Design: Customer Experience Design

Imagine that from the time guests research a hotel’s services to the time they check out, they feel like VIPs (Very Important People). They leave with a smile, write a glowing online review, and plan to return. They also spread positive word-of-mouth about the brand and, over time, are likely to become loyal guests. These are the impacts of refining the guest experience.

In this article, I’ll take a close look at the hotel customer journey—and how a business can optimize hotel operations to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

What Is the Hotel Customer Journey?

The hotel customer journey is the path guests take from the moment they first hear about a hotel to the time they complete their visit—and beyond. It includes all the touchpoints at which guests interact with a brand. These touchpoints cover everything from booking a room to staying at the hotel to post-stay interactions such as surveys and loyalty-program invitations. Every stage of this journey shapes the guest experience and guests’ likelihood of returning. Read More

Whether you are designing a Web site or a mobile app, both UX design and conversion-rate optimization (CRO) play important roles in lead generation, conversion, and retention. To achieve optimal results, you need to establish a symbiotic relationship between UX design and CRO, in which they supplement one another’s efforts and work together to achieve common goals.

Focusing too much on either UX design or CRO is often to the detriment of the other, so it’s important to strike the right balance between them. Before I provide some tips on how to balance UX design and CRO, let’s look at these two terms in context. Read More

Making a distinction between Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) often feels like an introspective debate that matters intensely to practitioners, but seems academic to everyone else. But here’s the thing: the relationship between them defines how companies build products that people want to use and digital user experiences that keep customers well-satisfied and productive. The collaboration, or lack thereof, between CX and UX teams shapes nearly every digital interaction that people experience today.

In this column, which is Part 1 of a two-part series, we’ll delve into the following topics:

• Differentiating Customer Experience and User Experience
• Exploring the evolution of and convergence between Customer Experience and User Experience
• Proposing collaborative methods Read More