some ideas for a survey on what designers and business people think Experience Design contributes to competitive advantage.
(as a working definition Experience Design is the end to end design process of proactively managing all touch points a user/customer has with a product, system or service ensuring a user / customers expectations are met or exceeded.)
I’ve been working on the idea that there are two distinct foci of Experience Design that could contribute to competitive advantage, internal and external. Internal Experience Design is focused on internal designs that can contribute to organizational performance, for instance a knowledge management system developed using Experience Design methodologies could lead to better knowledge management (I would hope it wouldn’t hurt)? The other focus is external Experience Design, that is maybe the more conventional lens that we’ve used to look at this.
Read more of this entry to see my ideas for questions that could be asked on this survey, (comments appreciated, I’m looking for feedback 
the format, i think would be a five point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree:
How does Internal Experience Design contribute to in your organizations competitive advantage, does it improve any of the following:
Product / Service Innovation
Faster Product Development Cycle Times
Continuous Improvement
Organizational Learning
Strategy Development
Change management
Information management
Information strategy
Knowledge management
Inter-departmental Collaboration
Inter-company Collaboration
Human Resource Management
Productivity
Decreased costs
How does external Experience Design contribute to in your organizations competitive advantage, does it improve or enable any of the following:
Relevance of New Product Introductions
Ability to discover Unstated, Unarticulated customer needs
Customer Loyalty
Customer Advocacy
Customer Satisfaction
Building brand equity
Increased margins
Creating customer communities
Creating value through gathering relevant customer information eg. amazon ratings
(And some ideas from the BCG report, Retailing Online: Coming of Age)
Identify your highest-value customers across all channels
study every nuance of customers needs, aspirations, and shopping behavior.
Design your of offerings, rewards, and service levels to favor your most valued customers.
Integrate your branding, merchandising, and marketing ef effor forts across channels.
Develop a curriculum of contact for all consumer touch points across channels.
Encourage multichannel customers to return by providing a flawless shopping experience.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Karl,
Good stuff here. A lot of what you’re doing is very linked to what we’re doing here. Spent last year building strategy and exeuction around building organizational capability and all of it was closely linked to customer value and brand equity expectations/results as well as Internal Employee value survey questions and results. From that, we spent a lot of time linking our internal behaviors very closely to what our clients were defining or asking their customer experience to be. We needed to be developing the capabilities internally that our customers desired when interacting with us. So for example, if our rewards systems weren’t tied to reinforce the same behaviors that we wanted our customers to see/react to, then something was broken down in the system. We’ve also starting to build knowledge management capability to reinforce what’s important to customers, share that info and make us more efficient. My suggestion on the areas to focus on externally (based on what we’ve done at Omgeo) are: customer sat, building brand equity, customer advocacy. For external, the things we’re focusing on internally are: org learning, continuous improvement, inter-company collaboration, productivity and strategy development.
There was definitely alot to think about.
I hope the survey went well…
Why don’t you survey if people feel ok talking about sex
thank you for the advice