Frans Joziasse, Founder of PARK, and Jay Peters, Managing Director of PARK USA, led Design Customer Experience (CX) workshops at Los Angeles Design Week and San Francisco Design Week 2018. The workshops took place two days in a row over the weekend at General Assembly locations in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Around 50 people attended the “Designing the Customer Experience” workshops in Los Angeles and San Francisco to learn how to better lead and manage CX. Furthermore, participants learned how to leverage design’s (potential) role as a competitive and strategic advantage for their companies or clients.

The workshops started with an introduction of CX, the importance of having a good customer experience and the negative outcomes of having a bad one. Participants learned why CX is so relevant nowadays for maintaining positive customer engagement, customer loyalty, and a holistic brand experience. The Customer Experience Arena, a proprietary tool developed by PARK Academy for mapping Customer Experiences was presented in addition to examples of how world-leading companies such as Nespresso, Niko, and GSK, are leading the market in the CX landscape.

Jay and Frans shared insights into how designers can provide important input to CX in many ways such as supporting CX activities from the design perspective, understanding the customer’s needs, visualizing data, aligning customer experience with other functions in the company and participating in touchpoints that they normally don’t have an influence on, with more ‘experiential’ design.

The session also included interviews with Clive Grinyer, a truly distinguished expert in the field of design in CX and former Head of Customer Experience at Cisco, Orange Telecom and Barclays Bank. His insights gave firsthand accounts and input on the topic to further support participants’ training.

Participants had the opportunity to briefly map their own company’s CX and brainstormed ways to increase engagement and customer loyalty by using the Customer Experience Arena.

We were very happy to teach and share insights about the value of design in CX with a whole new group of people. The workshops were very successful and we got very positive feedback as well as many requests for further sharing of materials.

Thank you to everyone that attended the workshops, we wish you success in designing the CX in your companies and hope to see you at 2019 LA and SF Design Weeks.

Customer Experience is a recently launched module in the growing line of topics that PARK Academy trains working professionals to develop themselves into design leaders.