designing for experiences across channels

This is some early and raw thinking I’ve been doing about designing and delivering experiences successfully across many touchpoints.

Organizations are channel-bound. Customers aren’t. This outlines components and practices necessary to deliver great customer experiences across more than a single channel.

With the proliferation of new screens and new moments in peoples’ lives, it’s natural for businesses to conceive of great new customer experiences that are more desirable and scalable, and therefore much more valuable to everyone. However, organizations lack the simple practices to plan, deliver, and manage a customer experience across more than one touchpoint.

I’ve obviously borrowed some ideas from business strategy, service design, brand strategy, and that wacky world of design thinking.

The diagram shows some of the key concepts to define and manage. The top row plans for the experience predominately from the customer’s perspective. The bottom row is — while still customer centric — taken from the perspective of what’s smart for the organization to do. The middle is the important interaction between customers and organizations that forms the experience.

The value column is key to ensure the experience is viable to the business and useful to customers. The flow column defines what the experience should be. And the change column captures the means by which you can move from current state towards a better and more valuable experience. To explain ‘evidence’ in this column: showing evidence of the future experience is often the best way of helping the organization change and move towards it.

For easier viewing, you can see this diagram larger or in PDF format.

Note: this is somewhat a re-post of what I originally shared on Flickr, which received some interesting feedback of where some improvements can be made.