Every brand has a story to tell. The question is whether that story is both memorable and valuable. Is yours?

Experience designHow to make sure your customers remember you for the right reasons

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Every good plot, wrote Aristotle in Poetics in 4th century BC, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Arguably, a good plot supersedes all other elements of a story — not only does it arouse emotions in the audience and provide a valuable cathartic release, but it also binds the story to the reader’s memory. Two millennia after Aristotle, the best business minds of our time are trying to create good plots of their own — memorable, emotionally resonant stories that have value for the person on the receiving end.

In large part, this narrative task now lies in the domain of customer experience design. There, Aristotle’s recommended approach to storytelling remains as relevant as ever. That’s because customers tend to experience a brand’s narrative in three stages: The first stage draws them in; the layered, complex middle stage engages different people with different

elements; and the third stage leaves a firm imprint on the memory.

Unlike literary storytellers, though, companies in the age of viral connections and digital word of mouth have less control over their narratives. Partly because their stories are ongoing — a series of discrete tales within the brand’s larger, perpetual narrative. And also because customers play an active role in shaping the plot.

Modern marketers, however, do have a tool that ancient playwrights lacked, and that’s data. But there’s a problem with that, too: paralysis by analysis. Fifty-eight percent of senior executives in PwC’s Global Data and Analytics Survey1 told us that in making decisions that impact corporate profitability and growth, they don’t depend on data but, instead, rely on intuition and experience.

Experience design: How to make sure your customers remember you for the right reasons

The start and the end are where a brand can exercise a fair amount of control, creating a strong first impression and leaving a firm imprint on the memory.

And then there’s the middle. Here the plot thickens. The story grows layered and complex, taking on a life of its own.

Experience design helps orchestrate your customers’ numerous interactions with your brand so that you create a persuasive narrative from start to end.

Act 1 Act 2 Act 3

Start EndMiddle

A brand must be nimble if it’s to keep influencing and shaping a narrative that rapidly travels by word of mouth, across real and virtual networks.

What’s the real story?

When it comes to making big decisions, the majority of senior executives rely on intuition and experience, over data, to tell them the real story.

58%

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Experience design at its best — integrating technology, creativity, and business savvy

Indeed, the more information we are inundated with, the more we listen to our inner voice to sift through the details and come to the right answer. This is driving a convergence of technology, creativity, and business acumen in the practice of experience design. As PwC principal Rik Reppe explains it, “The creative thinkers in a company help you write a better story, with the right experience flow, the technology people enable that beautiful experience, and the business people ensure that you get a financial benefit out of creating the experience your customers desire.”

Just look at the sharing-economy car-ride business to see how it all comes together. That success story is about more than just technological innovation. It took equal measures of creativity and busi- ness acumen to build and operate a high-growth platform that connects passengers to car-owners moonlighting as taxi drivers. For most companies, layering in multiple perspectives to create that great experience, grounded in a sound business model, is not easy. From the customer’s perspective, though, hailing a cab has never been easier. “You almost don’t want customers to stop and notice and say, wow, that was beautiful,” says PwC principal Juan-Carlos Morales. “Really good experience design is invisible.”

Whole Foods, for example, sequences personalized content for the customer in the form of healthy recipes, food storage tips, etc., depending on where she is on her digital journey. The content needn’t lead to big aha moments, but it should be relevant and personalized,

Know when and how to improvise

Such improvisation is especially critical to minimizing negative interactions with your customers.

With the right experience design, you can transform a bad moment into a good one, making your story memorable in a way that benefits both your brand and your customers.

In experience design, being able to design in the moment is just as important as thoughtful orchestration.

with the goal of enriching the customer’s overall experience.2 So intuitive and well-executed are the experiences designed by companies that know how to do this really well, it’s hard to put a finger on what they’re doing right. Chances are, though, they’re operating with an innate understanding of three key tenets of experience design:

1. The memory of the experience is more important than the experience itself. Rather than focus relentlessly on creating big “moments of truth,” experience designers should orchestrate all moments, big and small, to influence customers’ cumulative memory.

