2020-2022 was a difficult three years, and the global economy was hit hard, and the mainland was no exception. Coupled with the weakening of the demographic dividend, the Internet industry, as the vanguard of the experience field, has fallen back from its peak state, and the halo of the industry has almost disappeared. As a result, various large domestic factories have begun to "reduce costs and increase efficiency", and many designers engaged in experience design in Internet companies have "graduated". You may find that experience designers are among the most injured.
Many times, the work done by experience designers is considered by enterprises to be "icing on the cake" and does not reflect the core business value, so when companies are in a downward period of poor operating conditions and declining revenue, cost reduction and efficiency improvement often give priority to cutting down teams and positions that are "icing on the cake".
Therefore, if the job value of experience design has been in the middle and lower reaches of the value delivery chain of the enterprise, similar "graduation" will still occur frequently.
Many designers are also aware of such problems, and the experience design teams of some large manufacturers have also given solutions, such as starting to incubate products within the team, hoping to enhance the commercial value of the team in the enterprise through the external sales of products; Some teams began to propose the concept of full-stack designers, trying to integrate the responsibilities of interaction designers, UI visual designers, and even user research specialists on the responsibilities of experience designers, and enhance the business value of design positions by improving work efficiency.
However, these methods are palliative, not curative, and do not fundamentally solve the current situation that experience design positions are far from the core business value of the enterprise. As the chart shows, different businesses have different concerns about experience.
What should we do as practitioners in the field of experience design?
Only by transitioning into the enterprise experience space can this crisis be resolved.
01
Why transitioning into enterprise experiences is the right choice
I want to tell you a story first - the story of Warren Buffett's story about value investing.
The Coca-Cola Company is the world's largest beverage company, with a 48% global market share, and Buffett fully recognizes the great value of his company in the carbonated beverage market, making The Coca-Cola Company Buffett's preferred investment target.
From 1977 to 2003, for 26 years, Buffett's holding of Coca-Cola stock has never wavered, and the return on investment is as high as 681.37%. Although Coca-Cola also experienced a decline in performance during this period, Buffett insisted on trusting its long-term competitive advantage and never used a temporary decline in stock prices as a criterion for holding or selling. In 1997, Coca-Cola's return on equity was 56.6 per cent, which fell to 42 per cent in 1998 and 35 per cent in 1999. Many investors dumped Coca-Cola stock, but Buffett was unmoved.
He firmly held Coca-Cola stock and, together with the board, fired Coca-Cola's former CEO Avister and appointed Duff as the new CEO. Soon after, the Coca-Cola Company regained its strength and continued to generate high returns on investment for Buffett.
Coca-Cola's century-old track record has made it an undefeated stock legend. Buffett has said he "kills and doesn't sell" the stock.
Why Buffett can become a stock god is not how clever he has stock speculation, mainly because his core philosophy - value investment will not follow the trend due to short-term fluctuations.
The same is true for our choice of career direction, from the perspective of value investing.
The enterprise-level experience work we are engaged in is to deal with people's desires, as long as there are people who exist, there will be various desires, which requires all kinds of enterprises to provide products/services to meet people's various desires, of course, including the experience needs that will account for an increasing proportion in the future.
Therefore, the enterprise experience field exists to meet people's constantly updated experience needs, and this will be an eternal topic that will never be abandoned by the times. Entering the enterprise experience space is a value investment.
Speaking of which, do you have any questions about the decision to transition into enterprise experience? Don't question it, this must be the right choice.
02
Are you ready
Some designers may already be eager to enter the enterprise experience field through the above introduction. But as a beginner or a transformer, have you prepared from the four levels of Dao, spell, art, and instrument?
- "Tao" is "principle, law, essence". To enter the field of enterprise-level experience, you must first clarify the basic principles and context: do you have a deep understanding of the theory of enterprise-level experience, do you have a set of underlying methodologies to support, and do you have a clear understanding of what kind of business value enterprise-level experience can bring to enterprises?
- "Law" is "strategy, strategy", have you thought of a good way to transform into the field of enterprise-level experience? For example, when entering the enterprise experience field, you can "cold start" or "warm start". "Cold start" is to learn the system, methods, and tools of enterprise-level experience management from scratch. "Hot start" is about using your existing domain knowledge to go directly into the enterprise experience space.
- "Technique" is "tactics, skills", that is, specific steps that can be implemented, here is whether you have established a guide to action for career transition, what to do first, what to do next. For example, as an experience designer to carry out transformation, the first step can be to expand the scope of your work and do an experience satisfaction questionnaire under the premise of good design. The second step is to exercise your data processing and analysis capabilities through the experience data collected in the first step, and then try to build an experience indicator system.
- "Tools" are "tools, technologies". To enter the enterprise experience space, you need to have professional skills, understand the tools that are frequently used in this field, such as developing journey management capabilities, experience innovation design capabilities, etc., and you need to be proficient in the use of the journey mapping tool, the experience journey map.
