Designing Better Customer Experiences

In this post, we share how Mightybytes creates compelling and purpose-driven customer experiences (CX) grounded in shared, long-term trust and mutual respect.

“My agency never listens to me.” It’s one of the most common responses we get when asking prospects why they’re looking for a new agency.

For Mightybytes, a good customer experience starts with active listening and verifying values alignment. It’s important we do both.

• Active listening helps us craft better proposals and, eventually, design better solutions.
• Values alignment helps us nurture trust and build long-term, mutual success.

These are core stepping stones to how we design meaningful customer experiences. Our clients have chosen Mightybytes as their partner. That’s not a decision we take lightly.

Designing Winning Customer Experiences

CX at Mightybytes is intentionally designed and thoughtfully executed. This entails blending common experience and service design practices with a real-world commitment to building trust and nurturing mutual respect while helping them achieve their goals.

These rigorous practices help us design winning customer experiences that improve collaboration and drive long-term, shared success over time driven by target outcomes rather than simply a checklist of outputs.

With this in mind, most of our client relationships have lasted five years or more. We maintain this track record by creating long-term, shared value between our organizations and rigorously focusing on trust and customer experience. Service design activities help us achieve this.

Aligning Values: Profit + Purpose

Certified B Corps like Mightybytes have a long-term vision to build a more regenerative and inclusive economy. We do this by meeting the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.

Balancing mission with margins is hard work, but we know that purpose-driven companies are more successful in the long run. In addition to making money while creating change, Certified B Corps and other social enterprises reap these benefits and more:

• Higher employee retention and productivity,
• Better customer loyalty,
• Higher levels of trust,
• Increased interest from investors,
• In many cases, B Corps outperform their peers over time.

Many of these elements are part of our Code of Ethics and commitment to operate as responsibly as possible.

Most importantly, when we find customers who share these values, building trust and mutual respect becomes a whole lot easier.

Each Certified B Corp enacts our community’s collective vision in their own unique way based on available resources and, often, through strategic partnerships.

For Mightybytes, fostering long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with clients who share these values plays an important role in how we fulfill our mission. We are more than just customer advocates.

We strive to create collective impact and shared success by helping mission-aligned clients thrive in every way possible. In turn, they help us fulfill our mission and create ongoing, sustainable sources of income through impact business models and other means.

This shared prosperity is exemplified in our work through who we choose to do business with and how we conduct that business.

Embracing Service Design Practices

To this end, user experience design practices have been part of Mightybytes’ toolkit for decades now. Related, service design practices help us improve customer and other stakeholder experiences. Service Design includes many exercises and activities grounded in Design Thinking and related disciplines.

Some of these activities include:

• Systems mapping
• Contextual interviews and ethnographic research
• Brainstorming, card sorting, clustering, ranking, dot voting, and other ideation methods
• Current- and future-state journey and experience mapping
• Service blueprints
• Prototyping and wireframing
• Scenario planning and investigative rehearsals
• And many more…

These activities help us better understand how customers and other stakeholders perceive a service or program we hope to design or improve. Knowing when to employ each depends on the context of what we aim to achieve.

However, in every case, Service Design activities drive tactical and measurable CX improvements that build trust.

Nurturing Shared Prosperity

We take being a customer advocate seriously. It also requires us to think differently about how we design systems to create shared value.

Here are several ways we help our clients create change and align our work together with their mission and a larger vision for shared prosperity.

1. Sustainability & Whole Systems Thinking

You can’t sweat the right details unless you clearly understand the big picture. That’s why we incorporate systems thinking into our discovery process, so we understand your entire organization and where it sits within a larger ecosystem.

This helps us make better recommendations across the board and allows us to view client challenges from multiple angles, including the perspective of less obvious stakeholders like local communities, the environment, and so on.

Sure, we conduct user research and create personas just like any digital agency, but we also ask deeper questions:

• How does the organization fit into a larger social, ecological, and economic system?
• Do opportunities exist to foster innovation or transform an organization with this project?
• Can we help them incorporate more responsible digital practices within their organization?
• Where are the collective impact possibilities between our organizational mission and theirs?
• Can we identify potential paths to achieving long-term growth, value, and impact? What about impediments?
• Planet as stakeholder: Can we power their digital products and services with renewable energy?
• How can we create mutual, long-term success for all project stakeholders beyond the initial scope of work?

By asking these (and other) questions up front during the discovery process and revisiting them throughout a project, we can identify opportunities that support better outcomes for everyone.

Example: DePaul University

We started working with DePaul University back in 2016. When vetting vendors, they mentioned that, in addition to our experience, Mightybytes being a Certified B Corp drew them to work with us.

We schedule regular in-person check-ins with the DePaul team to focus specifically on strengthening the relationship between our two organizations and covering big picture issues. We also conduct multiple human-centered design workshops focused on solving specific problems we have identified.

