Firms Aren’t Equipped To Deliver Cohesive Cross-Channel Experiences

Companies are waking up to the realization that great customer experience (CX) is the biggest driver of competitive advantage today. As customer interactions span an increasingly complex array of fractured touchpoints — many of them digital — such as websites, apps, communities, and social networks, companies need to coordinate well-orchestrated experiences across all touchpoints. But this proves problematic because companies:

• Design their experiences in silos. Whether organized by business group, channel, or both, different parts of a single organization can concern themselves with one small part of what a customer experiences overall. The result can be disjointed experiences for customers who leave the experiences believing — often correctly — that different parts of the same organization don’t have access to the same information.
• Lack adequate and accessible standards. Companies make painstaking efforts to create standards for their websites but often lack standards for other touchpoints. Making the problem worse is the fact that designers have difficulty using the standards that exist because key details are buried deep within PDF files that can be as long as 300 pages — and that’s assuming that they can even find the PDFs buried in the recesses of convoluted corporate intranets. What’s more, standards typically define basic things like visual styles and layouts. While those things are important, most standards documents lack well-defined interaction specifications and details that describe the experiential qualities of key brand attributes.
• Don’t have cross-division oversight. Even when companies have well-defined standards, they often lack processes that enable designers to follow them and coordinate effectively with other teams. Beyond enforcing existing standards, this lack of governance leaves companies without any mechanism to proactively educate and guide teams on how their pieces of the experience puzzle fit within the overall strategy and larger ecosystem.

Cross-Channel Excellence Requires A unified Approach To Experience

The goal of a company’s cross-channel efforts should be to create a seamless network of interaction points that enables customers to choose where they want to interact and provides consistency of information across touchpoints as well as continuity when transitioning across them, all while maintaining a coherent brand personality.4 To serve the diverse needs of even a single customer across digital touchpoints, CX professionals must focus on building unified CX. Forrester defines unified CX as:

Experiences that match content, functionality, and a coherent brand personality to user expectations, tasks, and context across touchpoints.

Unified Experiences Deliver Cohesive, But Not Necessarily Uniform, Experiences

Unified experiences are not uniform. Instead, they offer avenues to the right set of content based on user context. Unified experiences:

• Use recognizable design patterns. The first thing customers react to when they hit any digital touchpoint is its visual design. While companies needn’t strive for a 1:1 use of visual designs from one touchpoint to another, the patterns and styles for imagery, typography, and layouts should be carried over from one touchpoint to another, while matching styles used in offline channels as well. For example, The New York Times’ stately serif fonts accentuate the firm’s heritage across all of its touchpoints — traditional and digital. Meanwhile, Toms Shoes incorporates elements of its imagery, typography, and layout on both its website and its Twitter page.
• Right-size content and functionality. Content and functionality don’t need to be recreated for every touchpoint. Instead, they should be created once and reused/resized to match the appropriate user context. For example, The Boston Globe’s desktop site provides a navigation bar across the top of the page, while the mobile site hides the navigation behind a “sections” menu. Meanwhile, the mobile app uses a different paradigm that provides the same content in a way that leverages specific device capabilities. In the UK, when Sainsbury’s recognized that people were calling to change the time slots they’d entered on the website for home delivery, the company began sending automated text reminders that gave users the opportunity to change the delivery time without having to go back to the site, increasing satisfaction and cost savings.
• Project brand attributes according to user context. Brands need to be more human; like real people, they need to have a personality that can adapt to the context of the people they interact with. Just as a human would, a company needs to speak in different tones, depending on what a customer needs. For example, Southwest Airlines adopts a more formal and distant tone when describing sensitive policies that might require larger passengers to buy more than one seat than it does when describing its “bags fly free” policy. More subtly, Toms Shoes makes an indirect statement about its brand on its Facebook page where it “likes” brands and organizations that share a similar mission. Meanwhile American Express’ Open network enables user conversations about things like using tablet computers for small businesses on its Facebook site, while providing more expert opinions on its website.

