A well-designed user experience is inimitable – it belongs to a company like an asset in a balance sheet and cannot be plagiarised.

Today’s digital platform plays a crucial role in delivering a seamless and consistent user experience across multiple channels. But organisations must be prepared to ‘write their future’ in a Customer Experience Strategy, and use the strategy to develop a framework to design unique user experiences.

The underlying philosophy of user experience design is being an advocate for the user. However, when many exponents refer to ‘user experience’ they are too often referring solely to the experience a user has while interacting with a website.

User experience design (UXD) is about people, which for most organisations means customers. Primarily, UXD is about designing a series of user experiences that together defines an integrated approach to engaging and interacting with people in the delivery of products and services.

And this sets up the key business opportunity. The most successful organisations are intrinsically experiential, and are completely defined by the experience the customer has when interacting with them.

Therefore an ‘experience’ is an expression of a brand – best viewed as an interaction between a customer and a company, and can be summarised as the ‘feeling’ that a customer has after that interaction.

Accordingly, it is safe to assume that while building a compelling brand creates your platform to attract customers, your ongoing success is realised through multiple and compounding customer interactions. Each and every interaction helps to form the customer’s experience of your brand, and knowing and understanding this truth is the key to customer retention.

The critical component is to identify all touch points and build user experience models that reflect a customer’s real world experience of interacting with your brand, digital or otherwise, and use these models to uncover gaps in product and service delivery.

It is in every company’s interest to understand all the possible touch points that can affect a customer’s experience, and create a Customer Experience Strategy that ensures the delivery of memorable and desirable experiences across all digital channels.

As digital becomes an operational imperative, it’s critical to understand the important role that user experience plays in aligning your customer’s needs with your business offer. The more you know about their desired experience, the more likely your digital solutions will be useful, useable and desirable.

For many companies digital is the first touch point for new customers. Are your user experiences compelling?