Traditional customer experience design or user experience design is evolving. The boundaries between our physical and digital worlds are merging as new technology allows us to interact with devices via voice and gestures, allowing creative minds to rethink traditional customer experience.

Home automation devices, such as Nest and Eccobee thermostats, are examples of how technology has evolved to control our physical world thru a digital channel. Connected cars enabling navigation, smart walls detecting vital statistics in the human body, and Amazon Go stores enabling cashless shopping are few other exciting examples

While we are seeing just the beginning of this trend, it’s important to keep certain principles in mind while innovating and developing new products or services in an Integrated Customer Experience world.

Customer-Driven Design

While it’s true that technology advances have enabled this new paradigm, the innovation should not be based on technology-focused thinking. Rather, it should be based on customer use-case focused thinking. Technology focused thinking will result in a solution or product customers do not want and will ultimately waste precious resources. It’s very important to follow proven customer-driven design processes and create paper-based experiments, digital mock-ups and prototypes to get customer feedback early on to refine the innovation.

Innovation Requires Discipline

The experimentation stage of your innovation requires thorough analysis to define who is your customer, what is the value proposition you are offering and what business model will you create around it. These 3 foundational elements are critical for the success of your experiments and innovation. It’s also very critical to define the metrics by which results from the experiments will be measured. Adopting an agile methodology to iterate thru the experiments (and going back to the drawing board if needed) is an effective way to ensure the success of your innovation.

Thinking Beyond The Present

While the innovation may address an existing problem, the solution should always anticipate the future. This is where creative minds excel by crossing current boundaries and thinking across multiple domains or industries to find corollaries. Forming a team from different backgrounds, skill sets, and industries can help the divergent thought process.

Leveraging The Right Technology

Technology is a great enabler to solve business problems and foster innovation, but it needs to be carefully evaluated. Selecting the wrong technology can necessitate the need to reengineer in the near future, thereby diminishing returns. Creating technology proofs of concept is an effective way to ensure successful adoption.

With a creative and experienced team, you can offer an elevated value proposition to your customers with an integrated customer experience. There are unlimited possibilities of applications and products that will leverage an integrated customer experience and benefit customers in the future.