By Ray
Categories: Customer experience | Experience strategy | User-centered design
Analytics are powerful tools
Hard data and analytics have become the chief source of insight in digital for many businesses. Big data and analytics tools are attractive to marketers and business decision makers because it’s relatively easy to demonstrate their worth; they make customer behaviours visible, allow you to develop hypotheses for testing in live environments and enable the optimisation of important sales and service processes, delivering a near immediate return on investment.
This is extremely valuable and these tools enable businesses to maximise return from their existing, digital environments, but over reliance on these tools can render a business myopic in the absence of richer sources of customer insight. Analytics should not be seen as a surrogate for qualitative research and close customer collaboration, particularly when it comes to the big decisions in digital strategy and experience design; in this context analytics are a blunt tool.
Designing for the future
Strategy, planning and innovative design requires judgements to be made about the future and it requires businesses to establish a vision for how they will engage with and service their customers in future scenarios.
How do customers expect and want to engage with brands in the shopping process? What does an ideal self-service environment provide and how does it feel? What will future multichannel journeys look like? These are some of the big questions that need to be answered when you’re designing for the future and they’re best answered in collaboration with your customers.
As planners and designers we need a deeper appreciation of and empathy with the customer. An understanding of the pain points customers experience today becomes a powerful catalyst for innovation and a driver for improved interaction in the future. Insights into customer’s aspirations and desires offer a well spring of ideas for new digital products, services and experiences. This form of insight cannot be divined from big data and no degree of optimisation will make a poorly conceived idea work.
Your thoughts
Andrew Davies said:
If you read the book Lean Startup by Eric Reis, you’ll notice while he does recommend a great deal of optimisation based on actionable analytics, there is still always a point in time where you won’‘t achieve the kind of step change you desire without a real shake up of the product. He calls this the Persevere or Pivot point.
When you hit one of these points then it is only a deep insight into your customers a excellent design which will get you through.
Nice blog keep it up.
Ray McCune said:
Thanks for the comments Andrew, I haven’t gotten around to reading Lean Start up yet, but its definitely on my list!
admin said:
Test