Customer experience design consulting is the work of designing what the customer actually encounters: the touchpoints themselves, the order they arrive in, and what each one already knows by the time the customer reaches it. Strategy decides what an experience should achieve. This is the practice that turns that decision into specific encounters a company can build and a customer can recognize as one relationship. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999.
- Since 1999experience and service design
- 200+published case studies
- 10 officeson four continents
- 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
When companies bring us in
Almost nobody calls to say the experience is badly designed. The trigger is usually one of these.
- A customer experience strategy has been signed off and no one can say what the customer will actually see, do or be asked for on any given day.
- Each channel scores well on its own survey and the relationship across all of them is rated poorly.
- The same customer is addressed as a prospect by one touchpoint and as an eight-year account by the next.
- A target-state experience was approved eighteen months ago, parts of it shipped, and what reached the customer no longer resembles what was designed.
- A new proposition is launching and there is a deck describing it but no specification of the encounters that deliver it.
Why the approved target-state experience rarely reaches the customer
The usual program produces a future-state experience: a set of redesigned moments, a vision film, a set of principles. It is approved as one thing. It is then built as many things, because that is how the company is organized.
Budget, roadmaps and accountability run down channels. The contact center has a plan, the app has a plan, retail has a plan, lifecycle marketing has a plan. The designed experience is cut along those lines and handed out. Each team delivers its slice competently and defends it against the others for the next two planning cycles. The customer, who consumes the whole thing in sequence, meets a different company at every step.
- The design is specified as a picture of a better state rather than as a set of requirements each touchpoint has to meet, so there is nothing for a channel team to be held to.
- Nothing in the design says what a touchpoint must already know. Context is re-collected at every step because no one wrote down that it should not be.
- The sequence is never owned. Individual moments have owners, and the order they arrive in has none.
- Operational and system constraints arrive after approval, and the experience quietly degrades into whatever the current stack can emit.
- Measurement is per channel, which means the one thing being designed, the whole, is the one thing nobody reports on.
The useful question is not whether each touchpoint is good. It is whether the thing you approved is the thing that can actually be built, by these teams, on these systems, in this funding model. That is a design problem, and it is the one we take.
What our customer experience design consulting services include
Six capabilities. Most engagements use three or four, and which ones depends on whether the experience already exists, whether the strategy behind it is settled, and whether the hard part is deciding or delivering.
1. Experience audit of what the customer actually encounters
We walk the experience as a customer, not as an org chart. Every touchpoint the customer can reach, in the order they reach it, with what each one asks for and what it already knows. This is routinely the first time anyone has seen the full list on one page, and it is usually longer than the inventory the company maintains.
2. Customer research behind the design
What the person is trying to get done, where they give up, and which encounters they remember afterward. We run this with our user insights and research team so the design is built on observed behavior rather than on the moments the business finds easiest to measure.
3. Touchpoint and sequence design
The core of the work. Each touchpoint gets a specification: what it is for, what it must know on arrival, what it is allowed to ask, what it must never ask twice, and what it hands to whatever comes next. The sequence gets designed as its own object, with the transitions between touchpoints treated as things to be built rather than as gaps that take care of themselves.
4. Interaction and interface specification
Once the encounters are settled, something has to carry them. Our interaction design (IxD) practice designs the exchange itself, and our user interface (UI) design team builds the surfaces that deliver it without making the customer work.
5. Prototyping and validation before commitment
An experience design is cheap to change until it is in a roadmap. We build enough of the real sequence to provoke a genuine reaction, test it with customers and with the frontline staff who will have to deliver it, and record what was disproven. See prototyping and testing.
6. AI-driven experience innovation
Where the encounter itself changes because the system can now anticipate, answer or act. Our AI-driven UX innovation and CX design team covers this, and digital product creation builds the product underneath when one is needed. Our view on how AI changes UX and CX design sets out where we think this goes.
Not sure which of the six you need first?
Start with a working session. We will walk your experience in the order a customer meets it, mark every point where they are asked for something you already hold, and show you which part of the design would survive your current roadmap.
How a customer experience design engagement works
- Walk it. We experience the service as a customer does, end to end, across every channel it touches, and interview the people who deliver each part. The output is the real touchpoint inventory in sequence, with what each touchpoint knows and what it asks for recorded next to it.
