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The trend: Experience matters more than we think

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The best experiences create passionate customers… for a minute

A great experience is the ultimate change management tool, helping employees improve productivity and speed adoption of new ways of working. Leaders in outperforming companies wake up obsessed with customer experience and how they should extend that to every touch point and every role in the enterprise.

37%

of consumers have switched brands to protect their privacy

57%

of consumers are uncomfortable with how companies use their personal or business information

Our insights

Every technology product, no matter how functional it is, gains significant value when combined with a high-quality experience. Conversely, technology makes experiences personalized at scale in a way not possible without it.

Whether it is an account origination of a financial product, the digital instruments on a new car, or the end-to-end journey of a flight as enabled by a travel app, experience makes technology more valuable. Technology makes experiences more personalized. And the magical combination makes any product or service much more valuable and profitable.

Foundation models and generative AI are great advancements for AI, but the bigger opportunity is how important it is to embed technology into the ways people work and live—in the easiest to use way possible—if we want to change what people do. This is a critical insight for enterprise transformation and modern change management.

Open AI’s ChatGPT (short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) seemed like an overnight sensation when it attracted more than 100 million users in the first two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. But Open AI launched its first large language model (LLM) in 2018 to little fanfare. It was human feedback that adjusted the responses, and enabled the creation of a simple user interface, ChatGPT, that triggered mass adoption. While the algorithm might have been good enough on its own, the “magical experience” made all the difference in its adoption.

Consumers are now accustomed to digital products and experiences that evolve every day. Companies push updates based on user data, streamlining design and optimizing product offerings based on their behavior. However, it's hard to be customer-centric if you don't understand their motivations and behaviors. When designers can tap into near-real-time data and insights, they can develop experiences that give people more of what they want—and less of what they don't. Today's instrumentation of user interactions with websites, phones, and products is accessible real time and offers new ways for designers to implement “continued product design” and correct product and service irritants with over-the-air updates, resulting in more revenue and better experiences.

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Meet the authors

John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting

Jesus Mantas, Senior Managing Partner, IBM Consulting

Salima Lin, Vice President and Senior Partner, Strategy, Transformation, and Thought Leadership, IBM

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Originally published 08 May 2023

The priorities

A flash of genius isn’t worth much on its own. It’s the painstaking process of implementation that turns brilliance into profits. Getting there requires a keen understanding of human behavior and relentless focus on design thinking across the enterprise.

Putting end users at the center of the design process gives disparate teams a guiding principle. It breaks down silos and blurs the boundaries between disciplines. And when this practice is applied in business, it can significantly boost the bottom line. Recent research from the IBM Institute for Business Value found that companies taking a design-led approach, which is characterized by empathy for end users, business needs, and broader cultural concerns, have a competitive edge. By embedding design thinking in customer, employee, and ecosystem experiences, these organizations saw a rate of revenue growth that was 58% higher than other companies.

Behavioral science attempts to explain why people do what they do, and what are the “predictably irrational” actions most people take when presented with a set of facts. Behavioral economics is the method of analysis that applies psychological insights into human behavior to explain economic decision making. The fascinating power of behavioral economics is that organizations can generate massive improvements in performance sometimes by making simple changes. For instance, in most decisions—“how” they are presented can be up to 500% more important in determining success than the facts. From simple “opt-in vs opt-out” to one-click buying, every enterprise should be applying behavioral economics and design to implement new workflows that can enhance performance and outcomes.

By understanding customer needs and consistently (and proactively) meeting them, organizations can also develop personalized experiences that build trust. This can be as simple as a chatbot that greets the customer by first name or as complex as using AI to recommend new products based on previous purchases or products viewed. But that trust is easy to break. Recent research found that 37% of consumers have switched brands to protect their privacy. And 57% are uncomfortable with how companies use their personal or business information. To build and maintain trust with customers, companies should use their data fairly and transparently, give people the ability to opt-out of certain uses, and provide clear value in exchange.

The bet

Apply design leadership to change every aspect of the enterprise

Actions to take

Instrument customer journeys with analytics to understand every product and experience.

Ensure full-time professional designers are embedded into every transformation team and empower them with co-creation methods such as IBM Garage.

Constantly monitor digital and physical customer journeys to detect and eliminate irritants.

Consider behavioral economics skills to increase the likelihood that users will follow the intended journey. Make the desired workflow the easiest one from the perspective of the users.

Increase design, AI, and data science competencies in your enterprise through continued engagement and training.

Help holdouts see the value of changing habits by highlighting how new workflows can boost their performance.

Engage partners to drive better experiences. Build more insightful personas and empathy maps that deeply connect teams to customers.

Design for trust. Make sure consumers can dictate how their data will be used, give people the ability to opt out of certain use—and ensure that your employees practice proper data governance.

Rethink your definition of customers to include employees. Embed design thinking into internal processes and technology.

See the bet in action

Health Services Executive of Ireland improves first-touch experience for COVID vaccination process

The Health Service Executive (HSE) of Ireland partnered with IBM and Salesforce to create a national vaccination platform that could safely and quickly vaccinate the country’s population against COVID-19. The COVAX (COVID Vaccination Information System) platform prioritizes human-centered design principles and incorporates empathy for users.

The platform, which captures all the necessary data to produce a vaccination certificate and helps ensure sensitive personal information remains in GDPR compliance, was designed to make the vaccination process easier for key people who would first use it: vaccinators, care-home patients, and healthcare workers.

The platform was built by the technical team before the solution plan was finalized due to the urgency of the pandemic. It uses various Salesforce clouds for appointment scheduling, helpdesk support, employee training, and integration with other systems.

To stay current and keep up with change priorities issued by multiple government agencies and committees, the virtual development team used an extremely responsive process, including agile methodologies, to rapidly develop, test, and iterate the solution.

The agile process allowed the team to adapt to the rapidly changing COVID-19 vaccine availability and rollout plan. The platform has been a significant factor in Ireland’s success in tracking nearly 11 million COVID-19 vaccinations across the country.