3 Signs that You Should Leapfrog Your Current Customer Experience

It’s difficult to determine whether you should incrementally improve your customer experience offering or throw out the playbook and leapfrog your way to a new paradigm. This is especially true when your team or organization is constantly heads-down or putting out fires.

Watch out for these signs that will help you assess whether you should adopt a leapfrog strategy or continue to make small incremental changes to stay ahead of the competition.

1. Have adoption rates of your product or service leveled off without any signs of future acceleration?
   The initial launch and adoption of an offering both rely on the uptake of a target market. If you see adoption rates level off, this signal could demonstrate that you have nearly exhausted your potential customers. Marginal improvements may generate additional marginal value yielding a corresponding marginal increase in users or use. Leapfrogging the current customer experience would create a new value class that broadens the target market substantially.
   
   This signal is an unemotional measure of the offering growth. Marginal growth may be the primary objective, but it may be time to listen to this signal more seriously if your offering is underperforming consistently. 
    
2. Are you often adding new systems, tools, or approaches to meet customer needs?
   The limitations of your foundational assets may be holding the overall customer experience back. Locating and integrating seamless and interoperable solutions happens far less often than developing clunky Frankenstein-like experiences. Addressing your foundational framework or tools may be the key to delivering a cohesive experience for your customers by ensuring the availability of an ecosystem of solutions.
   
   While difficult to measure, this signal is something that design, and technical teams always have on their radar. The people responsible for developing and delivering the customer experience might be fatigued and weary of adding updates to the roadmap. Internal workshops and anonymous surveys may bring this into focus for all your teams. 
    
3. Does it seem like your organization is launching a UX refresh every two years?
   Often a UX refresh is chasing after a new look and feel to generate hype and revive engagement but in reality, it’s masking significant challenges your customers face. The customer is always going to be concerned about their “Jobs to be Done” regardless of a UX refresh. If your team is in a perpetual cycle of declining engagements and UX refreshes, then customers may be having trouble maximizing value from your offering. 

If you witness one (or all) of these signs at your organization, consider reaching out to see how Mad*Pow can help. Ultimately, the decision to leapfrog your experience offering is a complex internal discussion that will include tradeoffs and external market-related factors. We’re here to offer our expert solutions and organizational strategy to help you succeed.