Customer experience the quality of the interactions between an organization and its clients. Consultants in this area have expertise in software design (graphical user interfaces, usability, interaction processes, and requirements documentation), psychology, interaction process flow and task analysis, and managing complexity. They work closely with business and technology to focus on what the customer-base is experiencing, and devise ways to improve that experience while meeting business needs.

Projects that include customer experience range widely. They can vary from designing application user interfaces, to analysis of processes across environments and business lines, to defining guidelines for a consolidated customer experience across an organization and its systems. The skill-set of a customer experience consultant can also be applied to analysis and improvement of internal systems and interaction processes where the ‘client’ is internal staff.

All digital systems and products have three fundamental aspects that directly impact their client/user base: Enrollment/setup; User interface(s) and the interaction processes; And support. The quality of these elements directly influences the user’s perception of the organization and the amount of time they spend interacting with both its electronic products and its support and setup personnel. Creating and maintaining high standards around delivery of these client-facing aspects is critical to the success of an organization. Customer experience consultants can analyze delivery channels across an organization and develop solutions to provide consistency of look, feel and behavior for all products and applications.

Inefficiencies and inconsistencies in customer experience can rapidly accumulate implicit costs. Lack of a consolidated approach to customer experience impacts internal staff as well as clients, and will contribute to increased expense of a support organization. Planning and development processes need to assign appropriate weight and/or impact to user-facing components, addressing them at the beginning of development efforts with explicit funding and skilled attention, in order to avoid expensive and on-going maintenance issues.

Organizations benefit from having a customer experience consultant involved in projects either at their initiation, or as a solution to expansion and proliferation issues. At initiation a consultant can insure that business and user needs are met in the initial release of the system/product, that it is easy to use and well-designed, and that the user interfaces and interaction processes are flexible, consistent, and scalable. As a solution to expansion and proliferation issues a consultant can make specific recommendations to improve designs and processes. They can also define organization-wide standards such as style guides and shared UI resources, self-service delivery channels, and design processes to be used across product development groups for achieving consistency and minimizing development, deployment, and support costs.

Investment in effective customer experience makes it easier for organizations to respond to growth and change in the marketplace. Organizations that understand client-centric development principles, and deliver well-designed systems and products, experience both high customer satisfaction and internal efficiencies.

The following types of projects can benefit from Customer Experience input:

Projects that are complex…
- Projects with multiple stakeholders and/or a wide or varied user base
- Applications, products, or services with complex business rules
- Applications, products, or services that deliver and capture significant amounts of data
- Delivery of services through multiple channels

Projects that involve the following types of activities…
- Business and functional requirements articulation
- Designing use cases, user interfaces, and interaction flows
- Enabling customer self-service through electronic channels
- Developing documentation for IT development, QA, and user manuals

Projects that focus on contained development efforts…
- Application user interface design/re-design
- Designing front-ends for portal and intranet environments
- Application prototype development
- White or gray label projects that allow for client customization

Projects involving planning and analysis…
- Use case development
- Competitive assessments
- Vendor analysis
- Client access/delivery strategies

Projects to define standards and guidelines…
- Style guide development (and/or expansion)
- Creation of shared UI resources
- Usability guidelines
- Architecture projects that include client-facing components

Projects involving training…
- Development of training tools and resources
- Customer Experience educational programs for developers, quality assurance, and customer support
- Designing and delivering surveys and user feedback mechanisms

Sample process for a simple application design project:
- Define user-base and business needs
- Develop use-cases (in context with business and functional requirements)
- Define application interaction flow
- Design screen layouts (in context with graphical design standards)
- Review designs with business and technology
- Produce documentation of the application’s front-end experience. Document will be used by technology for accurate development, by QA for writing of testing scripts, and by business for developing user guides and tracking functionality of the product.