The Most Important 2024 CX Trend: UX Alignment

High-impact insights teams use customer feedback to gain a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of customer needs and to spur decision makers to respond rapidly to changing customer expectations. The very best insights teams, however, do one more thing to produce greater customer value: they help their companies innovate.

In today’s market, there is significant pressure on brands to deliver more, faster, and with fewer resources. As a result, a prevalent challenge, as underscored by Forrester is that "teams rely on assumptions about users — what they want, how they want to interact, and what their problems and goals are — instead of findings from user research." This is leaving much to be desired when it comes to UX which is in turn largely impacting companies’ ability to deliver on their CX promises. So, how can we bridge this gap?

First, Prioritize UX.

UX is the very first chapter of the customer story. Failing to address this in the beginning will make it virtually impossible to improve your overall CX. The very essence of any business is to identify a customer need and fill it. Is your service and/or product filling this need correctly? If not, how can you expect to build a good customer experience

Focus on User Feedback.

User feedback is quite possibly the most important asset you have to effectively improve your UX. Working off general market conditions or trends is a sure-fire way to subpar results. It is all about creating a custom experience and the easiest way to do that is by actually asking your customers what they think. Understanding how your customers are feeling while using your product or interacting with your service is what will ultimately help you unveil the changes required to turn your good UX into a great one.

While gathering quantitative customer data can be very helpful, click-through rates and other numerical proof points are difficult metrics to build a great user experience off of. You want to get to the gold: qualitative feedback.

Getting to Qualitative Gold.

The great news is that in today’s market, there are so many more ways to collect qualitative customer data. For those seeking a more cost-effective and simple deployment option, surveys are a good choice. On the other end of the spectrum, market research firms, though more expensive, can provide a comprehensive, full-service approach to gathering customer feedback. While both options are great for those beginning to explore the world of research, I would recommend considering customer communities. An approach I believe is the more modern way to deploy and scale market research.

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