Trade Offs in Customer Experience

We use research because we want to understand customer decisions. We want to know why.

Why did a customer choose Product A over Product B? Why did they defect? Why did they recommend us?

When customers make those decisions, they’re making a judgement based on their perception of what will make them happiest.

A classical economist might talk about maximising utility (“this one is the best value”), and a behavioural economist might focus on heuristics like satisficing (“that’ll do”).

Modelling trade offs

Conjoint analysis is a research technique that organisations sometimes turn to when they want to predict or understand how customers make decisions. It tries to replicate a real consumer choice by asking respondents to trade off attributes at different levels.

We’d all like a safer car and a more fuel-efficient car, but if it really came down to it which one would you choose? How much more would you be prepared to pay?

Sometimes these attributes are traded off in pairs, and sometimes (rarely nowadays) as a full profile, neither of which do that good a job of replicating how customers really go about making decisions…but that’s a post for another day.

Trade offs in design

Just as customers make trade offs when they choose between alternatives, we make trade offs when we design products and experiences.

The quote at the top of this article has a lot of teach us about designing customer experiences. In particular it reminds us of two important truths:

• Yes, there will always be trade-offs. You can’t give your customers more information and make the document shorter.

• The answer is not compromise (average amount of information, average length of document), but choosing the best overall option.

But how do we know what the best option is? What if we end up designing for a hypothetical “average” customer that doesn’t exist, and end up with an experience that doesn’t work for anyone? That’s the problem with the compromise approach.

Imagine we’re designing a mortgage application journey, and think about the needs of first time buyers versus serial doer-uppers. One group has never done this before, and is going to need lots of hand-holding, the other wants everything to be as streamlined as possible. How do you design an experience that works for both of them?

Designing flexibility

This is where your research can help. Tools such as personas are a great way to reveal the different needs of different customers (or the same customers at different times). But even when we have a good understanding of what those different needs are, it’s not always obvious how to design around them.

Those choices need to be made holistically, looking at the entire experience, and we need to design in flexibility to make sure we accomodate different needs. One size rarely fits all!

In person to person interactions a lot of this flexibility can be provided by a member of staff with the right knowledge, emotional intelligence, and freedom to use it.

In digital journeys, it can be effective to have help or additional information on hand for those that need it, whilst making the journey streamlined for those who are confident with what they’re doing.

These are both great ways to design flexibility into your journeys, but don’t make the mistake of presenting too many choices to customers. As The Paradox of Choice showed, too much choice can make us less happy, not more. It increases the effort we have to make in the moment, and it can cause us to second-guess the decisions we’ve made.

Your proposition can help with this by making it clear what type of experience you’re aiming to create, and who for, but you will still need to offer some flexibility.

Great customer experiences are those that feel tailored to our needs, whether or not they really are; that give us the opportunity to be in control, but don’t overwhelm us with choice; that are not a compromise, but an optimisation among alternatives.