Great Customer Experiences Start With UX Research

The first Tuesday of October every year is CX Day – a day to celebrate professionals dedicated to designing and delivering exceptional customer experiences. But what exactly does customer experience entail? And how do teams consistently deliver good CX? What are some often overlooked elements of the customer experience? Several members of Applause’s UX research team shared their insights:

Shafik said that it’s clear when a company puts in the effort to deliver great CX. “A lot of companies are pretty hesitant about doing the work that it takes to get feedback from their clients. When a company does put that work in, it really shows in their product, it shows in their website. It shows they’re listening to who their customers are, what they want, where their gaps are, what is or isn’t working.”

For Smith, a great customer experience is one without friction, frustration or things that don’t work in the ways that customers expect. “The product needs to be more than just functional, it needs to be a joy to use,” he said. He used a simple rhyme to sum up the essence of great experiences: “Intuitive design with the customer’s needs in mind.”

“We’re either trying to solve a problem or we’re trying to prevent problems from happening,” Ross-Hirsch said. “There’s lots of nuances, but we’re really looking to make sure things work. And you have to make sure that you’re testing, you have to make sure that you have people interacting with your product, ideally in real-world settings, as much as possible.”

Applause supports a variety of different teams that are focused on customer experience. From customer experience teams to customer support and IVR teams, to digital teams creating prototypes or teams testing a new feature before it goes live, Ross-Hirsch said that UX research can help teams understand not just whether something works, but whether the user experience is good or needs improvement. “We can identify where an issue happened or where patterns are in so far as they affect the user’s experience,” she said.

Silver sees identifying customer pain points and opportunities for improvement as a clear way UX research can contribute to a better overall customer experience. Researchers often act as the voice of the customer as well, offering visibility into their wants and needs. “Executives or stakeholders aren’t necessarily talking to their customers one-on-one,” Silver said. “UX researchers really act as that voice and help drive empathy to the users on those pain points and opportunities.”  

UX research also often ties into strategic decisions and business goals. “The work that we do guides product road maps,” Silver said. “We’ll sit down with different product teams and look at their product road maps and make sure that we’re doing work that aligns or ladders up to decisions that they’re making. We can help inform marketing strategies and support larger company initiatives through the work that we do.”

Shafik said she sees many teams skip overall usability testing; they often don’t take time to collect feedback from their customers. Smith said, “You have to engage with your customer base, the people that use your products, to really gain an understanding of what can be improved and what’s going to move the needle when it comes to people’s perception of your product or how much they enjoy using it.”

Continuity and consistency across omnichannel customer journeys don’t get enough attention, according to Ross-Hirsch. “When people are in omnichannel experiences moving between channels, such as from digital to physical, we often find a lot of break points both from a UX perspective and a functional perspective. Those breaks really have impacts on the customer experience. The parts that aren’t digital can often be a blind spot for digital teams because you have to be watching somebody out in the world.”

Some organizations put all their effort into attracting new customers without thinking about how to improve the experience for existing clients. Silver said, “A lot of times people will focus on the new customer experience. That’s all well and good, but you also want to focus on the people that have been there for a while and make sure that they’re getting what they need to keep returning to your product or service.”

Smith would like to see companies better balance customer needs with business priorities when designing their applications. He said he often sees business priorities emphasized in ways that detract from the user experience. “You might log into your banking app and you’re presented with three consecutive screens that you have to close that are offering you something that you didn’t ask for and you don’t need. So, the user goes into the app with a goal in mind — maybe they want to make a payment or look at their account balance  — and instead of being able to get there, they have to click or tap multiple times to close things that they don’t want. There’s a time and a place to put those modals into an application, but a lot of organizations don’t think through that, which often leads to frustration.”  

“They think their internal teams can handle user experience decisions on their own, but the reality is, more often than not, internal teams are too close to the product,” Smith said. In addition, internal teams may not represent customers’ habits or the ways they interact with applications or products. “You can’t replace UX research with internal assessments. It doesn’t work the same way. It’s almost always the case that when you start talking with customers, their opinions, their frustrations, their pain points, what they actually want – encompasses things that the internal team never considered,” Smith said.  

Many organizations don’t fully understand the scope of UX research, said Silver. “Oftentimes people think of UX as being very narrow in scope: we have to test just this product or app or web page when in reality UX can be much more holistic of an approach, really taking into account your entire customer experience or tying into broader themes.” She called out that much UX research can be foundational, focused on learning who a company’s users are, what they are doing, and identifying their needs, wants, motivations and desires.  

Another misconception is that UX research has to be a lengthy and costly process. Silver said that while Applause can do larger, long-term studies, “there’s also a lot of opportunity for quicker, faster research. And that still yields really potent, insightful and actionable feedback.” 

Shafik said, “Even just a simple usability study or having moderated sessions with clients and hearing from them first hand – a simple project can pay off immediately.”

Ross-Hirsch agreed. “You don’t always need really long intense research. One of my first questions when I’m talking to clients is, ‘what’s your timeline,’ then ‘how much do you need to know?’ There’s lots of options and my goal is to be flexible and figure out how to get people what they need so they can keep moving,” she said.

Ross-Hirsch said that improving overall customer experience often starts with addressing customer support issues. For example, the customer support team from a streaming media platform was getting a lot of inquiries from customers who wanted to cancel a streaming service they had ordered through another provider. “There was some UI confusion, but at the end of the day, the overall issue was that people were calling this provider to cancel subscriptions that weren’t through them. People didn’t actually know where their subscriptions were coming from,” Ross-Hirsch said. “The conversation was, then, for these certain segments that are navigating these subscriptions, how do we make things easier? Can we help these customers understand that they might not actually have a subscription through us?”

Proactive communication with customers is one of the tools Silver sees consistently boost UX and ultimately improve the customer experience. “Just letting them know what’s going on, whether that’s an upcoming change or an update, potential issues that might be happening, known bugs, if a new feature is coming or a redesign. Communicating to them at every step of the way on how to get to where they’re going to accomplish their tasks,” Silver said.  

“A lot of the work can be very meaningful,” Shafik said. In one recent engagement with a digital health organization, the team was researching a website about Alzheimer’s. “We had to do moderated sessions with people who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or their caregivers — we were able to spend an hour with these people listening to their experiences and having them provide us feedback on the usability of the site… obviously, we hope that when we’re running these types of studies, we’re helping to find ways to improve their lives and quality of life,” she said.