Interweaving Design Roles for authentic CX

Interweaving Design Roles for Authentic CX

Why has CX become so critical for brands today? A brand presence with quality products, a great sales experience, and attentive after-sales efforts would have been the order of the day earlier. Today’s customers are highly discerning about brand truths, which means a brand has to gain customer retention with authenticity to build trust and loyalty. With brands vying for attention and tech in the forefront, there is a huge landscape shift in meaningful customer engagement, further challenging authenticity. To engage customers consistently over a long period of time and to keep fulfilling their promises, brands have upped their game to become more personalized and empathetic in their digital engagement. From chatbots to apps, staying with the user has become a part of the journey.

Ultimately the brand has to delight the customer, making the journey meaningful and memorable, as well as satisfying the user’s expectancy. There’s also a new playing field: the “phygital” CX where the physical experience is backed up with digital data and interventions. With the human mind conditioned to constantly search for conversations and data online, it has become the norm for any experience at a physical venue to be supplemented with digital, usually by scanning a QR code. Technology has made access democratic but the interactions often leave us cold. Substituting the physical menu at a restaurant, you are now made to order via your phone. We yearn for the waiter to serve us, the encounter of hospitality, and a superlative sensorial experience.

Any brand’s desire is to create a lasting relationship with its customers. Thus, long-term brand strategy essentially integrates into a cohesive CX strategy, positioning the brand to closely interact with customers through a multiplicity of experiences from awareness to conversion, aiming to create retention. The designer’s role in this is complex and multifaceted. It requires that we cull out nuanced differentiators for every brand to create its unique positioning and then to create many touchpoints for continual interactions with the customer, whereby the brand reinforces its strengths and creates familiarity and comfort.

The Designer’s Expertise

Anthony Lopez points out, “Experts in every field have delivered great outcomes, but narrow perspectives have often restricted the emergence of greater truths and even destroyed ecosystems.”

The designer has evolved as a professional cross-pollinator who can bridge different expert opinions to deliver holistic solutions. To ensure a measurable difference for the client, design studios develop design methodologies. At Lopez Design, we have shaped three possible design interventions, by varying the role of the designer for seamless customer experiences. Throughout the design process we put on the hats of Expert, Collaborator and Nudger, as and when needed, and many times overlapping.

The Designer as Expert

The Expert is the most conventional role of the designer, where they take charge, carefully tailoring the brand story after gaining deep insights and responding to the brand vision and mission. In our wayfinding design for Central Vista, we brought together the functional requirements and symbolic value of the avenue that leads to the seat of Government in India. Working closely with HCP Design, the planning and architects firm in the forefront, we responded to the needs of user experience and created physical signage that was non-intrusive. We designed for inclusivity, using braille. We developed a special Gender Neutral icon and commissioned a custom typeface. The wayfinding experience of the renamed Kartavya Path was brought alive through such thoughtful details, making the user journey complete by combining tactile, functional, and individual needs.

From Expert to Nudger

Increasingly, our clients want to shape their own brand stories. In the 21st century, everyone is a photographer, everyone is a writer, and anyone can become an artist. Being a nudger is about putting power in the hands of the brand owners and their people. In these cases, the client believes they know their brand well, and that there are many layers and details of the brand that may be impossible to communicate to the designer. Our role becomes to help the client interpret their complexities and guide them to create systems that are responsive to their audience’s needs. We educate the client to own their brand narratives and deliver them with speed and intensity, closely following their customer journeys through active social media posts, marketing campaigns, upgrading website content, and participating in communications across platforms. For Nestaway, an online home rental platform, which was ambitious about equitable and accessible housing for young metro migrants, we created a “voice box” identity, which the client team could use innovatively to tell stories and generate messaging. The result was a captivating and trendy customer experience with emoji-type characters that are highly relatable to the younger generation.

Authenticity needs to have visibility

To deliver a new brand with authenticity, it needs to be marketed with a good budget for advertising to make sure that it gets visibility. In the case of A23 (Ace Two Three) an online rummy platform, we repositioned them as a professional rummy coach, distinguishing them from hordes of other players in the market. Our role as ‘expert’ was in defining this distinctive positioning and giving the platform a unique space to grow as a responsible brand. This replaced rummy’s association with gambling to that of a competitive game. With our ‘nudging’, the client then took on the new brand image to fruition by implementing exciting offerings such as championships and tournaments, with Shah Rukh Khan as brand ambassador.

The Designer as Expert, Collaborator and Nudger

For the designer to take a step back and let other stakeholders play a role may be considered unusual. But increasingly, we have found, much to our delight and surprise, that if we set up a system and allow non-designers to participate in the process, a rich and contextual solution evolves, which gives users ownership of the brand. In this collaborative process, the customer’s conversion to the brand happens because they themselves are creating the brand story: they feel pride of place, accountability, and a sense of belonging. This was explicit in our branding for Ayushman Bharat HWCs where local artisans were given the freedom to interpret the designs based on a standardized set of rules. 1.5 lakh HWCs is no small risk, and we assured the client of the ‘expert’ role of the designer, where we would design the standard templates and the entire system. The first HWC at Chattisgarh was proof of our promise. Thus, our interweaving roles of expert, collaborator and nudger gave one of GoI’s most ambitious programmes a brand story that gave individual ownership to every region. It brought out India’s ’unity in diversity’ to actualize a visible, authentic and tangible customer experience.

Written by Sujatha Shankar Kumar

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