Susan Abbott writes:
Customer experience is the internal response of an individual to their interactions with an organization's products, people, processes and environments.
Integrating across these dimensions is much more complex than managing within one dimension. And we need to integrate more often and more effectively to compete successfully. This is the real reason that many managers' work lives are a parade of meetings sandwiched between marathons of e-mail reading. It's not because they are terrible at time management -- it's that a tremedouns amount of coordination is required to create a differentiated customer experience that feels integrated and seamless to customers.
Perhaps you'll believe AG Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, who says that the way work is organized has changed. It used to be organized along functional lines, but now, the importance of design has created a need for greater coordination.
On the one hand, design is simple. On the other hand, it didn't fit in the way branded consumer products companies work and are organized. I've been in this business for almost 30 years, and it's always been sort of functionally organized, you know, marketing, product development, manufacturing, and sales. Where's design? The answer is, in all of the above.
To create products that provide a really great customer experience, leading organizations are turning to design. But design is pervasive: it is part of process, it is part of environment, it is part of product, it is part of the way people behave when they interact with customers. Design is an essential skill in creating customer experiences that drive results. But you can't put it neatly into a functional department.