2. For brands eager to make memories that are likely to resonate positively with customers and lead to desired behavior, big data is helpful. But often companies overlook its limitations. Although big data can uncover difficult-to-detect patterns, it doesn’t reveal why customers

behave the way they do. Big data is most powerful when used in conjunction with small data, surfaced via traditional research methods like ethnography.

3. Big or small, no amount of data will help you script every moment perfectly. Instead, the right experience design should allow you to pivot from an un- scripted moment (e.g., a poor customer experience) and turn it into a good one. An ideal, though still uncommon, atmosphere for creating a design like this is a “sandbox” that sits within a company’s core business and draws on the best thinking from across the organization — sometimes from vastly different areas of expertise.

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Focus more on creating the right memories than on delivering big moments

Although a lot of businesses are under pressure to perfect every touchpoint with the customer, many companies miss an important nuance: How cus- tomers remember is often different from what customers experience. Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman has noted that we have two “selves,” the experiencing self and the remembering self, and that these can be fundamentally different.

It’s the remembering self that “keeps the score.” This has important impli- cations for experience designers. “What experience designers actually manage is the cumulative memory that customers have of a brand or a company,” says PwC principal Paul D’Alessandro. “You can influence the cumulative memory

of customers by curating three types of moments: the big moment of truth, small ongoing interactions, and just as importantly, moments where people are simply hearing stories about you.”

The obvious challenge today is that these moments are innumerable. So where does one even begin?

Let’s start with the ending

Done right, a story’s ending is powerful. For all the emphasis Aristotle placed on the story’s climax, he never underestimated the importance of the ending, knowing that it resolves the tension and provides emotional release. In doing so, the end forges a deep connection with the audience and makes the story memorable — as anyone who’s ever enjoyed a Shakespeare drama or a Disney movie knows only too well.

The same logic applies to brands, and is perhaps even more important because the story’s ending is the part that businesses generally can control. Celebrity chef Grant Achatz does this masterfully in his restaurant Next. He presents themed menus in extravagantly staged settings every three to four months. When the meal and show end, the diners, who buy all-inclusive tickets to get in the door, simply leave. The memory of those final moments, untainted by the inconvenience and economic pain of settling bills and calculating tips, is unforgettable — in a way that’s both positive and novel. The ending’s impact is even stronger if it compensates for a bad or mediocre experience running up to it, like an unexpected high note capping an otherwise disappointing vacation.

The experience your customer has is only as good as her memory of it

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But don’t forget the middle

Companies have much less direct con- trol over the biggest part of the story — the middle — which acquires a life of its own via word of mouth traveling fast across social networks. This is where storytellers that function as orchestrators have a clear advantage. Orchestration is about curating small and big moments that will predominate customers’ memory of the business.

For example, every family does not have to be the “family of the day” to experience the magic of Disneyland. This kind of orchestration is not overly contrived; it comes across as simple, natural, and rooted in the basic vision and purpose of the business. In fact, over the years, the purpose of the Walt Disney Company has stayed remarkably simple and consistent: creating happiness in magical settings. What’s changed? Behind the scenes, technology is playing a much bigger role in conjuring up magical moments. Disney is now helped by MagicBands, which are RFID devices, or rather, data-gathering machines, plugged into Disney’s analytical, predictive engine. MagicBands transmit signals to Disney hosts to clue them into the likely desires of the guests heading their way.3

Still, anticipating what the customer wants is one thing, executing the magic is quite another. This is where creativity and originality continue to matter, arguably even more than

before — because the more intimately you understand your customer, the more deeply you can engage them. Not every company, of course, is required to create magic. But, increasingly, companies across all industries are hard-pressed to design experiences their customers will connect with and remember the company for.

Consider a utilities company we work with: The company found its call center inundated during power outages. Although its customers’ immediate need in such moments is to know when power will return, the company decided to design an experience that would reassure customers that the company would always be right alongside them when they needed it most: during storms and hurricanes. The company’s app now routinely shares real-time, personalized information with customers about severe weather conditions and about the company’s own maintenance and restoration services. This has not only deepened the company’s relationship with its customers, but also alleviated a lot of stress on its call centers.

