Creative Good's most effective project is the customer experience strategy. This architects a new customer experience that will delight customers and deliver significant business improvement.
Our method is detailed in our whitepaper: Joining Strategy and Usability: The Customer Experience Methodology
Duration
- 8 or more weeks (with wireframes, 12 weeks or more)
Phases
Business and competitive analysis
Creative Good requests extensive information and documents from the client that goes beyond the questionnaire we use in our labs projects. Creative Good then analyzes the current state of the business and competitive environment. We analyze financial, performance and usage metrics. We review all strategy, marketing, customer research, and product development documents including results of past initiatives.
Stakeholder Interviews
Creative Good conducts extensive interviews of the internal team. Typically, we conduct hour-long interviews with eight to ten stakeholders, although some projects have had as many as 50 stakeholders. This is an important step when crafting a new experience strategy because the organizational and cultures issues "behind the interface" are critical to success (or often cause failure).
Expert Review
Expert reviews are initial analyses of the customer experience - relying on the Creative Good team's 11+ years of experience.
Customer Recruiting
Creative Good - in consultation with the client - develops the criteria for customer recruiting then manages the recruiting process.
Lab Design and Initial Hypotheses
Based on the business and competitive analysis and on the expert review, Creative Good forms initial hypotheses about the key tenets of a new customer experience strategy and uses those to inform the customer listening lab design.
Lab Moderation
Creative Good's project manager moderates our version of user tests. These listening labs combine the best of traditional usability research and less directive market research methods. These sessions are one-on-one customer observation sessions, each lasting 45 minutes, followed by adiscussion among the client team members observing from "behind the glass."
In most projects, Creative Good also takes its listening labs into homes, workplaces and even call centers. For some clients we conduct the research on multiple continents.
Client Participation
Client team members attend, representing a cross-section of the organization: advertising, marketing, technology, customer service, merchandising, and the senior executives who "own" the business.
Lab Analysis
Creative Good analyzes the results of the labs and prepares a metrics document.
Synthesis
Creative Good synthesizes the results of the labs with the results of the business, competitive, stakeholder analysis and expert review. We compare our initial hypotheses for the new experience with what we learned from customer behavior. We do not expect customers to direct innovation but we do find that their behavior creates a context for good innovation and strategy development.
Strategy
Based on the synthesis phase, Creative Good then develops a strategy for a new customer experience that will delight the customers and deliver bottomline and topline results to our clients. We review the strategy with the key client partners and then prepare the final document for delivery to the broader client team.
Wireframes (optional)
In about 75% of our strategy projects, Creative Good also creates the actual blueprints for the new customer experience. If for a website, these blueprints or wireframes involve detailed work on the new site navigation, functionality and applications, content and transactional elements.