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Excellent Customer Experience Through Leading Design
It is hard to ensure a great and consistent customer experience if not every member of your organization is aligned to your vision and values. You should establish a leading design system that does not only cover aesthetic aspects of your final products. To cite Steve Jobs, “design is not only how it looks, […], design is how it works”. Understanding design as a universal language, you should use it to align your teams to common goals and to establish design as an anchor for all decisions to be made in your organization, from product management to development to marketing and consulting.
Design based decision making
By establishing such a design system, every decision your organization needs to make will be based on the customer values your design system represents. It should be easy for every member of all your teams to understand and follow this system. Doing this, the overall customer experience will be expressed through and supported by all actions taken by everyone in your organization.
The customer experience is the primary product you are selling. It is the experience with all your services, products and processes, that will make the customer remember you through emotional bonds forged by your design language.
Build your design system around customer needs
Thus, your design system should be built around customer needs. Think about the customers you have and the customers you want. Also think about empowering your current customers by creating experiences that will improve their overall lives, even outside the actual realm of your products, services, and businesses. Think about the Customer Journey and how your services impact your customers’ quality of life throughout the whole day.
Customer Centricity Score
You can measure the impact of your design system using the Customer Centricity Score (https://ccscore.com/). The Customer Centricity Score (CCS) was developed by Jan-Erik Baars and the HSLU (https://www.hslu.ch/) and is a far better measurement of customer experience than the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in terms of your entire organization, not just the bottom line. Therefore, the CCS highly influences the final NPS and can also serve as a forecast of the development of your future NPS. It quantifies the customer centricity at the level of each of your employees and helps you to adjust your internal design language to bring them back to track.
I strongly recommend reading the book Leading Design by Jan-Erik Baars for a comprehensive understanding of design as a management tool for the most successful companies. You can get it here from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3hmkCAZ