2. Building Mutual Trust

Change and learning are continuous throughout any relationship. Individual projects are no different. We embrace continuous learning because it yields superior solutions, fosters collaboration, and builds trust.

The latter is key. While great products and good collaboration are important, without mutual trust any relationship will eventually fail, so we work hard to build and maintain it:

• We listen intently and ask many qualifying questions (see above).
• Conversely, we are always available to answer questions and alert our clients whenever any new piece of information could impact a deliverable timeline or budget.
• Clear communication and collaboration: workshops, regular check-ins, and in-person meetings that focus specifically on relationship-building as noted above.
• We are transparent about budget, scope, deliverables, timing, and so on.
• We are willing to pivot when necessary and share risk with our clients on projects.

In addition to the list above, we also regularly improve client onboarding processes to set clear expectations, answer important questions up front, and minimize surprises.

Example: Chicago Community Trust

Our first project with Chicago Community Trust, Chicago’s oldest and largest community foundation, was in 2008. Since then we have worked hard to build and maintain mutual trust with this organization.

3. Creating Collective Impact

Being both a Certified B Corp and an LGBT-certified Business Enterprise not only helps us align customers and values, but also helps us devise new ways to strengthen those relationships and create collective impact with strategic partners.

Example: The Alliance for the Great Lakes

We have recruited riders for Alliance for the Great Lakes teams to participate in multiple Climate Ride events. Climate Ride produces multi-day endurance events that raise money for environmental causes. These teams have raised tens of thousands of dollars for both Climate Ride’s growth fund and the Alliance.

Also:

• Both these organizations have referred clients to Mightybytes when the opportunity arose.
• Mightybytes has improved both their websites.
• I have served on the executive boards of each organization.
• We have spoken at multiple events together and identify opportunities to create ongoing value and engagement between the organizations.

By viewing these partnerships through a lens of shared value, mutual prosperity, and trust, we are able to create value beyond the exchange of money.

4. Embracing Tension

All this said, any long-term relationship runs the risk of turning sour, despite everyone’s best intentions. We think we’re pretty good at listening and asking qualifying questions, but sometimes it’s easy to misinterpret things. Digital projects are often complicated, leaving numerous opportunities for miscommunication.

So, how do you maintain value while also navigating uncertain waters and keeping everyone happy? Embrace the tension. Lean into it.

In our experience, project hiccups are either about simple misunderstandings, which are generally easy to navigate, or mismanaged expectations, which often aren’t. By designing processes with built-in opportunities to release steam and course-correct, navigating these situations becomes easier.

Despite having processes in place and nearly 30 years experience building hundreds of complex websites and digital products, we do occasionally miss something. We’re only human. The most important thing is that we learn from these situations so as not to repeat them.

When this occurs, we make every attempt to rectify the situation with the least amount of impact on project success. We own our mistakes and expect our clients to do same. We’re not afraid to have difficult conversations so long as the target outcome is a mutual understanding by both parties on the best path forward.

Example: Dharma Merchant Services

Several misunderstandings occurred during the launch of Dharma Merchant Services’ company website in the mid 2010s. Uncomfortable conversations led to a brief period where we were estranged.

However, as a fellow B Corp, we know Dharma shares our values and long-term vision, so we came together, collectively course-corrected, and worked toward mending differences.

Over a dozen years later, our relationship is stronger than ever and we’re able to create success for both organizations, helping each other thrive along our respective business journeys.

5. Customer Journey Mapping

Finally, to improve customer experience with an existing product or service, we sometimes facilitate customer journey mapping workshops. The exercises in these collaborative workshops help identify opportunities to improve customer experience.

They also enable project stakeholders to create a roadmap to improve over time. Mightybytes runs these workshops internally and for our clients.

Scaling Impact for Better Customer Experiences

We don’t always get it right, but we certainly try very hard to create a great customer experience for anyone we collaborate with. Our success, and sometimes that of our clients, depends on it.

The stories above are exemplary of relationships we strive to build with every client through meaningful service design. Success here enables Mightybytes to scale our efforts alongside those of our clients.

Over the years, the number of mission-aligned clients we work with has risen considerably. This is due to a number of things:

• Community-building with values-aligned organizations
• Targeted business development practices
• A solid reputation built over decades of hard work supporting the Impact Economy and helping our clients find long-term success

Throughout, one thing remains consistent: designing better customer experiences requires an ongoing commitment to quality and a growth mindset for continuous improvement.

For more examples of how this commitment to creating shared value plays out in our day-to-day work, check out our case studies or read other insights via our blog. Got questions? Give us a shout.

Frequently Asked Customer Experience Questions

Finally, here are answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about using service design to improve customer experiences.