Context is king! Why too many organizations fail to understand this

Organizations often fail to consider the context in which customers enter the experience, assuming that every customer is the same. However, recognizing the context of a customer's experience is crucial to developing an effective customer strategy.

Context is an omnipresent factor in customer experience. Depending on a customer's context, we must create a customized experience. 

For instance, while working on a project for one of the cellular phone companies in the United States, we discovered that they treated customers who had lost their phone or had it stolen in the same manner. This oversight neglected the importance of context.

Consider how you would feel if you had lost your phone in the back of a taxi. Most likely, you would feel foolish, right? Now, consider how you would feel if your phone was stolen. You might feel outraged, or scared, or both, which are different emotional responses than how you might feel after leaving your phone in a cab.

Despite this, the mobile company treated both types of customers in the same way. They immediately requested the account number from both. However, we convinced them to determine what happened first, followed by ensuring the customer's safety if their phone was stolen. This simple change had an enormous impact on their experience design and outcomes.

Thus, segmentation is a vital aspect of anticipating context. People bring unique perspectives and expectations to their experience. While segmentation is only one factor that can determine context, it is an excellent starting point.

In this episode, we explore why context is crucial to customer experience design and how you can improve your understanding of your customer’s context.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

• • 03:10.  We discuss how Kenneth Cukier’s TED talk about “Big Data is Better Data” and how having data isn’t enough to predict how people will interpret it. 
  • 07:12 Colin tests his theories with Ryan, who has his own context, which is always a fun activity.
  • 10:20 Ryan shares an interesting demonstration of different contexts clashing in a researchers work with an isolated tribe in the Pacific.
  • 14:20  Colin shares his recent insight about diversity, which he describes as a “blinding flash of the bloody obvious.”
  • 18:09  We get into a discussion about changing a person’s context gracefully and the skills needed here. 
  • 27:48 We share our advice for helping organizations improve their experience understanding and using context in experience design.

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