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Yesterday NYC-based Smart Design held the first of their Customer Experience Lifecycle workshops at Frost & Sullivan's Fourth Annual Innovations in New Product Development and Marketing 2008.

Smart Design's Customer Experience Lifecycle workshops focus on the three essential stages a consumer has with a given product/service: awareness, decision-making and usage. The awareness stage is a pre-purchase 'read' that encapsulates an individual's first reaction to a product/service and their initial emotional response - i.e. curiosity, intrigue, confidence, etc. The second stage is the decision-making that entails a closer inspection of the given product/service, with the final 'read' being a post-purchase usage experience. This is drilled down into two sections, a consumer's first time use and an ongoing usage experience.

"Focusing on a consumer's experience over time encourages repeat customers and promotes brand loyalty," commented Tom Dair, Co-Founder and President of Smart Design. "Businesses can only compete on price and technology for so long before parity is reached. The next level centres on design. Companies are under immense pressure nowadays to come up with new ideas and developments for innovative designs to compete for market share. However, they don't always realise the importance of a customer's emotional responses that greatly influence an individual's decision to buy, use and keep a product."

To keep abreast of future workshops, tune in to Smart Design's website. For more details on how this particular workshop went, click here.

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