Insight
3 design sprint techniques to enhance your customer journey and boost CX results
James Carr
In today’s fast-paced digital world, optimising the customer journey is not just a strategic advantage. Customers expect seamless, personalised experiences across all touchpoints, and brands must adapt quickly to meet these expectations.
This is where design sprints come in. By allowing your teams to rapidly identify and solve customer pain points, design sprints offer a powerful way to enhance the customer journey without the lengthy development cycles that can stall progress.
At Code, we’ve seen first hand how effective design sprints can be in driving innovation and delivering results. In this blog post, we’ll share three unique design sprint hacks that can significantly improve your customer journey. We’ll also hear from Jess Sherratt - Head of User Experience at Code, who will share her take on the considerations around creating a seamless customer experience. The following hacks focus on empathy, prototyping, and validation—three crucial elements that, when done right, can set your CX strategy apart from the competition.
Let’s dive in!
Understanding your customers on a deep, emotional level is the foundation of any successful customer experience (CX) strategy. Empathy mapping effectively allows you to step into your customers' shoes, uncovering their needs, emotions, and pain points at every stage of their journey. This process helps to make sure that your solutions are genuinely customer-centric, addressing the real challenges your customers actually face.
Traditional empathy mapping can be time-consuming, but within a design sprint, speed is key.
A rapid empathy mapping session can be completed in just a few hours by focusing on the most critical touchpoints of the customer journey. Here’s how to do it:
Code worked collaboratively on a project with the Ombudsman Services who were transitioning to a B2B model and wanted to explore the value in data to create an offering that would help influence partner consumer strategies. With no product to support yet, we were part of a programme of change to redefine the Ombudsman brand, map their end-to-end customer journey and lay the digital groundwork for the future.
By using empathy mapping as a method within customer journey mapping, we helped the company’s understanding of their customers and how they engaged with them across their digital touchpoints. With Ombudsman’s services required to be accessible for all, we helped educate on how to apply inclusive design throughout the website, including how to implement accessibility tools so that customers using their own tools were able to access their services.
How can your team come together to use empathy mapping to better understand your audience and improve touchpoints across the organisation?
One way to elevate your empathy mapping session is by integrating live customer feedback. By using tools that allow for real-time feedback collection, you can refine your customer personas and ensure your insights are accurate and up-to-date.
Tools to consider
Benefits: Real-time data allows for more precise empathy maps, which lead to more targeted and effective CX solutions.
Optimising a single touchpoint isn’t enough in today’s creation of complex customer journeys. Customers interact with brands across multiple channels and devices, and each touchpoint plays a role in shaping their overall experience. By prototyping multiple touchpoints in parallel, you can make sure that your customer journey is cohesive and that each interaction reinforces the others.
To prototype multiple touchpoints within a design sprint, you’ll need to:
Cross-functional collaboration is crucial when prototyping multiple touchpoints. By involving team members from different departments, such as marketing, product development, and customer service, you can capture diverse perspectives and create more comprehensive solutions.
Not only can you create comprehensive solutions from this exercise, but you can also more accurately assess the potential risk involved with the development of any of the touchpoints as well. This means you can effectively mitigate any risks and ensure a project runs as smoothly as possible.
Quick Tips:
The design sprint doesn’t end with the creation of a prototype!
Validation is a critical step to make sure that the solutions you’ve developed truly resonate with your customers. Without proper validation, there’s a risk of launching untested solutions that may not address your customers' needs effectively.
To establish a robust validation process:
Beyond the initial validation, it’s important to create a continuous feedback loop that allows for ongoing refinement of the customer journey. This means that your CX strategy remains dynamic and responsive to changing customer needs and also the market.
Tools to consider:
Benefits: A continuous feedback ecosystem keeps your customer journey optimised and relevant over time. Streamlining this process also means increased productivity and efficiency.
Incorporating these three design sprint hacks into your customer experience strategy can significantly enhance your customer journey, making sure that every touchpoint is optimised and aligned with your brand’s goals. By focusing on empathy, holistic prototyping, and ongoing validation, you can create a CX strategy that not only meets but exceeds customer expectations.
Staying ahead of the competition requires constant innovation and a deep understanding of your customers. If you’re ready to take your CX strategy to the next level, get in touch with Code today. We specialise in helping brands design and implement breakthrough experiences that drive growth and customer loyalty.
*Contact us today to learn more about how Code can help you implement these design sprint hacks and optimise your customer journey.*
Code is a customer experience, digital innovation and AI agency.
We’re a strategic digital partner that delivers breakthrough growth throughout the customer experience (CX).
We achieve this through our industry-renowned services in digital transformation, web development, brand strategy, conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and UX (user experience).
Our human centric approach underpins every aspect of our work.
A collective of experts in multiple disciplines, we collaborate to distil the complex needs of organisations and end users to engineer solutions that make an impact.
From fast scaling start ups to global brands, we can help you to transform your organisation.
Code is a part of EssenceMediacom North.
EssenceMediacom North helps brands to breakthrough in the new communications economy.
Disrupting models of media, EssenceMediacom North accelerates creative and business transformation for its clients roster, including Hillarys, Absolute Collagen, Webuyanycar.com and United Utilities.
The agency delivers breakthrough growth, capabilities, and revenue through the integration of media, creativity, data and technology, combined with its diverse industry-leading expertise.
Equipped with access to the richest data, robust benchmarking and advanced technologies, EssenceMediacom North unlocks new opportunities to deliver truly integrated media solutions for scaling and global brands.
EssenceMediacom North is part of WPP’s media investment group, GroupM.