- Design it. Encounters and sequence designed together, with the people who run the channels and the systems in the room from the first session rather than consulted after approval. The output is a specification per touchpoint and a designed set of transitions, each with a cost of delivery written against it.
- Prove it. The designed sequence put in front of real customers and real frontline staff, tested as a sequence rather than as a set of screens. The output is a validated design and a written record of what did not work.
- Hand it over. A specification the channel teams can build against, an owner named for the sequence as well as for each touchpoint, and a measure that reports the experience as a whole rather than channel by channel. The output is something your teams run without us.
Why companies choose Vivaldi for customer experience design
Three answers come up repeatedly in the first conversation.
- We design to what can be built. Channel owners, operations and technology are in the room from week one, so the design that gets approved is one the company can actually deliver, not one it will quietly reinterpret.
- We specify, we do not illustrate. The deliverable is a requirement set per touchpoint with named owners, not a vision of a better future that no team can be held to.
- We are a strategy firm that designs. The brief comes from a commercial decision about what the experience is worth, which means the design has an argument behind it when it meets a budget cycle.
How to evaluate a customer experience design consultant
Worth asking of every firm on your shortlist, including us.
- Ask what their deliverable looks like. If it is a future-state narrative and a set of principles, you are buying alignment, not a design. Ask to see a touchpoint specification from real work.
- Ask who is in the room. A design validated only with customers will be rebuilt by the channel teams into something the customer never saw.
- Ask how they handle the sequence. Most firms design moments. Ask who owns the order those moments arrive in once the engagement ends.
- Ask what the design says a touchpoint must not do. Constraints are the part that makes a design enforceable. A design with no prohibitions in it is a wish list.
- Ask how it will be measured. If the answer is per-channel satisfaction scores, the thing being designed will never appear in a report, and work that is never reported on does not get maintained.
CX design consultancy, digital agency or CX strategy firm?
| Criterion | CX design consultancy | Digital or UX agency | CX strategy firm |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it decides | What the customer encounters, in what order, and what each encounter already knows | How a given digital surface looks and behaves | What the experience should achieve and where to compete on it |
| Typical deliverables | Touchpoint specifications, designed transitions, prototypes, named owners for the sequence | Wireframes, design system, prototypes, front-end build | Experience principles, priorities, target segments, business case |
| Who signs it off | Chief customer officer with the channel owners together | Digital or product team | Executive committee |
| How success is measured | Resolution without repeat contact, relationship-level satisfaction, cost to serve, retention | Task completion, usability scores, conversion | Share of category, growth, customer lifetime value |
| Best when | The strategy is agreed and nothing specifies what the customer actually meets | The experience is settled and one surface is the constraint | The company has not yet decided what the experience is for |
Related work
Customer experience design sits inside our service design practice. The neighboring capabilities divide as follows.
- Experience strategy decides what the experience is for and where it has to win, before anything is designed.
- Customer ecosystem strategy and interaction field design works on the wider field of players, partners and interactions around the customer rather than on the encounters themselves.
- Customer journey mapping documents the journey as it is today. We take the map as an input and design what replaces it.
- User experience (UX) design designs a person’s experience of a product. We design the customer’s experience of the company across everything it runs.
- User insights and research supplies the evidence a touchpoint design is built on.
- Interaction design (IxD) designs the exchange inside a single encounter once we have specified what that encounter is for.
- User interface (UI) design builds the surfaces that carry the designed encounters.
- Prototyping and testing validates a designed sequence before it enters a roadmap.
- Digital product creation builds the product when the experience needs one that does not yet exist.
- AI-driven UX innovation and CX design is our team for experiences where the system anticipates, answers or acts.
For worked illustrations of the end result, see our collection of great customer experience examples. For who we are and how we work, see Vivaldi Group.
Customer experience design consulting in the US and worldwide
Vivaldi is headquartered in New York and has a second US office in Los Angeles. Outside the US, our teams work from London, Zürich, München, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Lima. We work with US companies nationwide from our two US offices; for city-specific information, see our pages for Chicago, Dallas and Houston.
Start where the sequence breaks
In one working session we will walk your experience in the order a customer meets it, find the points where they are asked to supply something you already hold, and name who would have to own the sequence for a fix to survive the next planning cycle. You leave with the list and a view of what it is worth.