If you’re focused on digital transformation, you’ll know that to build a truly customer-centred culture, you need the right customer data. We can get richer, more holistic data than ever before, meaning we can compile an authentic picture of what our users and target customers want.
But with that data comes a huge amount of responsibility. In this article, I’m going to explore how you can build a customer-centric culture that respects your customer data.
Gather the information you need
I like to start by checking the data strategy is aligned with a company’s goals and brand. If they’ve got clarity on who they are, where they stand in the market, what they want to achieve and where they need to work harder, then they’re ready to go ahead. If not, it helps to clarify that information before you go any further.
Once you’re aligned, it’s time to review your personas or audience segments– outlines of your current and target customers – and scenarios – the tasks they’re trying to complete. Are they proven by research, up to data and aligned with your corporate strategy? Have they been checked against real customers lately?
For example, for the Bank of England’s recent website redesign, we crafted seven personas ranging from investors and IFAs to students and educators. Their characteristics and motivations informed the information architecture, content and design for the whole project. When it comes to scenarios, you’ll often find personas’ needs align or overlap.
Then you can map your customers’ touchpoints and journeys. We use a tool called a service design blueprint to do this. It plots the people, resources, functionality and data that support each customer interaction along a journey, so it shows you where any obstacles or hiccups might occur.
It’s really useful to have a data layer in your service blueprint, because it helps you see exactly what data point(s) you need to inform how you handle each moment.
Usability testing – user interviews, ethnographical studies, exercises like card sorting – will complement any quantitative data, like website performance. This qualitative data gives deeper insight and richer context to your customers and their situations (if you’d like to find out more about the methods in UX, download our free UX handbook).
Once you bring these insights together, they should form a meaningful, holistic picture of your customers’ functional need (what they’re trying to achieve) and emotional need (how they’d like to feel while they’re doing it).
Your customers might be ready to trust you with their data – as Mary Meeker’s 2019 report said, 83% are willing to passively share and 74% are willing to actively share data in exchange for personalized experiences – but that trust engenders responsibility.
Customers expect us to guard their data with care and compliance. We’re living in an age where data breaches are rising: in the first half of 2019, 4.1bn records were exposed.
