Featuring:

Rachel Kobetz, Head of Experience Design, Bank of America

Show Notes:

For organizations struggling to create memorable, human-centric customer experiences, the missing piece might be found on their org chart. On this episode of What It Means, recorded at Forrester’s CX SF Forum, Rachel Kobetz, head of experience design at Bank of America, shares her insights and provides practical advice for designing impactful experiences.

As a starting point, Kobetz says experience designers and market researchers must work together — they are two sides of the same coin. While market research broadly defines what customers want, design research takes the next step and seeks to deeply understand the customer’s behavior and identify and address their unmet needs.

To be truly effective, dedicated innovation and experience design teams need to be embedded within the relevant business units — not sitting off in an innovation and design bubble. Transformational experience design must include partnerships with internal teams focused on data/analytics, customer care, privacy, and other strategic areas. Kobetz points to the hybrid digital/physical experience that banking customers require as an example of how important internal business collaboration is to delivering a personalized and seamless customer experience.

Memorable internal communication will also help these internal teams understand the depth of thought going into the CX design. Kobetz says personal storytelling and use of artifacts (such as hanging the customer journey on the office walls) can help internal teams better understand the strategy, but she also cautions that changing culture takes time and patience.

This podcast was recorded live at Forrester’s CX SF 2019 Forum. Learn more about CX North America 2020 here.