By Wendy Eichenbaum
In a world when customer experience is becoming the key differentiator, it is critical that you understand the best-of-class experiences to determine how your experience measures up against your competitors.
A competitive analysis is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. Marketing and business development groups have performed these analyses for decades.
But it’s not enough to compile a checklist of features to see which company provides the most functionality. Instead, the key to conversion and retention is to understand how easily and intuitively customers acquire, use,and maintain your product or service.
In the world of Customer Experience (CX), you perform a competitive analysis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of competing experiences. And this is critical because by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. [1]
The first step in this process is to define your competition. You will want to review 2-4 competitors at a time. Consider reviewing companies with services that have similar features, a reputation for a great user experience, or are your strongest competitors.
Then you will select the tasks that are key to providing a great experience. This will vary from company to company. But common tasks to consider are how customers research your service, purchase that service, or get assistance if they run into issues. For each task, look for trends, patterns, and differences in the experiences between your offering and that of your competitors.
For instance, if a customer is researching a product on your website, how much information can that customer learn before calling you? Do your competitors showcase the benefits in a white paper while you only provide a one-paragraph description? And can the customer access the information in a few clicks or is it buried under layers of navigation?
If a manager has questions about her fleet’s insurance policy, how can that manager contact you? Do your competitors offer multiple channels of communication – such as chat, phone, forums, and emails? Do they offer longer hours of support in a day?
And the comparisons don’t stop with your direct competitors. Customers create a “mental model” in their heads as they interact with any product and service. The model is their set of beliefs for how something works. This model then sets the expectations that customers have when they come across other products and services that “feel” similar.
Let’s say that you manufacture a fleet tracking device. A driver gets stuck in a huge traffic jam and is worried about making the delivery before his mandatory break. The GPS feature provides directions to the next location, but it does not provide alternative routes. You may have several reasons why you cannot provide alternative routes, but the driver only remembers that Google Maps re-routed him during his last traffic jam.
And you will be compared with great experiences in ANY industry. For instance, let’s say that you offer phone support. Customers call in, and are routed to a queue. While they’re waiting, they remember that Apple customer support provided a “Call Apple Support Later” feature. This feature allowed them to schedule a time for Apple support to call them. Apple set the bar for respecting the customer’s time.
In a world when customer experience is becoming the key differentiator, it is critical that you understand the best-of-class experiences to determine how your experience measures up against your competitors.
[1] http://www.walkerinfo.com/customers2020
Wendy Eichenbaum is a UX professional with 23 years in the business. She began her career as a technical writer. She then earned a Master of Arts in Professional Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, studying both writing and UI design. Over the years, she has worked across verticals, from start-ups to multi-national firms, in many areas of UX including research & strategy, Information Architecture, usability testing, and focus groups. She started her own UX consulting firm in 2008, Ucentric Design. And she is an adjunct professor at Cal State University, Fullerton. There she teaches a class that she created, User-Centered Design for Web and Mobile Interfaces.
www.ucentricdesign.com
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