to co-create."

• Use technology for customer value creation

  While technology has enabled companies to improve their business and reduce costs, it can also be used to improve customer experience. As Mike notes, if it's digital, anytime you use it, it can create a record, an indelible footprint, and you can make value for customers. "If we're collecting information when they're online, and then in the store, and then on their phone and through conversation, what if we put all of that together and we were able to meet more of our customers' needs? What value could we create for them? That's that five- or ten-second profit pause that everybody needs to ask to find out how we can help our customers do more of what they want, the way they want to do it. And that might end up helping you find ways to differentiate your brand to make it more story worthy, which means it's such a good experience that people can't wait to tell a story about it."