Don’t end up with the seller’s complacency!

Customer Experience Value is Critical in an "Age of Poor Sales" How to Increase Service Value through UX/CX Design?

In recent years, we have been hearing more and more about “user experience/customer experience (UX/CX) design. As it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate services, the importance of UX/CX design has been strongly emphasized as a measure to improve sales. However, it is not easy to tackle UX design, partly because of the difficulty in understanding the term. In this context, the efforts of TDC SOFT Inc., which boasts a wealth of experience in UX design support, have been attracting attention. What are the specifics?

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Today, it is extremely difficult to “sell products,” which is the starting point of business. One of the most frequently cited reasons for this is the diversification of consumer needs and the flood of alternative products and services. In addition, the rise of digital technology has rapidly rendered the business models that have served as models obsolete.

Nevertheless, increasing sales and profits is an important issue for companies in all circumstances. From this perspective, the keyword “user experience (UX) design” is gaining attention. It is a simple term that expresses the concept of “enhancing the subjective experience of people and the value of a series of experiences brought about by a service to increase the attractiveness of the service.

In contrast, the key point of UX design is to focus on improving the attractiveness of services from the customer’s perspective. The goal is to create a virtuous cycle that attracts more customers by maximizing their expectations of the service and their excitement and joy when they use it.

What is the UX design support service that boasts a wealth of experience?

In order to gain the support of customers, UX design is now being adopted in all kinds of services. This trend is especially noticeable in the digital field, such as smartphone applications. Mr. Sakai stresses that this is an inevitable trend.

In the case of services using digital technology, it is difficult to differentiate them only by functionality. Therefore, the real solution to differentiation is to incorporate UX design to create and enhance the value of new customer experiences,” says Sakai.

As society becomes increasingly digitalized, systems are becoming increasingly important as points of contact with customers. In this context, UX design has become an area that cannot be ignored by any company.

Mr. Sakai continues, “There are a number of business processes in a company. Companies have a number of business processes, and the digitization of these processes is accelerating against the backdrop of DX, so continuing to innovate and improve business processes with UX design will directly lead to increased efficiency and employee engagement, which in turn will lead to cost reductions and higher profits. In other words, UX design is effective not only for “offense” but also for “defense.

However, even if one understands the significance of this concept, putting it into practice is not a simple task. Many companies lack the knowledge and know-how, and many are at a loss as to where to start.

Against this backdrop, TDC SOFT Inc., which has been in business for 60 years, is a company that has been advanced in supporting corporate UX design, launching its “UX Design” service in 2019. Since then, the company has accumulated numerous achievements in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, distribution, information and telecommunications, finance and insurance, and educational institutions.

According to Mr. Sakai, corporate concerns regarding UX design practice are extremely wide-ranging, including “Insufficient in-house know-how and human resources,” “Not knowing how to judge output,” “Difficulty in understanding the final goal and the relationship between each process,” “Too much time and effort,” and “Too much division between departments and services, making it hard to create a consistent It is too time-consuming,” and “There is a high hurdle to create a consistent experience due to the division between departments and services.

Misaki Yokoi of the Financial Business Design Division says that these concerns have surfaced in the banking services she is responsible for.

“Banks often have multiple user points of contact through terminals at sales branches, ATMs, Internet banking, and more recently, smartphone applications. The financial industry has a wide range of services and existing services, so it is difficult to transform all of them into one experience at once.

With the recent increase in awareness of UX, Mr. Yokoi says that he is beginning to receive more consultations from major SIers and other companies that build banking systems.

Integrated follow-up from "survey" to "systematization and kaizen action

TDC SOFT Inc. has a wealth of expertise in UX design cultivated over the years. Mr. Sakai proudly states that the strength of the company’s UX design service is that “we provide a comprehensive support from planning to system development, and from user evaluations and surveys to the establishment of a kaizen cycle, and we help solve a wide variety of UX design issues in the process.

So, what exactly does this service entail? Broadly speaking, the UX design process is not so different from conventional system development, from planning to design, development, and maintenance, with the crucial difference being that the first and last phases are “research” to understand the users and “evaluation” to verify the effectiveness of hypotheses based on the research results. In addition, TDC SOFT Inc. has its own “Structuring and Kaizen Actions” at the end of the process to pursue sustainable UX design.

