User Experience (UX) can be best understood as the accumulation of all interactions a user has with your product or service over time. These interactions include using your app, encountering your company’s ads, visiting your physical store, and engaging with your staff. These touchpoints collectively shape the User’s Experience, and for optimal results, your organization must support a unified ecosystem of these touchpoints.
In today’s business landscape, understanding your customer’s perspective and delivering products and services that surpass expectations are essential. While many companies with UX teams excel in customer focus, their efforts can falter if the company’s culture and structure don’t align with the demands of great UX.
Companies are complex entities influenced by factors such as culture, business models, inertia, infrastructure, siloed units, personalities, and resources. These factors define the environment in which UX work transpires and its potential outcomes.
UX work can unveil aspects impacting the goal of creating a superior customer experience, even if these aspects extend beyond traditional UX domains. Seamless collaboration is crucial. In my role as a UX designer for a project allowing insurance agents to offer credit cards to customers in physical offices, seemingly straightforward ideas revealed intricate challenges due to historical business decisions. An example involved outdated legacy systems requiring a cumbersome UI workaround, adding to agents’ frustrations.
A successful customer experience for this project is seemingly simple: customers should know about the credit card offerings, be able to compare them quickly, and apply easily. However, business inefficiencies can complicate this. Siloed units demand extra effort to align, tenured employees might be territorial, and outdated infrastructures hinder modern customer needs.
The nature of UX is holistic, thriving when integrated with other organizational efforts enhancing customer experience. A thoughtful and adaptable company structure, culture, and strategy that harmonize resources for optimal customer experience lead to long-term rewards: heightened satisfaction, loyalty, and direct contributions to brand and financial success.