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CX Professionals Must Lead Unified CX Initiatives

Delivering unified CX is more than an exercise in developing and enforcing a set of standards. Instead, organizations need to develop their CX disciplines into repeatable practices that help tie experiences together. To advance their practices, CX professionals need to view their roles as educators whose job is to:

• Promote an easy-to-follow and repeatable design process. When different parts of an organization are designing different interactions, it can be difficult for CX professionals to manage the quality of those interactions. That’s why firms need to establish repeatable processes that promote quality without requiring designers to refer to unwieldy documentation. What makes a good process? It’s one that enables designers to focus on what they’re building without having to pay too much attention to the overall picture. How do you codify this process? One financial institution provides checklists that walk designers through a series of questions about how their proposed designs align with user goals, overall strategy, and brand attributes. Each of the 15 questions links to detailed examples that help designers follow established standards
• Establish and track a set of metrics to fit the strategy. When firms only measure outcomes from a specific channel, they may not be viewing the entire picture of what a customer experiences. For example, a website user who buys a product but calls to ask questions about delivery timelines because the site didn’t specify when the product would ship might be dissatisfied as a result and, worse, cancel the order. But website metrics alone won’t connect those dots. That’s why CX professionals need to help establish metrics that track the overall experience.
• Maintain a library of content and functionality assets. Content and functionality need to differ depending on user tasks. But digital experience building blocks like forms or product descriptions that appear in multiple instances shouldn’t be recreated each time designers build something new. Instead, CX professionals should maintain a library of assets that meet internal standards and usability best practices that can be easily repurposed to fit the needs of other groups. This will help them stay on track and focus on building the more unique parts of the interaction rather than reinventing the wheel.
• Facilitate cross-silo connections. While tearing down the silos is a noble long-term objective, it won’t happen without major organizational changes. In the meantime, CX professionals have to work within the structure of the existing organization and serve as guides and educators for siloed teams that typically don’t report to them. How? They should oversee the different projects in flight across different business units and touchpoints. This enables the central team to understand the processes and approaches that different teams take and provide guidance when they start to drift away from customer goals and strategy. It also helps broaden a central set of knowledge about skills that can help facilitate cross-silo connections that might otherwise not happen.

Recommendations: Lay The Groundwork For Unified Experiences

Before they can focus on managing experiences across touchpoints, CX professionals need to lay a foundation that provides context for how each business unit and/or touchpoint contribute to the overall experience. To do this, CX professionals need to define and disseminate:

• A clear CX strategy. Firms need a plan to guide the activities and resources required to meet or exceed customers’ expectations.10 A clear digital CX strategy reflects a company strategy, propagates a coherent brand personality, paints a vivid picture of how the company will meet user needs, and should serve as the rallying point for all CX efforts.11 CX professionals need to spell out and socialize the principles that guide employee behavior. For example, John Deere Financial took its brand promises and translated them into “Key Decision Factors” that direct staff on the kinds of activities that matter most to its customers. Furthermore, CX professionals need to use the strategy as a filter for funding and staffing projects.
• A single view of the customer. If they want to facilitate smooth transitions across multiple touchpoints, CX professionals need to understand, document, and disseminate information about who customers are and how they go about accomplishing their goals as they cross touchpoints. Tools like cross-channel personas and customer journey maps can help. Good journey maps show an understanding of customer needs, likely touchpoints, and emotional states that give a complete picture of not only what customers need to see and do but also what they need to feel.
• A brand personality that will permeate all interactions. Brand guidelines need to be about much more than visual design. Every piece of content, every interactive element, and every word become a representation of the brand. CX professionals need to work with brand organizations — particularly ones that are schooled in traditional channels — to go beyond a list of generic attributes and to define the interactive qualities of the brand that will manifest themselves across touchpoints. Leaders at MailChimp did just that, creating a brand persona that specifies how the brand will behave in digital interfaces.