The Support Experience vs. User Experience

As a support industry, we talk a lot about the User Experience. We even have a catchy name for it, UX. I wanted to take a minute to talk about how the Support Experience (I’ll call it SX) is different and yet often more important than the UX.

First, let’s talk about the User Experience: If you are like most customer-centric businesses, you have spent countless hours engineering, developing and documenting the Customer Journey. Time, energy and money goes into the effort and it’s a cross-departmental, organizational-wide effort. You have every detail articulated with an owner, impact and process to support the optimal journey for your valuable customers. All roads ultimately lead to that holy grail of a customer advocate that is blown away by your brand so much they choose to tell the world about it. Your Customer Journey is a well-paved superhighway leading to NPSVille! (Net Promoter Score — Find out more about NPS here)

In this perfectly planned world, there is no need for a Support Experience. Let’s be clear, things that trigger the need for a support experience are not things you planned for, or engineered into your product design. The Support Experience (SX) begins when your customers take a wrong turn off your superhighway in a bad part of town.

This is an unpaved road, that begins with a customer with an experience of your brand contrary to your design. The real world has happened and in spite of all the planning, efforts and coordination something isn’t working.

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All your customers want to do is be back on the brand experience highway and without a defined and effective SX strategy, many customers never find their way back. The result is customer churn, brand disconnects, and in many cases lost revenue and brand detractors.

Support Experience begins when a product or service has failed to meet expectations or ease, performance or capability. There is frustration, disappointment and disillusionment with your brand from moment one.

The goal of any well designed SX is to get customers back on the highway faster than Siri can say “recalculating”! More importantly, the Support Experience can play a key role in driving brand affinity and advocacy.

Equal to your sales and marketing effort, Support Experience is one of the key drivers of your brand, sales and profitability.

Companies that take great strides to engineer an effective Support Experience can underwrite these expenses through reduced customer churn, repeat customer purchases and the most importantly by leveraging the voice of the customer as they advocate for your brand based on both service solution and overall experiences.

The good news is the Support Experience is not hard to engineer. The same processes and practices you utilized in designing the customer experience are leverageable into the support environment. Even more beneficial is that while some of the core User Experience components are required to be designed and executed internally; oftentimes strategic sourcing can quickly provide capabilities to optimize SX.

Finally, SX provides an immensely valuable input into the overall UX. By collecting data at the flashpoint of customer saves, feedback can be provided to all stages of the UX, continually improving the design, systems and flows of your customer journey. The result is a speedier route to NPSVille for your customers on their UXjourney.

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The Support Experience vs. User Experience