Why You Should Consider Hiring an Experience Strategist

Starting a business—especially one that seeks to satisfy prospective clients’ demanding needs—takes courage, persistence, patience, and the wisdom to know when to bring in other specialists to form a formidable team. A team to help the business achieve its business goals while giving the customer an unforgettable experience. An Experience Strategist is a team member that can help reinvent the relationship between a business and its clients.

Who is an experience strategist?

Also known as a User Experience (UX) Strategist, Experience Strategists use UX practices, science, and research to understand consumer insights. This allows them to help a business or an organization design their products or services with the end-user in mind. Besides helping businesses adopt consumer-centric practices, UX strategists also often become important team members and change agents. 

They also play a key role in moving a business towards its goals by:

• Collecting and incorporating customer data in product design
• Pushing UX teams to align their processes with the organization’s goals, values, and vision
• Bringing together different team members in an organization to improve user experience 

How can an Experience Strategist help your business?

Improve customer engagement and excitement

A UX strategist can help shape and communicate your organization’s user experience design and policies while acting as an advisor and representative of the brand across all digital platforms. They work with others such as visual designers, technical staff, analysts, and program managers to set design objectives, identify needs, study consumer trends, and create experiences that synchronize business goals and user needs into memorable experiences.  

Support senior management

The UX Strategist plays a crucial role in the planning and goal-setting processes. They engage other leaders from various business units to understand consumer insights, business needs, and competitive landscape. They identify and analyze areas that need improvement and recommend the most suitable solutions. This work contributes to the continuous innovation and evolution of products and services. 

Support product development processes

UX strategists are involved in the entire product development process to ensure both the business and the consumer meet their needs. They are involved in user research, requirement analysis, prototyping, usability testing, and review.

Define opportunities and problems

UX strategists work with businesses to help their clients identify problems that need solving and define opportunities. Through concise and compelling story-telling, strategists can explain the business’s approach and processes to the clients, gaining their trust. 

Examples of application of Experience Strategies

In healthcare

According to medical reports released in 2016, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. Some of these errors are attributed to poor usability and user experience, forcing healthcare providers to seek UX strategists’ services. 

When these strategists come in, they collect data and evaluate the existing systems to identify problems and opportunities. For example, In 2014, a hospital in Texas sent home an Ebola patient because of poorly designed electronic health records. The doctor cleared the patient to go home despite having visited West Africa at the height of the Ebola outbreak because his travel history was only available to the nurses’ side of the software. In another case, a little girl suffering from cancer died because three nurses with over 10 years of experience failed to input IV hydration instructions while trying to navigate through the complex software.

If these healthcare providers had incorporated user experience strategies, these deaths would have been easily avoided. UX strategists help healthcare providers:

• Test and refine design concepts
• Reduce cognitive loads and distractions caused by unnecessary tabs and flashy designs
• Minimize process and remove hops and loops to ensure seamless functionality
• Maintain patient-centered care involving a personal touch in the age of telemedicine and robotic surgeries
• Revamp healthcare user experience, starting with user research
• Design a sustainable digital strategy to help them achieve their goals while fulfilling patients’ needs

In insurance 

Insurance is a competitive business with thousands of providers offering various attractive packages to attract potential customers. However, according to a study carried out by McKinsey, 70% of consumers are likely to buy from a business with the best user experience. While this applies to all businesses that offer products or services, it is an especially strong influencing factor when customers have to choose among businesses that offer intangible benefits, such as insurance companies.

UX strategists help insurance companies:

• Reduce transaction costs on all policies by helping the company move from paper to digital documentation
• Improve closure rates and shorten sales cycles by encouraging insurers to adopt eForms
• Gather digital insights that help determine the best channels, messages, and processes that resonate with potential customers
• Get access to customer-centric data that helps design insurance packages that appeal to their target audience
• Simplify processes that are often confusing and complicated

All businesses

While we have highlighted only these two industries to demonstrate the application of experience strategies, almost all businesses, including those that offer non-digital products and services, can benefit from experience strategies. To learn how an Experience Strategist can help your business or organization achieve its goals while creating a stable, long-term relationship with the clients, contact ArtScience Group.