Research is positioned as the starting point in UX design. Mr. Sakai says, “Many people mistake UX for UI. It is true that UI is important enough to be included in UX. However, the goal of UX should be to optimize the experience value throughout the entire system. Therefore, we conduct user interviews to find out the latent needs of customers (not the superficial, apparent needs, but the unconscious, unverbalized needs), and then create personas (clarified values, attributes, and behaviors of target users), service blueprints (a chronological representation of the situation and behaviors of users and stakeholders), and a UX system that can be used to optimize the experience. The activities include the creation of personas (a clear description of target users’ values, attributes, and behaviors) and service blueprints (a chronological representation of users and stakeholders’ situations and actions), while identifying the current experience as precisely as possible,” he explains.

Based on the results of this process, the biggest challenge in UX design is to clarify how to create the ideal experience. In this phase, “the knowledge of companies that have expertise in customers and business operations is indispensable” (Sakai), and a measure taken in response is the holding of joint workshops. TDC SOFT Inc. will provide its knowledge and ideas on the original aims and emerging issues, deepen discussions on how to respond to them, and jointly plan the UX that should be aimed for.

Once this point is reached, the implementation process is similar to general system development. The final service is then evaluated and verified from the user’s point of view, leading to the next kaizen (improvement). In UX design, there are many things that only the company itself can determine, so our UX design service explains each process and goal, its relationship to the previous process, and the criteria for judgment in a way that even beginners can understand, while providing support for a series of decisions in a companionable manner,” says Sakai.

Demonstrated from new service launch to legacy renewal and DX

As already pointed out, the understanding of UX design varies from company to company, and TDC SOFT Inc. offers a number of ways to implement UX design services to facilitate the process, such as the company taking the initiative, supporting the planning itself, or acting as an advisor. The company also provides training services for UX understanding, and within its UX design services, it also offers educational services in the form of on-the-job training.

The company’s services, based on the UX design expertise it has cultivated over the years, have already produced diverse results for many companies. Take, for example, company A, a machinery manufacturer. As it was becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate its products by functionality and performance, the company was aiming to launch a service to acquire new customers and up-sell products in order to differentiate its overall service. However, the company did not have its own customer information and did not know where to start.

Therefore, TDC Software supported the client in understanding the current situation, conducting user surveys and analysis, providing UX design training, conducting experience design workshops, and creating prototypes. We also supported the creation of a long-term plan concurrently with the work to release the service, and the company is now on its way to improving sales and customer satisfaction.

A company that uses UX design for DX is food wholesaler Company B. The company has made a management decision to revamp its existing operations to match the digital age. The company is proceeding with a zero-based review of what its business operations should be, based on a management decision to revamp existing operations to match the digital age.

The company is now in the process of revamping its current system,” said Mr. Kato, “but we cannot avoid the difficult task of denying the past. To this end, we must first pick up and share the current dissatisfaction and requests felt by employees, and then overcome the psychological challenges through a method of working together to find a solution. Of course, the road to business innovation is a long one, and we will embark on a new kaizen while repeating the cycle over and over again.” (Sakai)

The support content and development scale of UX design services vary. However, each project, from initial research to evaluation, takes at least three months to complete per cycle.

Starting from familiar places" is the quickest way to promote UX design.

TDC SOFT Inc. has established a cross-sectional team to promote UX design, and evangelists trained by the team are spreading their knowledge in the field.

Mr. Yokoi, who has become an evangelist, says, “Our top priority in the past was to make sure that the system was created exactly as designed. But now we are paying more attention to how we can enhance the value of the experience for the final users of the system. At first, there is a mountain of work to be done to spread UX design from evangelists to members, but once the mindset of UX design becomes the norm for everyone, I believe it will lead to an improvement in development quality,” he says.

Corporate efforts in UX design have just begun. It is almost certain that trial and error will begin in earnest in the future in order to achieve greater results.

UX design can be used to address issues such as the transformation of the customer-company relationship and business operations that are difficult for IT departments to address. In the future, design will become more important in the field and in management. The best way to promote UX design is not to think too hard, but to try it out first in familiar areas and build on that experience.” (Mr. Sakai)

TDC SOFT Inc. is a valuable “bag of wisdom” for introducing UX design. For companies that want to increase the number of fans and satisfaction, TDC SOFT Inc. will be a powerful partner that continues to provide support in a companionable manner.

Reprinted from: ITmedia Business Online
ITmedia Business Online Reprinted from an article published on March 16, 2023
This article is published with permission from ITmedia Business Online
https://www.itmedia.co.jp/business/ articles/2303/15/news001.html

Technologies Used

• Click here to download the UX Design document.