Brands are tapping into the user experience (UX) and business value of design to set themselves apart from competitors.
Salesforce EVP of product design and user experience Justin Maguire says as more industries mature, customers are choosing experience over brand loyalty.
“When there was no car, the first car had half the levers behind me and it was hard to use. It didn't matter because it did a thing nothing else on earth did,” Maguire says.
“So, then after that point, there were five people making cars and I had a choice. Now, what I make matters. Every industry does that.
“Many industries are now fairly mature and the competition is [too]. People are loyal to experiences, not brands.”
Global insights firm McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over a five-year period in multiple countries and industries.
According to the McKinsey Design Index (MDI), companies with top-quartile scores outperformed industry benchmark growth by as much as two to one.
These companies with higher scores also saw higher revenue growth.
Big companies are increasingly recognising this value – it was only four years ago that Maguire was the first senior executive to be hired by Salesforce to lead product design and UX.
Now across the company there are more than 700 designers working together in different departments ranging from marketing and creative to experience design and IT.
The next step is developing the Salesforce design narrative which Maguire says will become the foundation for a centre excellence that they can point customers to things like best practice and queries.
“We're centring that around the idea of relationship design. It's kind of our talking point and story,” he says.
“The goal is both internally of course to empower anybody to take on those best practices, not just a designer, and more importantly for our customers, to expand that Salesforce economy and our whole ecosystem with people who have that kind of skill.”
Shifting design practices
When it comes to best practice tips, Maguire says having a conversation with the customer first is something every company should do.
“Many companies today have overinvested on quantitative data which is important but it doesn't explain the why,” he says.
“You need to do qualitative research. Sometimes they do qualitative research as just purely in-app feedback, but they're failing to actually have a conversation.”
Technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning have been quick to come to the aid of brands wanting to deliver personalised experiences for customers at scale.
Maguire says it is still early days but his team are working to fine-tune both technologies to improve experiences for customers.
“Delivering complete personalisation to everybody is no longer a crafted thing. It's building tools,” he says.
“We're in the process of building the tools that enable that next way of designing which is to deliver a personalised experience for everybody, and we're in the evolution of that.
“We are also looking at giving just stronger hints and guidance, making it hard to do something silly.”
In addition to using it to scale experiences, Maguire says they are also using machine learning to share best practices and ethical concerns.
While Salesforce’s customers are free to make decisions on how they use the products, he says the company is now “baking” ethics into its tools to help them make better decisions.
“If we notice you're building a loyalty program that's going to use zip code, we know zip code historically embodies huge amounts of race discrimination. So, we will point that out,” he says.
“So, baking those into the tooling for our customers is another place we're leveraging on data and insights and machine learning to grow and learn with our customers and pay attention and try to provide smart guardrails and assistance to them along the way.”
As an aside, Maguire does note that brands using AI and machine learning need to take an ethical approach to the use of these emerging technologies.
“AI and machine learning represent all manner of opportunity for guidance and bespoke experiences at scale that we could never do before, but they also sit at the edge of what we can control and so there's a lot of fear around that,” he says.
“I think what grounds us in that new journey is our values. Any company that's taking part in the AI evolution; if they aren't guided by a core set of values and principles, good luck.”
AdNews attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.
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