Earlier this month, we attended Forrester’s CX NYC Conference, and throughout our time there, we heard digital leaders speaking about customer experience from the earliest touch points through the full customer lifecycle. Talking to your customers throughout that experience is a critical part of your larger CX strategy. Here at AnswerLab, we conduct UX research in the digital space for clients in a variety of industries with a diverse range of products to bring customer insights to their customer experience initiatives.
We were thrilled to be able to share American Express’ story of integrating a human-centered design process into their design culture with Forrester attendees. While many brands are seeing customer experience scores plateau and stall, American Express is leveraging customer insight to deliver break-through mobile app experiences. With their innovative practices, American Express ranked highest in overall satisfaction in the JD Power Credit Card Mobile App Rankings, jumping 31 points from the previous year.
To hear about American Express’ CX strategy for their mobile app redesign and their UX research and design practice, watch our full keynote below in conversation with Evan English, Vice President Product Design, Enterprise Membership Digital Experiences, American Express.
Here are a few of our key takeaways and recommendations:
Focus on building experiences that are essential to customers’ everyday lives.
Instead of creating a transactional experience in their mobile app, American Express looked to elevate their mobile experience to an essential part of the customer journey. Understanding users through research was crucial to successfully implementing this change and creating a redesigned mobile app experience.
Rapidly test and iterate designs in progress.
Every Thursday, American Express brings in real users into a usability lab to test a variety of ideas and concepts throughout the day. This allows product owners, engineers, stakeholders, designers, and researchers to get in front of customers and get a human reaction to concepts and designs currently in progress. Rolling research programs like these go by many names, but we call ours Rapid Labs. American Express’ success with this program has led to research becoming an essential part of their design process, making human-centered design a part of the DNA of the company.
Embed designers and researchers in your product and engineering teams.
Because they have a shared vision and goals, building these relationships was the key to getting constituents working together on creating good products that are essential to customers’ lives. When it comes to research and iteration, bring in marketing partners, service partners, and other business owners who work in non-digital spaces as well.
Treat your processes like a product.
Test, iterate, and improve your research process and practice as you would your end product. Training your teams to understand and utilize different sources of insights and research methods is critical to improving your process every step of the way. Unless you can get product managers, marketers, and other stakeholder teams to understand how these methods work, the process won’t be as valuable.
Want to bring more research into your CX strategy? Talk with a strategist today.
