In designing your customer experience framework, what features do you want available from each channel?
As I said yesterday, it all starts with what the customer wants. If you listen to your customers and observe their behaviors, you will get a good sense of what they are looking for in each channel. Not everyone will want the same things but, you can learn the features that the main users of each channel will want.
Consider a simple direct marketing campaign from a retail store promoting a sale. The store might reach some customers through direct mail, others via email and still others through social media using an offer on a company Facebook page. The example in Figure 1 below is simplistic in that it only considers three ways of receiving an offer and three ways of responding but, the concept is still clear: the channel in which the customer initially receives the offer may or may not be the one that they want to use to respond. To take it a step further, the customer may want to respond to certain things in one channel and perform other activities using a different channel.
Customers don’t think in terms of optimized user interfaces, they think about what they want to do next. If you design for activities – both those the customer wants to take and those you want the customer to take – you can create a smart design framework that considers all appropriate channels for your target audience.
Elizabeth Gooding is the editor of the Insight Forums blog and president of Gooding Communications Group www.GoodComm.net
