Interview
The Gist
- Experience balance. Striking a balance between employee and customer experiences is essential for successful UX and CX design.
- Navigating privacy. Adapting to privacy regulations and cookieless architecture requires innovative approaches to deliver personalized, contextualized experiences.
- Seamless integration. Prioritizing seamless omnichannel experiences ensures that transitions between channels do not negatively impact the customer's digital journey.
In the swiftly transforming digital landscape of today, businesses confront the daunting task of furnishing outstanding customer experiences while steering through the convolutions of privacy regulations and burgeoning technologies.
In this Q&A, CMSWire Contributor Nav Thethi, senior manager of web and digital experience at Hitachi Vantara and a seasoned digital customer experience expert, shares his views on achieving equilibrium between employee and customer experiences, adjusting to privacy challenges and underscoring seamless omnichannel interactions. He elaborates on the significance of incorporating UX in CX design, adopting contextualized experiences and preserving brand consistency across channels, all the while adhering to privacy laws.
You can take a peek at Nav's column "Your CX Design Is Not Working. Are You Doing It Right?" and be sure to heck out his other CMSWire columns as well.
Editors note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro here senior managing editor at CMSWire. Actually, I gave myself a senior title. That's technically not true. It's managing editor. Get ready. I was getting ready for your title now Nav Thethi here CMSWire contributor. You are a senior manager web and digital experience at Hitachi Vantara, what's going on?
Nav Thethi: Good, Dom, all good. It's a sunny day here in California all good. Enjoying the weather and doing my work at my home office. So that's pretty much it for today.
Nicastro: Yeah, you you play right in the space that you know we care about CMSWire customer experience, digital customer experience, web, CX design, UX design and tell us a little bit about yourself because you have some pretty impressive history. Your resume is pretty stacked with technology chops, business chops, marketing, development. I mean, you kind of got it all.
Thethi: Yeah, it's pretty exciting journey all across over the last two decades. I have been through technology, business delivery, and marketing now highly focused on customer experience on a digital space. I'm pretty much focused on digital customer experience. So yeah, here at Hitachi. I take care of digital operations that pretty bundle pretty much closely bundled with digital journey of customers online and collecting the data, understand them and then improve the experience for maximizing the the engagement and conversion.
Balancing Act: Integrating UX in CX Design with Employee and Customer Perspectives in Mind
Nicastro: Yeah, vast experience and you know, that all plays into the columns you've been writing because you're just you're writing about things that you live and breathe every day so it's cool to watch and cool to read. I know our readers like it. So the latest article we're talking today is about UX and really infusing UX into like CX design. So what's important to know at a high level for if you're a customer experience practitioner, and you're really diving into that UX aspect, what's what's important to know?
Thethi: Yeah. I wrote this article considering I was learning from various organizations and being researchers and interviewing some leaders and and learning that most corporates are sitting in a room and and deciding what the experience should be. Okay, so without even understanding the problem with customers, and how it should really be designed from a customer perspective.
So yeah, so that's the focus and also at the same time, employee experience is equally important. How we go to market without experience, how that experience should be delivered, developed and delivered, how soon it should be, what the timing should be, and how well employees are equipped with that experience, knowledge and pain points to address that through user experience and personalized experience. So it is a balance between employee experience and customer experience. That's where I covered the spot in this article.
Nicastro: Yeah, it's a tough thing to balance right. Because you want to assume that because you have all this experience, you want to assume what you know about what the customers want, right? You know, I have experience I know, I'm a customer, I kind of know what they're feeling. But you think it's really important to go with that, you know, that sort of outside in perspective, rather than most commonly I think people do the inside out.
Thethi: Yeah. So that is what I'm gonna say, like, clearer based on their understanding, based on what little bit of customers that I talk to, on a higher level that what the problems are, but we deal with every single user online and understand the patterns like what are their pain points, where they're bouncing, what assets work well in the in that conversion journey. And based on that, like how we should design the experience that can improve that engagement. And also what have customers through different organizations and frontline staff like sales, pre-sales, support advocacy teams, and all those folks that we need to collect all that information to understand where it should focus to deliver the customer experience.
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Embracing Contextualized Experiences Amid Privacy Concerns and Evolving Digital Landscape
Nicastro: Yeah. Well, we're here pretty much in the fourth quarter now. Closing out the year. You know, are there any sort of big initiatives as a, you know, as a digital customer experience practitioner like yourself? Is this something you're sort of doubling down on something you're focusing on? To close out this year strong or something big like maybe in 2023 that you have on your mind?
Thethi: Yeah. So from the technology perspective, I think there are a lot of use cases that to focus, the organization should focus on. I think, this contextualized experience is going to take a digital space very heavily because of these privacy regulations and, and the cookieless architecture is being more prominent and demanding moving forward. So I think that's where we should learn and especially when this matter was and blocked in are expanding very fast, privacy is getting a concern and at the same time, we need to keep consistent with our brand commitment with our customers.
So having that all in together, like when we are talking about consistent brand experience to our customers and market is changing very fast this volatility and disruptions keeps happening. So it is very tough and complicated core right now to keep up the momentum of providing a consistent customer experience. So yeah, with that privacy into the mix now and regulations I think contextualize experience should is should really be focused on at this point, and how to still deliver the same personalized experience to the user and and like not just one touchpoint, it should be like omniexperience, right? So switching between channels should not impact your digital journey. So I think that's what should be focused on over the next few years with all digital leaders to cover that gap.
Related Article: CX vs. UX: What’s the Difference, and Why Does It Matter?
Striking Equilibrium: Merging Privacy Considerations with Personalized Omnichannel Experiences
Nicastro: Yeah, that's the reality. You have to have omnichannel you have to have availability and personalization in all channels wherever they are. And then at the same time, you have to respect privacy. It is a tough job right now to be a customer experience practitioner professional. Because you've been taught all along as marketers as CX people to collect data, collect, collect, collect, the more you collect, the more opportunities you'd have to market. And now it's be more transparent collect less ask for information, respect the privacy laws. So it is a balancing act. And one, one I don't envy having to do.
Thethi: Yeah, and and I see that I built this after last week. Yeah. I was able to talk to a lot of providers — there was a big event. And I really learned that providers are thinking about privacy and personalized experience at the same time, and I have, yeah, I was excited to talk to some of those developers. And yeah, I'm gonna talk to them more. And maybe that's gonna be the next project, one of the projects in 2023 that I'll be looking into.
Nicastro: Yeah, you can follow Nav Thethi's columns on CMSWire. He's got a few of them already, including this one and one on privacy and personalization. I remember so they can dig into that one and your profile. So hey, it was great to catch up. Thanks for joining us and CMSWire.com. And thanks for being a CMSWire contributor. That's awesome. We love getting practitioners with experience like you and yours. So thank you very much.
Thethi: Yeah. Thanks, Dom. For the talk today. I'm really looking forward to discussing more topics with you moving forward.
Nicastro: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot, Nav, and have a good one.
