As the CX industry moves forward, its engineers are looking for ways to improve customer service by refining the CX journey to better reflect the thoughts, preferences, and ideas of people in a trend known as human design.
First coined by a global design firm called IDEO, human-centered design is a creative approach to problem-solving by keeping consumer preferences, dislikes, and desires in mind when designing the customer experience design process.
The term is slowly influencing CX design and development as organizations look to create more relevant customer journeys that will lead to a bigger profit down the line. However, this leads to several questions about human-centered design and why it is becoming more important.
Why is human-centered design so important?
Human-centered design has become popular in recent years because of its potential to fix the CX gap. A 2021 survey revealed that over 75% of companies are satisfied with the digital customer experience they offer, compared to just 35% of consumers. The disparity between corporations and consumers dates back to when the pandemic first struck and corporations made massive changes to their CX infrastructure but at the expense of customer convenience. Human-centered design can be seen as a means to close the gap.
Furthermore, human-centered design can identify some of the problems in the customer journey which is often crucial to success. This can help organizations overcome one of the biggest problems in digital-first customer service: companies fail to discover where the issues are because it is difficult to gain feedback. However, with a human-centered approach, companies will always be in touch with the customer experience, making it easier to discover pain points as they crop up and resolve them.
Best practices for human-centered CX design
Incorporating human-centered design into CX requires organizations to account for the following:
- Employ multiple techniques to gather feedback and avoid fitting data around preconceived narratives.
- Improve the customer journey to create customer promises and commitments after the initial research.
- Prototype a customer journey and test it with real users to develop a human-centered experience.
What does this mean for CX?
Human-centered design is the latest tech innovation that has changed how we think about designing and deploying customer flows. This new approach to CX design and deployment has become so pervasive because organizations are looking to build a better connection with their customers by building a network that meets the customers need for convenience and efficiency.
This could have significant implications on the types of tools used in the assessment, design and deployment of CX networks because organizations can no longer make assumptions about what their customers want. They will have to rely on tools and platforms that can provide them with the necessary data, which could affect their investment decisions.