Business Stakeholders Are Increasingly Understanding the Importance of Providing an Outstanding Customer Experience. But How Do They Collaborate with Marketers to Take Their Products and Services in the Right Direction? Design Systems Might Just Be the Pied-Piper for Futuristic Customer Experience Endeavors

“You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”
-Steve Jobs

An enterprise’s ability to provide optimum customer service will decide the success of tomorrow’s organizations. As businesses become exceedingly competitive, the winner will be the one who can truly make its customers feel special.

So, why are companies prioritizing customer happiness over business strategy?

Huffingpost has this to say.

• 67% of customers left a brand due to a bad experience
• 66% of people chose another brand due to appalling service
• 56% of consumers wanted to get the right answer, however, 64% of consumers failed to trust the information that was given to them
• Non-engagement resulted in dissatisfaction in 91% of customers and made them leave

The facts are proof that consumers have huge expectations. Especially, now when enterprises are mushrooming. A talented lot of entrepreneurs are managing to develop stunning products for consumers. However, sustenance of their franchise is solely dependent on they handling their customer’s entire lifecycle.

This is even true for larger corporations who are facing a considerable volume of customer attrition.

But, marketers would question the co-relation between design systems and customer experience.

Before finding that out here is a quick revision of the sphere of client service.

Also Read: How Can Event Data Help Enterprises Build Customers?

Revising the Basics of Customer Satisfaction

Essentially, businesses are restricted to thinking that customer satisfaction is limited to a product and its pricing. Traditionally, while this might be true, today’s consumers anticipate a lot more.

Hence, no longer is customer service a simple entity to gratify. Enterprises need to learn about customer service lifecycle. The vast amount of emerging technologies have enabled organizations to experiment with all aspects of their operations. Hence today’s customer sees a stylized website, Mobile application or a product.

Client Engagement

The challenge for stakeholders is how would they know if their attempts are succeeding? This is where client engagement comes into the picture. Customer engagement assessment is at less than 1 percent. Feedback is the key. Marketers need to put in extra efforts to ensure that they are conversing with their customers. Out of the 26 people dissatisfied with service, only one of them ever complains. If customers do not speak, it should not be taken as a sign of satisfaction.

Contact Center

Businesses should invest heavily in their support teams. 84% of customers are reported to be agitated if a support officer did not have information about their query. The same equation applies to email support tickets. Contact centers are the go-to place for clients regarding their questions. A poorly represented center nosedives brand image completely.

Online Presence

Marketing initiatives need to uplift brand value. Such campaigns should be made with a purpose of developing content that its audience loves to engage in. With the rise of capabilities like Influencer Marketing & Video Analytics marketers have the tools to design them with ease.

Bad content or swarming irrelevant advertisements will kill a brand. This is also true for Social Media. Customers are trending towards raising their voice via Social Media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. Instant response to these mediums impresses consumers.

Customer Delight

Customer delight is being pro-active about customers. Essentially customer delight is surprising customers with gestures that benefit them. Customer delight convinces clients that the organization they trade with cares about them. It ensures that it’s not all business and that the company is creating a feel-good atmosphere for its customers. Customer delight guarantees –

• Customer loyalty
• Positive word of mouth
• High retentions

Design

You might be an enterprise who has got most elements of the customer service paradigm right. However, this last bit is a little tricky and involves slightly complex processes to execute. However, in today’s business scenario, the design is a game-changer.

Today, designing for customer service needs to cover all the aforementioned scenarios along with creating newer opportunities for enterprises.

One of the many reasons that Apple is so successful as a brand today is its immersive design. People love It so much that Apple has managed to sell 700 million iPhones globally. Today, Apple doesn’t need to advertise.

For companies to reach great heights, the answer is not copying somebody’s strategy but to build their own. Enterprises need to truly define what their essence is as an organization. They can only then direct themselves to define and implement aesthetically beautiful designs.

As the world shifts towards mobile-first approach companies are gearing up to develop functionally gorgeous applications. They are also working on upgrading their website to optimize browser experience. The challenge here is homogeneity. The entire experience never appears seamless. This is where designers can leverage design systems.

Good designing is also extremely critical to provide omnichannel commerce. Omnichannel commerce is a big opportunity and very few organizations have enabled the omnichannel experience for their customers.

Futuristic technology powered products are also assisting the customer care mission. Internal products like Intelligent assistants and chatbots are showing huge potential to support customers 24/7. This element needs designing too and needs to integrate with business goals.

Hence, design teams need to be enabled with the latest designing tools. Change is always difficult but in order to be at par with the present business scenario, transitions have to happen.

What’s more is that this has to be worked backward. Marketers need to collaborate extensively with designers in order to explain their customer servicing ideas to them. Only then can marketing goals, customer service, and business goals come in sync.

Hence it is very important to know about design systems.

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What Are Design Systems?

A Design System is an array of components that can be reused/recycled to design using a variety of styles. Design Systems enables enterprises to design business critical elements at scale.

System Designs have been around as an applicable concept with design teams. What is changing though is the way in which enterprises are applying it to their business objectives. The Design Systems in the discussion are for products of a digital nature. Hence in this context, Digital Products like websites, mobile applications, Social Media etc. will qualify.

People who need to be enabled with Design Systems are –

• Digital designers
• Analysts who work on Customer Experience
• Designers that craft interactive designs for internal and external customers
• Front-end developers

Why Should Enterprises Use Design Systems?

Designing world-class digital products is never an easy job. Enterprises who aggressively venture into making excellent digital products will be benefitting by using Design Systems. Businesses need great products that satisfy the entire customer service paradigm, and they need it continuously.

Hence using Design Systems would –

Easily Build Larger Applications

Design Systems help develop applications that comprise of several hundred pages, effortlessly. Further, enterprises can scale up or down depending on the business requirement and can build apps from scratch.

Homogenous Interface

Customers love consistency, be it apps or a website. Design Systems helps developers create a consistent look and feel across a digital product. This earns huge praises from customers about design and adds up to brand value. This is because when customers see a website with two dozen different styles, they lose interest in that brand.

Reusability

Since Design Systems can be reused, developers can build really fast. Interactive and customer experience evangelists can rapidly deploy prototypes and test it for usability.

Next Level Teamwork

The team handling the design section will have a lot more free time due to the above-mentioned scenarios. They can then collaborate and work on upgrading existing products and adding more customer delight. They can also brainstorm about the long list of projects that are pending in the pipeline.

Collaborating with the Marketing Community

Marketers need to collaborate with designers to roll out effective marketing campaigns. They can build a working roadmap about marketing campaigns and proceed to do a hand-off to designers. Designers can then build digital products in tandem with marketing campaigns. Since key teams are in sync, it is very likely that customers would be more than impressed.

Being a Customer-Focused  Enterprise

As customers experience products online, they are comparing it on scales of look, feel & functionality, inventory and customer centricity. As enterprises are understanding this they are continually upgrading their digital presence to be more in favor of consumer expectations.

However, digital products are getting refined every day. The main capability of Design Systems is to fine-tune digital products in real time. Hence, Design Systems will be the future of customer experience.

The only sensible thing that enterprises can do though, is work designs with their own values and themes. Replicating design patterns of an already successful digital product will, in the long run, jeopardize the company and its brand value.

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