Orchestrating a beautiful middle also influences the starting point of your story, the reason a customer is drawn to you in the first place. Think of it this way: In most circumstances we hate to wait, and yet we ungrudgingly stand in line to obtain the latest iPhone, often enjoying the collective anticipation as part of the overall customer experience.

Using data to orchestrate all moments — good, bad, and ugly — to create an overall positive experience

Every moment need not lead to a big aha, but collectively all moments must work together to influence customers’ cumulative memory. This kind of storytelling requires creativity. At the same time, there’s nothing like a good dose of data, packed with customer insight, to really get those creative juices flowing. Hence, the hype around big data we’ve seen in recent years.

But just as big moments by themselves do not create great experiences, big data alone does not tell companies everything they need to know about their customers. And oftentimes it tells them more than they can easily decipher. As the scientist in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia puts it, “Real data is messy…. It’s all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune… to pick it out of the noise.” The polling predictions during the 2016 election season are perhaps the most striking, recent example of this difficulty.4 And while most companies are not pollsters, they too must pick out the tune if they are to create cohesive, powerful narratives from the noise.

That means not only listening to big data, but also making small, intricate behavioral observations about people. Big data’s strength lies in its ability to surface important correlations. The growing popularity of functional foods,

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for example, is correlated with people’s ability to use their mobile devices to look up nutrition profiles of foods quickly, according to Google Search data.5 But the fact that two trends dovetail doesn’t necessarily mean they have a direct cause-and-effect relationship. And so an examination of why different shoppers are making certain food-purchasing decisions (looking behind the trends and big data) is warranted, if retail and consumer companies want to entice buyers of functional foods with the right experiences.

This close observation of human behav- ior is fundamental to ethnographic market research, which has its roots in anthropology. While this research method is hardly new, it is being rebranded today as small data,6 to contrast it with big data. Historically, small data has had richness but lacked scale. Now it is about to explode.

Use data to help you deliver the right narrative to your audience

By merging big data with small data, you can obtain the right blend of customer insight, telling you not only what your customers want, but also why they want it.

This will help you deliver the right experiences to the right customers at the right moments.

Big data identifies large-scale patterns.

Small data — ethnographic or personalized observation — reveals why those patterns exist.

How to make big and small data work together

According to one estimate, by 2025 there will be three billion wearable sensors collecting detailed data about people in their local environments.7 This is an exciting development for designers who are eager to plug holes in their understanding of customer behaviors. Both big and small data are inadequate when working in- dependently of one another. But their convergence, through small data feeding into big data algorithms, is providing a much finer view into customer behaviors (which, as mark- eters know well, are often irrational).

We recently helped a client create a connected motorcycle prototype that plugs into the internet and everything else, from traffic lights to smartphones. In this connected network, when

one object gets information, the entire automotive system absorbs the lesson. That’s the power of big data. Ultimately, though, an intelligent vehicle is one that intimately knows its rider, and responds to that person’s basic emotions like security, comfort, passion for riding — and in the case of motorcycles, a shared sense of community with fellow enthusiasts. This is where small data generated by sensors comes in. Small data about the rider feeds into the big data algorithm to generate information that will make the ride a far superior experience — for example, more personalized and social by allowing the rider to “follow” others’ trips and learn about relevant upgrades at just the right moment.

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How to pivot when the story goes off script

If Aristotle created a clear story structure, Shakespeare layered it with greater complexity. His subplots were full of unexpected events (think protagonist meets witches) and surprising pivots (think comic sidekick’s untimely demise) that businesses can relate to. But unlike Shakespeare, companies can only, at best, anticipate unexpected events and surprising pivots, not script them perfectly ahead of time.

And yet it is when a company’s well-crafted customer-experience plot veers off script that the value of orchestration — or designing an experience rather than engineering it — becomes most evident. Behavioral science tells us that the human psyche remembers pain, loss, suffering, and bad experiences more strongly and vividly than pleasure, gain, and good experiences.8,9 By bear- ing this human tendency in mind, experience design can help companies pivot from a bad moment to a good one, potentially rechanneling all the negative energy surrounding a bad experience into a highly positive moment.

