[MUSIC] Hi, welcome back. The use stage of the customer journey is often the most explicit testing point for the promises of the brand and how they manifest themselves in the customer experience. In English you might say it's where the rubber meets the road, it's the ultimate test. This is true for a restaurant whose brand is about promoting the unique dining experience of South East Asian and French country cooking. The experience around discovering that restaurant, looking at review by previous diners, looking at the menu, getting to the restaurant, parking, and waiting to be seated are all parts of the journey. But the brand promise is most tested at the table with guests ordering the food. The used stage of your home internet provider, after you selected it, scheduled the installation and configuration by a technician, is mostly judged by the speed and reliability promised by the provider's brand message. If you are unable to watch streaming video services, while your partner is uploading files, the brand promise gets broken. Sometimes users will be forgiven or will be forgiving for other aspects of a customer journey, like when the construction of that furniture that you bought is painfully difficult. But if the product doesn't offer the use value that it either explicitly or implicitly promises, customers notice. In digital products, such as business software and mobile phone applications or video games, the impact of the use phase is even greater. In such situations, the brand promises typically less abstract and more focus on the concrete value that the product brings to the user or the problems that it solves. For example, analytic software targets business users, so that they can use quantitative data to make decisions. While users might aspire to use a software so they can be recognized by their colleagues for their incredible business acumen or analytical capabilities, the decision to buy the software is really dependent on a checklist of available software features. Chart types, usability, data support, analytic and interactivity, shareability of the content, etc., etc, these are often provided as buying guides from industry analysts. The interactions that end users have with the applications they use, whether business software or mobile games, is known as the user experience. In a way, you can think about user experience in terms of the brand promise during the use phase, the use stage of the customer journey. This might be obvious, but in my experience, in medium to large companies, the customer experience team and the UX teams don't even know the other exists. So let me clarify for those of you in brand or CX, who may not know much about the user experience function. User experience designers, who may be designing your company's products as we speak, are trained to define the digital product's workflows, the look and feel, the feedback loops, etc. These designers attempt to meet and hopefully exceed users' expectations for achieving their goals with the product. They also typically conduct user research that provides a wealth of information about customer perception, their preferences, their usage context. This research might take the form of usability studies, prototype validation studies, observational research on the context that end users interact with the product, etc. It should be used to complement the customer experience and marketing teams' understanding of customer's interactions at other stages of the customer journey. If your company has a UX Team, it's almost certain that they're doing some kind of customer research or user research. If you recall one lesson from this class, figure out ways to share, systematically, the research that the UX team and the customer experience teams are doing. Share them between the two teams. In my experience, I'd say about half the time the two teams, customer experience and user experience team, have no idea the other exists. So if you're currently in the the CX function for a company that sells software or even hardware solutions, whereas mobile applications is part of the customer offering, then find the team designing those solutions. Give them a hug, invite them to lunch. You are allies in the quest to deliver great customer experience. The more you know about each other, the more likely it is you'll be aligned about your goals for the customer experience and ultimately how the customer experience reflects the brand. In week four, I will introduce you to some more specific tools that can help you map out how you can better collaborate and align with other departments, such as user experience. But for now, let's simply leave it as, get off your seat, and go find the other team, figure out ways to work with them. [MUSIC]
