Managing Experience

At Adaptive Path we've recently been tossing around the terms "Experience Management" and "Managing Experiences." The precise meaning is a little fuzzy, but the intent is to focus some attention on the practices of persons at senior positions within organizations who are charged with the management of products or services where experience plays a significant role. To clarify, I'm talking more about people who are responsible for managing say, a hotel chain's reservations services rather than a person responsible for sand sales at General Construction Products, Inc. The difference being that the first person is more likely to be competing in the marketplace, changing key business metrics, or reaching new customers by carefully considering, planning, and evaluating her customers' experiences. This isn't to say that the Senior Manager of Sand at GCP Inc. can't do the same — but this person is just a much less likely participant in user experience because the nature of commodity products like sand. We certainly aren't the first to utter these terms. I'm sure there's countless bloggers, creative firms, and others applying the term to all sorts of issues. One of the most prominent is the concept of Customer Experience Management (CEM), that seems to arise from more of a marketing viewpoint and is explained as a counterpoint to CRM. CEM is quite different from what I naturally think of when describing Experience Management. I'm thinking of more mature and rigorous processes help those with defined business objectives, budgets, and product/service-line ownership make decisions over time that lead to predictable and positive outcomes for both the customers and the organization. The discipline of user experience is beginning to hit its head against a ceiling where empathetic research, participatory design, prototyping and testing can't address all the challenges faced. There are plenty of existing processes that can be adopted from neighboring fields like marketing, brand, and business strategy. The question is which practices to adopt, and how to integrate them to maintain the humanist values inherit in the current ux practices.