The concepts of "context" and "scenario" play a crucial role in designing and optimizing the customer experience.
As we explore customer journey orchestration, we often come across two closely related but distinct concepts: "contextual" and "contextual".
These two concepts play a crucial role in designing and optimizing the customer experience. Recently, when putting together our project's scenario library, I've noticed that team members don't understand the two concepts clearly and often get confused.
Therefore, this article aims to clarify the unique roles and relationships between "context" and "scenario" in the customer journey, and hopefully help you understand.
Then let's get started~
1. Time & Space
When discussing situations and scenarios in the customer journey, there is a real need to clearly define the temporal and spatial conditions. This framing helps us to more precisely understand the behavior and needs of our customers at a specific point in time and in a specific environment.
1. Limitation of time conditions:
– In a customer journey, time can be thought of as a series of successive slices of time, with each slice representing a stage or moment in the journey. These time slices can be key moments in the customer's decision-making process, such as the awareness, consideration, decision-making, purchasing, and feedback phases.
– By breaking down the journey into different time slices, we can explore the customer's behavior and experience at each stage in detail, identify needs and challenges that may arise at a specific moment, and design targeted improvement strategies.
2. Limitation of space conditions:
Spatial conditions are often divided into "online domains" and "offline places", which provide different contexts and opportunities for interaction with the customer experience.
– In the online domain, customers interact with the brand through digital platforms, including websites, social media, apps, etc. The experience design of the online space needs to consider factors such as the ease of use of the interface, the accessibility of information, and the convenience of interaction.
– Offline venues involve physical stores, offices, event sites, etc., where the customer experience will be affected by many factors such as environmental layout, employee interaction, and physical product experience.
When exploring the customer journey, clearly framing temporal and spatial conditions helps us gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and needs at different points in time and in different environments.
2. Scenario & Scenario
1）情境（Contexts）
In the book "Consumer Behavior: Theory, Cases and Practice", it is mentioned that the so-called "situation" is composed of some temporary events and states, which exist in a certain time and space. Consumers do not react to stimuli (e.g., intrinsic properties of goods) in isolation, but must respond in a specific context.
For example, people will exhibit different consumption behaviors on different occasions, and at a given time, people will also have different desires and behaviors to buy than at other times.
Situations exist naturally, and situations mainly involve "spatio-temporal conditions" and "contexts".
- Spatio-temporal conditions: It covers all elements in the scene, including time, space, personal attributes of customers (such as age, gender, purchasing ability, purchase motivation, emotional state, etc.), environmental factors (such as the layout of the store, the way goods are placed, the attitude of waiters, etc.), and the interrelationships and effects between these elements.
- Context: It mainly provides context for the scenario to help enterprises understand how customer needs, preferences, and behaviors change under different conditions, so that the product or service is more relevant to the actual needs of customers in specific situations.
For example, in the context of shopping, if we further consider the "time and space conditions" and "context", consider that the shopping scene and behavior of customers browsing the website at home (space) quietly (space) on weekends (space) and shopping through mobile apps (space) on weekdays (time) will be very different from the shopping scenes and behaviors through mobile apps (space) on weekdays (time) on the busy commute (space).
2）场景（Scenarios）
A scenario is contained within a context (a subset) and usually refers to a specific story or situation that describes how a customer interacts with a product or service. These scenarios revolve around the customer's needs, goals, or tasks, describing the steps and experiences of the customer in the process of achieving the goal.
Scenarios generally have two characteristics, one is a natural scene, which refers to the scene that occurs in the original law of the customer's life, and the other is a scene shaped by the business of the enterprise, which is combined with or independent of the customer's natural scene, but must be highly related to the business.
Scenarios help businesses understand customer behavior in a given situation, anticipate possible challenges or obstacles, and design better solutions to meet customer needs. For example, "When a customer wants to buy a piece of clothing online (in demand), how do they search for a product (step 1), compare options (step 2), choose a size and color (step 3), and then complete the purchase (step 4)." ”
3) Comparison table
I've put together a table to make it easier for everyone to compare and understand.
3. Scenarios & Functions
Scenario understanding is the basis of function development, and function is the specific practice of the enterprise to respond to the needs of customer scenarios.
In the business environment, enterprises will develop a series of functional products or services based on different scenarios of customers. The function corresponds to a series of events that occur in a certain scenario for the customer, and the enterprise provides a solution that can meet their needs.
For example, in an e-commerce shopping scenario, customers need to compare the features and prices of different products, so the company has developed a tool that can select different products for parallel comparison to assist customers in making purchase decisions.
