When I started creating sites in 1995, the only experience we were concerned about was if there would be an online experience at all. It’s been quite a long time since those days. Today, most companies are interested in what kind of experience a person is going to have when they visit their site. Now, I am not just talking about pretty logos and cool colors with some fancy interaction. I am talking about the holistic online experience.
To take a small step back here, let me explain what I feel experience design is. Now, please keep in mind that this is just one professional’s opinion and others have debated me on this issue with mixed success. That aside, to me the experience is every element that has an impact on your potential customer. It is everything they see, hear, feel and smell. It is also the environment they are in when they interact with your product or service. To take it a step further, it is their gut reaction to your product or service.
To the Core of Your Business
There are several things that impact the customer’s experience that we all commonly know about, such as the quality of customer service, the quality of the product or the service offered, the price of it as well. But there are also psychological factors that play in to this, including how they are treated by the customer service reps on a personal level, including the tone of voice, the judgment of their intelligence and the sympathy or empathy expressed by the rep themselves. This extends much further than just the customer service rep, though. It goes all the way into the core of the company, from the vision of the CEO to the attitude of the people on the sales floor.
Memorable Experiences
Ultimately, the question you have to ask yourself as a business owner is this: what kind of experience do you want your customers to receive before, during, and after they have purchased your product or service? Building memorable experiences is not an easy task but in today’s markets it is a necessity for survival. There are plenty of other companies a customer could look into if your company doesn’t offer what they need and give them the kind of experience they are expecting.
Putting a Face on Your Business
In this day and age of the experience economy its not simply about why you’re better than the competition, it’s about how you make yourself better than the competition. I feel that the next big factor to extending the experience economy and adopting this new approach is the return of the personal human touch. This is to say moving beyond the sterile brochure copy of business practices of the past, and putting a human face on your product. A person that your customers can trust and can establish a business relationship with.
Ask yourself this: when was the last time you purchased a service or product where the salesperson remembered your name? And I am not talking about reading your name off their computer screen or your credit card. Think about that for a moment. Do you remember that experience? Was it memorable? Is that little step something that set that business aside from the rest in your mind? That, my friend, is part of the experience economy.
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