What is customer experience design? Benefits, examples, and tips

What comes to mind when we think of a good customer experience? The film Pretty Woman, of course—but not that scene where the high-end Rodeo Drive shop blatantly ignores Julia Roberts because she doesn’t look like their typical customer. The stellar customer experience moment happens a few minutes later when another store treats Roberts like a princess, giving her fabulous options and taking her wants and needs into consideration.

In 2022, support teams can’t afford to be like the first snobby boutique. They need to care about every single customer and lean on feedback and tools—like CRMs and customer journey maps—to offer a world-class customer experience (CX) and meet consumers’ increasing expectations.

CX design vs. UX design: What’s the difference?

Customer experience and user experience (UX) can often be confused, but there’s a simple way to differentiate them: remember that UX is part of the overall CX design.

UX focuses on a customer’s interaction with a specific product or service, while CX encompasses all the possible interactions with a brand.

CX design is based on the overall picture of a customer’s journey and every touchpoint between a consumer and a brand—from the first time they see an ad or social media post to them making a purchase or contacting customer service. The way buyers feel about those interactions and the business itself are also part of CX.

A good UX design experience is making sure your website is designed in a way that makes it easy for visitors to navigate it, even if it’s one they’ve never used before.

Customer experience design examples

Wondering what a standout CX design looks like in practice? Check out these three real-world examples from top brands.

Bang Energy: A brand ambassador program builds trust with target customers

Bang Energy uses its brand ambassador program to foster long-term influencer relationships, which helps the company attract Gen Z consumers.

When Gen Zers see the influencers they follow are invested in a partnership with Bang Energy, they are more likely to trust the brand. Gen Z is Bang Energy’s target audience, and the company knows this younger generation prefers personalized content from influencers who are “normal,” not just celebrities.

Bang Energy bases its CX design on knowing what its ideal customer wants, which is authenticity. The results speak for themselves—the company generated $1.2 billion in sales between June 2020 and June 2021.

Robinhood: Transparency and simplicity keep people coming back

More than a year before Robinhood launched its stock trading app, the company used referral marketing to create hype and promote its message, resulting in nearly a million sign-ups.

Robinhood incentivized the pre-launch waiting process and turned it into a game of sorts. When you signed up, you were placed in a virtual queue, and when you referred a friend and they signed up, you moved ahead in the line. This increased your chances of gaining early access. The referral and sign-up processes were simple, too, which made people more likely to participate.

The company also built trust in its CX by updating followers frequently to tell them where the app was in development. For many customers, this transparency motivated them to try the product once it was launched.

Noom: Influencer and affiliate programs attract the right audience

After achieving a sales growth of more than 3,000 percent over four years, the weight loss app Noom can safely say it knows how to connect with its target customers.

This growth was largely driven by Noom’s influencer program. Instead of selecting influencers who were already in shape, Noom worked with people of various body types, which resonated more with consumers who were struggling with weight loss.

Compared to its competitors, Noom offers its affiliates more benefits for their referrals and link clicks. Noom also provides an attractive and user-friendly platform for affiliates to navigate.

The customer experience design process

CX design isn’t about guesswork—it’s about gaining a strong understanding of your customers and using that information to shape your brand’s touchpoints. Follow these steps to create a CX design that keeps customers at the forefront.

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4 tips for building your CX design strategy

Building a good CX design is about seeing the big picture and delivering an authentic experience to your customers. Here are four ways to make this happen.

1. Build a cohesive view of your customer touchpoints

   Customers want to feel understood, no matter what channel they’re using. Offer a consistent experience by centralizing your support team’s customer data and omnichannel communication in one CRM.

   With a CRM, support agents can access all customer conversations across channels from a single dashboard. At the same time, agents can quickly access key information about a customer—from their past interactions with the brand to their product preferences—from profiles in the CRM.

2. Share the customer journey map

   Once you create a customer journey map, share it with other departments so the company as a whole can deliver world-class experiences. When each team understands the customer journey, it’s easier for everyone to track touchpoints and deliver a consistently satisfying customer experience.

   Say the support team discovers that most of the customers who become long-term advocates belong to the same membership tier. Your agents could pass this information along to the marketing team, who could promote that tier more heavily.

3. Adopt internal and external knowledge bases

   Customers are increasingly eager to solve their issues independently. According to our CX Trends Report, 69 percent of consumers prefer to resolve as many simple issues as possible on their own.

   Empower your audience to find solutions by building a robust external knowledge base. Create resources that address FAQs and common troubleshooting requests. Plexus Worldwide, for example, knows its customers want the ability to access support at any time, so it offers helpful self-service options via a detailed knowledge base. This makes it easy for consumers to find what they’re looking for.

   Along with self-service resources, create an internal knowledge base for support agents. This enables agents to provide quick solutions to recurring customer requests and deliver accurate, up-to-date information.

4. Be adaptable to customers’ evolving wants and needs

   The pandemic changed everything. Companies need to maintain a spirit of flexibility to be there for customers in ways that may not have occurred to them previously.

   Train agents to be empathetic by role-playing hypothetical situations with difficult, emotional customers. You can also shadow agents’ calls and give them feedback afterward.

   Harry’s went above and beyond for its customers by adding a crisis helpline to its homepage during COVID-19. By responding to current events that could affect its customers, Harry’s team showed its audience that they see them as people—not just buyers.

How to use CX design to optimize the customer journey

The customer journey represents a consumer’s state of mind and needs at every touchpoint in the buying process. Typically, these stages include awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and advocacy. CX design plays an important role in each phase.

Create a consistent CX design with a customer experience platform

To successfully implement a customer experience design that sets you apart and keeps customers coming back, everyone on your team needs to embrace the CX design principles. Use a customer experience platform like Zendesk to help your team better manage interactions across the buyer journey and to deliver the type of support consumers want and expect.