Customer Experience Design: Tips & Examples

Sara Mote and I founded MOTE agency in 2014. We specialize in ecommerce, providing refined design, cutting-edge engineering, and the highest order of service to an ever-changing marketplace. In my career as a web developer I’ve fostered an appetite for innovation and a focus on crafting websites for brands that want to cultivate enduring relationships with their audiences. Here are some insights gleaned from my 26 years of experience.

When your customers build an emotional connection with your brand, that’s a far more powerful and enduring experience than if they simply purchase your product to meet a need.

So how do you cultivate an emotional connection between your ecommerce brand and your target audience?

The answer: customer experience design. Read on to learn how to design a meaningful customer experience for your audience and why that’s a vital part of brand-building.

What is customer experience design?

Customer experience design is the process of applying care and consideration to every touchpoint a customer has with your brand. It should be consistent from the awareness stage all the way through post-purchase service and loyalty-building. If the customer journey is a conversation between a brand and a user, your customer experience design strategy is how you shape that conversation.

Customer experience vs. UX design

The main difference between customer experience (CX) design and user experience (UX) design is UX design doesn’t necessarily encompass every single touchpoint. The main goal of UX design is to provide a seamless technical experience within a website or application itself.

For ecommerce UX, that might mean improving the checkout process or other site functionality. CX design, on the other hand, involves supporting connection by meeting customer expectations at each stage in their journey—both on and off your website. CX design channels include things like email marketing and social media engagement.

Why is customer experience design important?

Customer experience design is important because it’s a way to build brand equity, influencing the market awareness and perception of your brand. Through traditional performance marketing tactics in conjunction with brand marketing tactics, marketing experts recommend businesses choose brand equity as their North Star metric.

When it comes to growing a business, many brands focus primarily on performance marketing. That can be an effective short-term approach, but in the long-term, focusing on conversion without also nurturing public perception of your brand can actually erode it. And once you start eroding your brand, it’s rather difficult to build back up.

Beyond customer satisfaction, an exceptional customer experience builds a deeper connection with both new and existing customers. Developing customer loyalty like that can increase both customer lifetime value and brand equity.

How to design a great customer experience

1. Map the customer journey
2. Identify strengths and weaknesses
3. Match the mood
4. Test and track
5. Make incremental improvements

Since customer experience design is all about connecting with customers on an emotional level, it’s often best to take an intuition-led approach. When you get stuck, you can use this blueprint:

1. Map the customer journey

Start by mapping each interaction your customer personas have with your brand. For example, a single customer journey map might involve the following steps:

1. Search engine ad

2. Retargeting ad on social media

3. Abandoned cart email

4. Conversion on the ecommerce site

5. SMS with tracking details

6. Shipping

7. Unboxing experience

8. Product packaging design

9. The product itself

The goal of customer experience design is to harmonize and unify these steps so they speak the same language.

2. Identify strengths and weaknesses

Once you map the customer journey, identify the strengths and weaknesses of the customer experience using a simple SWOT analysis. Find out what’s working for your customer experience (strengths) and what’s not (weaknesses). From there, you’ll be able to learn from your strengths and make progress where there’s room for growth.

One way to identify strengths and weaknesses is to check the Marketing section in your Shopify admin. With Shopify’s built-in analytics, you can see how each of your marketing channels compares against the others. While you’ll find more detailed breakdowns of campaign performance within each channel’s dedicated app, the advantage of Shopify’s built-in Marketing section is it allows you to see multiple channels at once and identify any that may be lagging behind the others.

3. Match the mood

As you’re learning from your strengths and then applying those lessons to your weaknesses, you can’t copy and paste what worked for one channel to another. You need to match the user’s mood and energy at each particular touchpoint.

For example, maybe you’ve discovered your Instagram ads aren’t performing as well as some of your other channels. The first thing to question is ease: Are the ads cluttered? Are they messy? Is there a sense of ease in your messaging, or a sense of strain? If there’s strain, how can you address any pain points?

Once you’ve established more ease in your communications, you can work on deepening your connection to the customer. For example, after cleaning up your Instagram ads (and testing and tracking their performance to ensure this change has helped—more on that below), you can work on surprising and delighting your customers at various touchpoints. For example, in product shipments, you could surprise and delight by including free gifts—like sample products, stickers, or other goodies relevant to your brand or product lines.

4. Test and track

Any changes you make to the customer experience should be tested and tracked. Split testing is a good place to start.

For example, you might test two versions of a shipping confirmation email: a basic version with the tracking details and a more celebratory version that aims to connect with your customers. Perhaps you could remind them of your shared values or encourage them to reach out to the founder with their feedback. (This customer feedback will be invaluable when measuring the success of your CX strategy.)

If the connection-driven version performs better in email A/B testing, you can move forward with that version. To see if your change actually improved the customer experience, track your revenue generated from email marketing against other channels within the marketing section of your Shopify admin.

With customer experience design, it’s essential you look at both the quantitative and qualitative data—track the emotional response from customers in addition to the numbers. One of the benefits of customer experience design is that if you foster connection with your customers, they will be more likely to speak up when there is room for improvement. Forging mutual trust with your customers sets the foundation for developing an honest feedback loop: Customers trust that their voice matters to you, and you trust that their perspective is invaluable. In turn, you both benefit from applying their feedback in ways that improve and grow your business.

5. Make incremental improvements

Customer experience design works best when making incremental improvements, since changing a single variable at a time will give you the best signal of what is and isn’t working. Keep your customer journey maps up to date and continue to compare your marketing channels’ performance to determine where to focus and refine your CX design efforts.

What’s an example of great customer experience design?

Sunspel, a company that makes cotton t-shirts, has figured out a simple way to put its customers in a good mood when they receive their order—all without even any elaborate branded packaging.

When customers get their package, the box is typical. The wrapping paper is typical. But there’s a little postcard in it. The postcard doesn’t say “Tag us on Instagram” or “Here’s a discount code for your next order.” It’s just a pretty landscape—but it puts the customer in a good mood at the exact moment when they’re about to try on their order.

In marketing psychology, this is known as behavioral priming. When you try on your clothes in a good mood, you’re more likely to keep them—even though the postcard has nothing to do with the clothes. This is a great example of how something simple yet unexpected can delight, and how delight can impact your bottom line.