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Turn your customers into your biggest fans — and most eager referrers

Hey there — it’s JDM. 👋

I’m back with a weekly tip on launching products sooner and scaling them faster.

Today’s email is about turning your customer into you biggest fans, and it takes about 6 minutes to read.

Let’s do this. 👇


When I talk about customer experience, you might be tempted to conclude this email’s all about UI and UX, but it’s not.

If you’re running a business with any technical component — even just a marketing website for a service business — there’s no escaping the need for a good user interface and technical experience. But that is, at most, only one component of what contributes to customer experience.

Customer experience is the feeling customers get when they interact with your product across the entire lifecycle:

  • awareness

  • evaluation

  • purchase

  • delivery

  • support

We have many kinds of experiences when we interact with companies. Some are good — we feel comforted or supported or delighted. Others are very much not — we feel confused, frustrated, or stuck. We form these impressions early in the process, and they are reinforced or debunked as our relationship with the product deepens. We notice when our experience is disjointed or inconsistent, and we internalize these as confusion at best, and “meh” at worst.

Meh kills companies.

But when the experience works, it’s amazing! We get the experience we hoped for — and more. We’re pleasantly surprised. We’re eager to engage. And we tell our friends about it. There is no greater predictor of massive success for a startup than the experience of its customers. It all starts here.

But while eliciting these kinds of experiences is predictable, it’s not self-explanatory.

Let’s start with a realization:

You don’t design customer experiences — you design for them.

Experiences are internal to the customer. They are transient, fleeting, and malleable.

You can contribute to them, but you can’t control them.

Your goal is to design every aspect of our product or service with the experience you want your customers to have in mind. You design your products and services for the desired experience, but you can’t create it directly.

As you construct your startup from the ground up, design thinking can help you put the customer and their experience at the center of everything you do.

Let’s break down how. There are six components.

People

I’m talking about design thinking, so it’s no surprise we start with people.

But it’s not just one people.

As a startup founder, you should have an intimate understanding of your customer — demographically, psychographically, and behaviourally. This is at the very center of any innovation and the core of any business model.

But you should also know who else is in your customer’s orbit. This tells you how they hear about you, what they hear about you, who they trust, the competitors they know, etc.

This includes:

  • Who talks about you in the marketplace

  • Whose advice they listen to (friends, colleagues, news media, etc)

  • For B2B, their boss, supporters, sponsors, stakeholders — and saboteurs

  • Your competition, and any vested interests in their continued success

  • etc.

It’s everyone.

Your customers have wants, needs, and fears, which inform the experience you need to create to be successful. Everyone else is about differentiation and expectations.

Customer Needs

Your customers have needs, and those needs are why you are in business.

What a customer wants to accomplish — their so-called jobs-to-be-done — sit at the center of the experience, because the experience of your startup is the experience of accomplishing those tasks. It’s about a customer journey. From awareness through support, the customer’s experience is dictated by the manner in which those needs are met.

This is a helpful constraint. Some experiences are unavailable to you by virtue of those needs. If you’re a get-out-of-your-way productivity tool, you can’t design for an experience that makes itself known — a delightful experience is not experiencing it at all.

Similarly, if your customer’s need is enjoyment (e.g. for a game), then the entire customer lifecycle must embody that enjoyment.

Experience

And this brings us to the experience you want to design for.

How do we want to the customer to feel during their journey with us? From awareness to sales to support, they are experiencing you at every interaction along the way — and even between interactions, which I’ll get to shortly.

Think back to your customer’s wants, needs, and fears. These speak directly to the experiences that resonate. If they fear wasting too much money, your experience should provide constant reassurance and validation. If they fear missing tasks or dropping the ball, your experience should be supportive and reassuring.

This is one of the most important decisions you’ll make in the design of your product, but most founders don’t put any conscious effort into it.

Don’t make that mistake.

Be explicit about how you want your customers to feel.

Product

When you have a customer with a specific problem, you design a solution for it — duh.

This is the product, or offering component of your customer experience design, and it encompasses the UI and UX we discussed before, but it also includes all of the related activities (such as support) that go into creating and delivering the value promised.

Importantly, you must design the product from the context of the experience you’re designing for.

Software is an easy example. You probably design your interfaces from critical paths. In order to get value, the customer must do X, Y, and Z, so you design and prototype a series of screens that accomplish that goal.

That’s not wrong, but there’s a missing component.

It’s not just about getting X, Y, and Z done. It’s about getting them done in a way that elicits the feeling you want associated with your brand. That not only impacts the critical path itself, and therefore the design of the prototype, but it also impacts the design of those screens — item placement, density, fonts, colours, number of steps, and so much more.

Product design is worthless in the abstract.

Customer Interactions / Touchpoints

Once you have an experience you’re targeting and a customer journey to implement, you have to think about how you interact with your customer — literally.

What are all the mechanisms by which you’re going to communicate? This includes obvious things like:

  • Your app

  • Customer support portals or email

  • SMS notifications

  • Two-factor authentication emails

  • etc

But it also includes less obvious things, like how your customers encounter your product or brand in the wild.

Every single time a customer engages in any way with your brand or product, it’s a touchpoint. And every touchpoint is an opportunity to deliver on the experience you’re promising — or to drop the ball and let random forces and saboteurs define it for you.

Service Evidence

And now we end with the one that’s not like the others: what do you leave behind?

As we interact with products and services, we collect “evidence” along the way of our interactions — email invoices, receipts, deliverables or reports, physical products, and more.

As with touchpoints, these are clear opportunities to reinforce the experience you want to create.

But more important than that is that these are the residuals. This is what’s left behind. It’s what they’ll reflect on afterward, it’s what they’ll share with friends and colleagues. Take advantage! Use the stuff you leave behind to reinforce the experience for which you’re designing.

Most startups just miss this opportunity.

Let’s talk process.

It’s not complicated.

Ok, it’s pretty complicated, but it’s not unapproachable. If you think about your product and experience in a systematic way, you will not only gain actionable tasks to implement, but you will also create alignment. The experience you’re designing for will naturally begin to permeate through your work. It’ll diffuse from you to your team to your product to your customer.

It’s 6 steps:

  1. Who is the customer? What are their wants, needs, and fears?

  2. What is the specific need we are addressing in our product?

  3. What experience can we design for that will resonate powerfully with that customer?

  4. What does a product that fulfills that need and delivers that experience look like?

  5. What are all of the ways we should be communicating with customers? What are the ways we shouldn’t?

  6. What evidence can we leave behind as a remind of that experience?

And that’s it.

Follow these steps, experiment, and validate. If you’re right, your customers will be your biggest fans.


When you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you.

  1. Ask me a question during my weekly office hours  (Thursdays at 11am pst).
  2. Work 1:1 with me to tackle the most challenging parts of the startup journey (100+ first-time founders).
  3. Run a design sprint with your startup team to find traction fast (dozens of startups).

Published over 1 year ago

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