Consider, for instance, a technology company we work with — it had found that the experience of its globally mobile workers could be greatly improved if they no longer got lost in the labyrinth of cross-border tax treaties and policies. Recognizing that employees are the most trusted and credible storytellers of its brand, the company set out to design an entirely new experience for them, with the help of a cross-functional team of tax professionals, creative and customer experience designers, and digital strategy experts. Together they identified moments that typically stump international

assignees (bad), demystified those moments (pivot), and revealed the financial implications of different choices available (turn bad to good).

In a customer-facing context, the value of pivoting at the right time has always been known, if not practiced. For example, if a customer is told her flight is canceled, the airline staff can turn that bad moment into a positive experience by upgrading her for free to business class on a later flight. Today it’s more important to know how and when to do this, because of the exponential growth in the moments of interaction with the customer.

But it’s impossible to eliminate the unknown, and so that’s why the intuition of a designer — informed by data but not limited by it — is so valuable. A customer does not experience a sudden, unexpected moment, good or bad, in a vacuum. It is part of a continuous set of interactions she has with the brand, and those are more numerous today thanks to digital channels. This means that a company has a bigger opportunity than before to turn a bad interaction into a positive one in the context of that customer’s overall connection with a brand’s story.

Even if a customer experiences a bad moment that’s not attributable to your company, it’s possible to incorporate that moment into your story and turn it into something positive. On the face of it, this may seem like a risky, if not downright undesirable, thing for a company to do. For Zappos, it’s business as usual. The company has been known to send flowers to a sick customer and refund payment to a bereaved one, without return of merchandise.10 These are decisions made by the company’s customer service

representatives, who, without following a script, are at all times collectively writing what the company calls its “Wow” story.

Not all companies find it worthwhile to go the extra mile for every customer. This is where customer lifetime value (CLV), an old metric with new relevance, can help, allowing companies to calculate how much future business value will be generated by further investments in a particular customer. Many airlines do this routinely, which is why the committed discount traveler is unlikely to get upgrades and services offered to more-profitable customer segments. Delta, for example, even offers its “high-value customers” the opportunity to upgrade to a private jet for an added premium. It’s probably safe to say that the airline doesn’t do this frivolously.11

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Whether you’re an airline or an apparel company, or prefer Classical Greek over Shakespearean drama, you must have a firm grasp on your own story, knowing what you can actually control and what you can merely influence. Chances are, if you can master the art of blending technology, creativity, and business savvy, your story will be more memorable than your competitors’ — and in a good way, for both you and your customers.

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Endnotes

1. PwC’s Global Data and Analytics Survey, 2016

2. “Leading with Customer-Focused Content: Driving Growth Through Personalized Experiences,” Forbes Insights, Forbes and PwC, January 2016

3. “Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wrist Band,” Cliff Kuang, Wired, March 10, 2015

4. “Poll Positions,” Daniel Gross, S+B Blogs, Strategy& and PwC, November 9, 2016

5. “2016 Food Trends on Google: The Rise of Functional Foods,” Pedro Pina, Think with Google, April 2016

6. Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends, Martin Lindstrom, St. Martin’s Press, Feb. 2016

7. “Wearable Sensors 2016-2026: Market Forecasts, Technologies, Players,” Research and Markets, April 2016

8. “Praise Is Fleeting, But Brick Bats We Recall,” Alina Tugend, New York Times, March 23, 2012

9. “Losers,” James Surowieki, The New Yorker, June 6, 2016

10. http://customerthink.com/zappos-customer-experience-employee-experience-culture-and-holocracy-interview-with-rob-siefker-of-zappos-and-zappos-insights/

11. “How to upgrade to a private jet for $300” Kathryn Vasel, CNN Money, July 29, 2015

© 2016 PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the US member firm or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates, and may sometimes refer to the PwC network. Each member firm is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. 264905-2017 LL

www.pwc.com/us/experience

More information Want to learn more about experience design? Please contact someone on the PwC team, including one of the following individuals:

Edward Landry Principal Strategy& 703 626 3145 edward.landry@pwc.com

Rik Reppe Principal PwC 612 596 4421 rik.reppe@pwc.com

Paul D’Alessandro Principal PwC 312 298 3753 pmd@pwc.com

Juan-Carlos Morales Principal PwC 786 528 4932 juan.carlos.morales@pwc.com