Only when you think clearly about the four levels of Dao, spell, spell, and instrument can you prepare to enter the realm of enterprise-level experience.
03
Actions are always more important than thoughts
I remember that there is a saying in the stock market, when the grandpa and aunt who buy vegetables know to invest in stocks to make money, the stock is basically going to plummet. Because opportunity is always reserved for those who act first.
At present, the enterprise experience field is still in the embryonic stage, and there are no particularly mature and unanimously recognized theories and methods, so this industry is still growing wildly, and only more practice can know how to implement the enterprise experience work in practice.
Only practice can make enterprises realize the value of enterprise-level experience, generate more related positions, and make enterprise-level experience theory develop and grow.
As a result, there are many opportunities to look forward to in the current enterprise experience space.
As long as you recognize the underlying logic and core value of the enterprise-level experience, don't hesitate, roll up your sleeves and work hard, opportunities will not wait for you.
04
AI is reinventing the enterprise experience
The progress of technology has profoundly affected the development of human society, from the steam engine age to the electric age to the information age, each era has witnessed the fundamental changes brought by technology to business and social relations.
At present, AI technology is still hot, and the future social network will inevitably transition from the information age to the intelligent era, and eventually affect the process of human civilization from all aspects of economy, culture, and life, and the field of enterprise-level experience will be no exception.
Recently, ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a conversational large-scale language model released by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence laboratory in the United States, has set off a frenzy on major Chinese and foreign media platforms. In just 4 days, its number of users reached one million, and the number of registered users caused the server to crash for a while.
It can have a dialogue with people by understanding and learning human language, and can also interact with people according to the context of the chat, truly chat and communicate with people like humans, and even complete tasks such as writing papers, emails, video scripts, copywriting, translation, and writing code. It is also able to answer "what is the enterprise-grade experience".
Following AI painting, the birth of ChatGPT has made it a new traffic harvester, writing code, writing papers, writing novels, doing problems... It will do anything! Even Musk believes that "ChatGPT is too powerful, and we are not far from powerful and dangerous AI".
AI technology represented by ChatGPT has made great progress since its birth. From the initial theoretical concept, AI has developed to the present, which has profoundly affected all aspects of human society, changing the way we live and work all the time.
05
The future of enterprise-level experience is bound to be deeply integrated with AI
AI technology has a huge impact, and its influence will continue to affect the future development of enterprise experience.
In 2022, MIT's Future of Work for Customer Experience report showcased the results of interviews with 800 executives and a range of experts, and in statistics on which tools and technologies are being used or will be used in the future to improve enterprise-level experiences, we found that the top three AI technologies are AI training and coaching (93%), AI performance monitoring and evaluation (92%), and AI chatbots and voice bots (90%)
From the above statistics, it can be seen that AI technology will bring great value to the enterprise experience field in the future. I believe that AI technology will be deeply integrated with the following three aspects and enterprise-level experience in the future.
1. Promote each other in the experience touchpoints
The enterprise-level experience comes from the interaction between the target group served by the enterprise and the enterprise, so there are many experience pain points in the touchpoint that need to be solved. For example, when we call the customer service center, we often encounter the phenomenon of "kicking the ball", but with AI technology, we can automatically distribute the phone path based on the aggregation and intelligent analysis of the problem content, match the customer with the customer service agent who is most suitable for handling the problem, and effectively solve the "kicking the ball" problem.
Similarly, the development of AI technology can enable companies to provide more in-depth customized experience services for the target population, so that more and more companies will use various AI technologies such as ChatGPT in the future, so that the demand for customized experience of the target group will be increasing, which in turn can promote the continuous development of AI technology and find more commercial landing scenarios for AI technology.
2.AI technology enables enterprise-level experiences and improves delivery efficiency
The experience that companies deliver to their target demographics is necessarily highly customized, so the tools and workflows involved are necessarily very different from traditional standardized products/services. The technical characteristics of human-machine collaboration and integration of AI make the work methods and practices of the enterprise-level experience field more possible, which will inevitably improve the efficiency of experience delivery.
3.AI technology has changed the way enterprise-grade experiences are delivered
In the current enterprise practice, experience delivery needs to be achieved through the carrier of products/services provided by enterprises, so we should pay more attention to the quality of the product/service itself, but because of the emergence of AI technology, there are more possibilities for experience delivery. We use AI technology to understand the intents of our target demographics by analyzing their experiential behaviors and attitudes behind them, allowing us to deliver exceptional experiences and focus more on the data and the experience itself.
Therefore, let's not be afraid that the arrival of new technologies such as ChatGPT will impact the experience design industry.
The reshaping of enterprise experience by AI and its integration with the review of enterprise experience will bring many new opportunities to the field of "enterprise experience". It's never too late to dive into the "enterprise experience" space!
To learn more about enterprise experiences, read Winning in Experience: Enterprise Experience from Beginner to Mastery.