Here at Bluestone360 we like to think for ourselves, break moulds and go further with our clients. Not just for our own interests of course, but for our clients and customers. The best way to do this is represented in our business statement – The Creative Brand Strategy Agency. Rather than just a new way to describe an agency model, it compounds what we do creatively, when we build brands and develop strategies.
However, what does this all boil down to? We think it’s our approach to Customer Experience (CX). We also see this as an umbrella term for our activities that we address when approaching a project or working on a client’s product. It’s analysing and understanding data and human behaviour an approach that we break down like this:
User Experience (UX) – We work with you to help understand how customers interact with your product. This is the Creative part of the puzzle. Is it physical or web-based? How does a customer pick it up? Where? How did they hear about it? How do they access it? Do they have to do anything to get it? What is their intent to engage with it? Questions can be endless, but essentially we want to understand how customers interact with a product? What assumptions they make and how we can identify user personas and journeys and adapt and test products to deliver the best possible experience? Not only for the customer, but the brand resulting in sales.
We use tools and data to provide initial insights and diagrams alongside clients’ work to map a framework on how we can influence behaviour, engage the customer and create calls to action (CTA) that result in providing simple and enjoyable sales for the customer and brand.
Part of the extension of this is the next part of our line – Brand. CX means we ask more questions, harder ones too. We research how customers feel and interact with the brand behind the product. This might be extending common held beliefs about user personas to create a greater number, but also tap into that “Invisible PR” the company/brand has and how it makes people feel? Does it represent what it does? A good example of a brand really understanding what it means to people is RedBull. Redbull makes entertaining content that pushes extremes and challenges the status quo. It just happens to make money by selling drinks. That feeling and knowledge defines the brand and how powerful this is in working their commercial goals. It’s not people interacting with the product itself, but how they engage with the brand.
The final part of the puzzle is perhaps the most important of all and one often left on the shelf – Strategy. For us this needs to consider a brand’s most important asset – its employees. Employee Experience (EX) is incredibly important. We push brands to help provide the best tools to their staff. Not only so they can do their job, but become advocates of the brand and its products. Happy and fulfilled employees are going to push a brand and its products, it’ll be more than a job to them. Training to understand how to action campaigns and how to take customers from awareness to consideration and decision (purchase stages) and continue to engage current and potential customers is only possible if staff have the knowledge and ability to execute this.
UI, USPs, wireframes, journey mapping, prototyping, automation, promotional and servicing activity etc. is are important. However, we always return to the foundations of what we do – it’s what makes us Bluestone360 and what our clients return for.
Stay tuned for our mini-series of why we think UX, CX and EX are important in more depth.