Building great customer experiences is not about improving the website’s looks (UI).

It goes far beyond that.  

The best experiences are more meaningful.  

They should, 

1. Help customers meet their goals quickly and efficiently
2. Build a connection that goes beyond the simple transaction, and
3. Signal care, respect, and gratitude

Do it well and your customers will thank you.  

Stick to just making the UI look good. And you end up with lipstick on a pig.   

Building meaningful experiences requires a holistic approach.  Here is how the best product teams do it.

1. Set up for success

1. Pick the right journey to improve:  Not all customer/user journeys are the same.  Some matter more than others.  Find out what matters to your customers the most.  Start from there.  
2. Define success metrics:  Meaningful journeys deliver business impact. So identify a handful of business metrics (e.g NPS, cycle time, HEART, etc.).  Define them upfront.
3. Mobilize a cross-functional team:  Building great experiences is not just about having a great UX team.  For the best experiences, create a three-in-a-box team that includes the product, engineering, and UX managers.
4. Fund persistent team:  Don’t fund this like a project (scope + resource + timeline).  It is the main culprit for mediocre experiences.  The best experiences continuously evolve by teams that stick around.  So fund accordingly.  

2. Discover the right experience

1. Identify customer needs:  The best experiences solve a customer’s problem.  To help discover these needs, do research. Encourage the team to talk to users directly.  Nothing beats first-hand data.  Avoid traditional methods.
2. Come up with lots of ideas:  Once the needs have been identified, the next step is to come up with as many ideas as possible.  There is an art to generating lots of ideas.  There are a ton of different ways to do it.  This here is my favorite.
3. Validate ideas before you build:  The sad truth is that most ideas will fail.  So test the ideas first – build prototypes, share with users, collect feedback, and iterate.
4. Add to the roadmap:  Only after the prototype has been validated, add the solution, feature, or functionality to the roadmap. 

3. Build and launch

1. Build:  Most organizations are relatively good at this.  The key thing to keep in mind is to begin small. Define your MVP and stick to it.
2. Launch:  Big bang approaches are risky.  Despite all your research and experimenting, the customers may still not like it.  Or the technology may not be robust enough.  To discover these problems early (before it damages the brand), keep the launch blast radius small.  And then slowly expand.

4. Monitor and improve

1. Measure impact:  Once the MVP is launched the real work begins.  Start with monitoring the impact of the launch against the metrics you defined earlier.   
2. Continuous improvement:  If the metrics confirm what you saw in discovery, then build what is next on the roadmap.  If not, iterate and improve.  Depending on your data you may have to go back to discovery.

Why go through all this hassle?  What is at stake?

If you follow the above blueprint, both your customers and executives will thank you.

You will not only create experiences that surprise and delights your customers.  But you will also deliver business impact. 

However, if you decide to just upgrade the look and feel.  Be prepared for unhappy customers and angry executives.

After all, putting a slick veneer on the same process is not going to deliver a meaningful experience or a business impact.

The choice is yours.  

Happy building!!