Reverse Engineering In Customer Experience

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With all the advancement and technology nowadays, customers are becoming more demanding than before. They expect immediate access to information, data and services at any time. And brands must keep up with their demands if they want to continue to deliver high-quality customer experience. Plus, at the same time, they need to stand out from competitors as a job to capture customer attention is more harder than ever.

In order to do that, it is important to think differently from competitors and create something better. To create unique and innovative strategies to deliver personalized and exceptional customer experience. The one strategy we will talk about today is reverse engineering.

🚀 Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 🚀

What Is Reverse Engineering?

Buyer Legends points out:  „The most effective way to plan your customer experience is by starting at the happy ending and working your way backward.  It is reverse engineering a successful customer experience.“

Reverse engineering (reverse thinking or working backward) is a technique that focuses on customers’ needs. It is a step back to try to find out how customer experience was actually made. And this technique, with deep analyzing, can help to create unique customer experiences faster and with fewer resources.

Picture 1. Reverse engineering process

7 Reverse Engineering Strategies in Customer Experience

1. Detect a real-life customer problem within your current customer experience. 

Customers deal with different issues every day. It is important to find the real reason behind those issues they are facing. 

• Is it because the product doesn’t please customer needs? 
• Or customer service your company provides is poor?
• Maybe the customer is being transferred over and over? 
• Customer service is untrained or unfriendly? 
• Because the company lacks a customer-centric culture? 
• A customer has received a faulty product?

Those are all possible issues. As soon as you detect them, you will be able to find a solution faster.

2. Address the problem with the ideal solution of the customer experience. 

After detecting the problem, the next step is to sit down with your team and together try to find an ideal solution. Start thinking about how to incorporate the solutions you’ve discovered into your customer experience strategy and in every single action and choice your company makes. 

Picture 2. Finding the ideal solution

Related: Effective Customer Experience Strategy & How to Build One

3. Work back from the experience towards technology and processes.

The final product is the customer experience. But in order to create one, it is important to go back at the beginning of the process. That is gathering a team who will make an excellent strategy, and help you develop the customer experience. And secondly, to find technologies that will help you improve CX. The better a company organizes and trains the team, and better technologies company implements –  a better customer experience.

4. Build a company-centric culture from within the customer experience. 

After discovering solutions, it is time to build a company-centric culture. Ask yourself a few questions first. Such as:

• On what ways communication are you relying on?
• If it’s the traditional one, why haven’t your company changed it yet? 
• Have you already optimized your marketing?
• Is your customer experience strategy designed well?
• Do you have all the resources and technology needed?
• Have you already implemented a customer service philosophy?

Only when your company is able to answer these questions, it will get what every business desires – a personalized and unique customer experience. And by delivering unique experiences, your company will only prove its value.

5. Derive marketing content out of the customer experience.

Marketing is an important part of CX, as marketing materials, advertising, posting content on social media platforms are all leaning on CX. 

So, it is important to map customer touchpoints on their journey and connect with. And when touchpoints are discovered, the next step is to create creative, helpful and enjoyable content customers can relate to and engage with them. A company can even use negative customer feedback they resolved and turn it into a powerful article. That way customer will gain more trust in a company which eventually results in customer loyalty.

Picture 3. Make creative and engaging content

6. Build a customer-centric company with CX feedback.

Did you know that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are not customer-centric? So, in order for your CX strategy to work, customers need to be in the center of everything the company does. Try to establish a relationship with them by showing understanding and will to solve their issues. Consider even using a help desk software as it can help you solve issues faster and in that way delight customers.

7. Refine your CX.

If the company wants the customer experience to be up to date, it should use metrics. They are mainly used to measure the company’s performance and to assist you to keep track and compare outcomes and detect weaknesses in your approach. And they are crucial to delivering excellent customer experience.

Related: 10 Essential Customer Experience Metrics

Reverse Engineering in CX – Examples

APPLE

As Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO said: „Begin with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.“

So, the first great example of reverse engineering we found is the wireless headset feature from a new iPhone.

Picture 4. Apple reverse engineering example

While it may come as a huge development in technology, the customer may still wonder why this feature even exists? But, when you begin thinking like –  ‘I want to listen to music without the wire-hustle’ – the advantages instantly become more apparent, and the product itself, sounds more attractive.

IKEA

Tradfri (or IKEA Home smart app, according to last changes) is a smart home accessories line from Ikea, which began in 2017 with a lot of WiFi LED bulbs compatible with Apple’s HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home.

Picture 5. Ikea reverse engineering example

So, when they’ve discovered the original problem, such as lighting moods, they created several groups of light sources and made it easy for anyone to control it and design in their own way. It is about making things easy for individuals to change make the atmosphere they want. 

DISNEY

The last example comes from Disney’s Animatronics. They first started with reverse engineering a mechanical bird.

Picture 6. Disney reverse engineering example

Adafruit Industries says: „When Walt Disney found an antique mechanical singing bird in a shop while on vacation in New Orleans, he was intrigued. He reasoned that he and his staff had been doing animation on film for years, but it would be fun to try some three-dimensional animation.“

Reverse Engineering in CX Wrap Up

We hope these 7 steps will help your company to reverse engineer customer experience in a unique way. Yes, the reverse engineering process is not an easy process, but the end results are worth it. And those are loyal customers. So, by going a step back and discovering the core problem with the help of your team and analytics, it will be easier to implement a strong strategy and achieve great results.