Scenario-driven function development can adapt to the diversity of customer scenarios, and the same function can actually span one or more scenarios. This means that even if the same function requires different forms of expression or operation logic in different scenarios, the value and scope of the events it solves will be different.
For example, the difference between location in navigation apps and social apps.
1) Location Services in Navigation Apps: In navigation apps, Location Services help users determine their current location and provide route planning. Users rely on this feature to get precise directions from their current location to their destination, whether walking, driving, or using public transportation.
2) Location services in social apps: In social apps, the same location features are used to enhance social interactions. Users can share their real-time location or check in to a specific location through location services, which are more focused on increasing interaction and sharing experience between users.
4. Functions & Requirements
In order to generate functions that can meet the needs of customers, it is necessary to combine the customer's past situations and scenarios (the customer's previous state) and various factors in the situation to stimulate (triggers), so that the customer's needs in certain scenarios can be successfully activated.
At this time, in this scenario, the enterprise uses its own products or services to provide customers with corresponding solutions to meet customer needs.
In the development of the same function, there will be 3 types of needs that need to be met from the JTBD (crème brûlée) theory, namely: functional needs, emotional needs, and social needs.
1. 功能性需求（Functional Jobs）：
- This is the basic need of a user to use a product or service to accomplish a specific task or solve a specific problem. It focuses on the usefulness and efficiency of a product or service.
- For example, a map app for smartphones needs to provide accurate navigation, which is a functional requirement.
2. 情感需求（Emotional Jobs）：
- Emotional needs focus on the user's feelings and emotional experiences during the use of a product or service. These needs may involve an individual's inner feelings or emotional satisfaction associated with the use of a product or service.
- Continuing with the map app as an example, users want the app to be user-friendly and interactive to be pleasant, which are emotional needs.
3. 社会需求（Social Jobs）：
- Social needs relate to the social impact and relationships of users when they use a product or service. It focuses on how users position themselves or interact with others in a social environment through a product or service.
- For a map app, if it allows the user to share a location or travel route with a friend, then this involves meeting the social needs of the user.
A feature development approach based on a deep understanding of the customer's context and needs gives companies a greater opportunity to design features that are more engaging and deeply tailored to the needs of users.
5. Failure Mode & Journey Orchestration
In fact, the features developed by enterprises do not always meet the needs of customers.
In certain cases, failure to meet the requirements due to insufficient understanding of the customer scenario, functional design flaws, insufficient content coverage, or reliability issues is also known as a failure mode.
Failure modes often occur because enterprises do not fully grasp the behavior and needs of customers in specific scenarios, or the functional design does not fully consider the diversity of these requirements.
To combat failure modes, organizations need to adopt a journey orchestration strategy that optimizes the experience by designing and adapting customer interactions. When businesses perceive potential problems with the customer experience in a timely manner, they can address them by guiding customers into new scenarios that better meet their needs.
Usually, in the scenario, different degrees of weight will be assigned to the business, and this weight will determine the direction of the customer flow in the journey orchestration.
For example, I went to find a keyboard on the Taobao platform, but in the search results, I couldn't find the style I wanted. At this time, if a new guide can appear, giving recommended products based on big data, let me enter the (new) scenario of recommended products.
In this way, even if the platform's initial search results didn't match the demand, I was directed to a new scenario where I browsed the products recommended by the system.
That is, journey orchestration allows customers to find a new scenario through timely perceptual feedback.
This application of customer journey orchestration exemplifies how businesses can respond to customer needs in a timely manner through technology and data insights, turning potentially negative experiences into positive customer interactions.
6. Summary
I summarize the previous process into a complete picture, and make a small summary to fully understand and help us clarify the differences in our work.
First of all, we understand a series of environmental materials that exist naturally through the temporal and spatial conditions of the situation, the context, and the previous state of the customer.
Then, based on the understanding of {natural + business} scenarios, enterprises develop a series of functions (solutions) driven by scenarios to meet the needs of different types of customers {functional needs, emotional needs, and social needs}, and the satisfaction of needs at this stage will be mainly oriented to the main path of customers.
Finally, in the failure mode, the journey orchestration design process is defined to improve the reliability of customer demand achievement.
More than.
Columnist
Long Guofu, public account: Long Guofu, everyone is a product manager columnist, and the manager of CxHub. Committed to lifelong learning and self-improvement, sharing information, views and personal insights in the fields of user research, customer experience, service science, etc.
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