Lars Wiedenhoefer - Strategies for Creating Effective Digital Experiences

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.

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Why is this book needed?

When thinking about writing a book about digital customer experience engineering, quite a few questions came to mind: Why is a book needed?, Who is the audience?, and of course Is there enough value to write about?

Let me answer the Why question first by going into how I detected the need and key components of this function.

When I was in the role of a manager of tech support of a major international financial services company, key parts of the role were to develop a deep understanding of the impact of issues, to understand and optimize the speed of the engineering feedback loop (issue resolution time), and to develop the ability to calculate the cost of the issues or customer friction to the business (in aggregate and on a case-by-case basis). To provide input, answers, and proactive solutions to these key topics, I had access to large amounts of operational data on the engineering, call center operations, and customer experience side.

The cross-functional leadership and mentoring skills as well as the engineering techniques learned from this proactive stance are quite valuable and teachable and provide the reason for why it is important to compile them into a book.

Having since worked with other technology organizations in FinTech, Ecommerce, and even MedTech, patterns of applicability emerged that proved each time how applicable these techniques are and how uplifting an experience it was for the teams, departments, and organizations that deployed them.

The uplift was experienced by engineers as they experienced a higher degree of empathy with the customer as they were in touch with them even prior to delivery of their features and product increments. The engineers created meaningful insights and data points that allowed the feedback loop to be optimized to the point that the efficiencies gained saved the company money as it also earned the company a higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) with their customers.

Whenever my teams and engineers worked with others in a proactive stance to address issues of speeding up the feedback loop, we educated and taught as many other engineers as we could. There were many who learned and picked up the techniques.

So, why is this book needed? The purpose of this book is to express the learnings and insights gained from the development of a proactive stance toward a product-centric engineering discipline that I call digital customer experience engineering.

As the audience for this book, I am generally trying to address anybody who is participating in the value stream of digital software engineering for the benefit of customer experiences, directly or indirectly. You may be an engineer practicing DevOps or site reliability, or you might be a product owner, UX designer, or researcher. And you might be working in support and seeking for new ways to engage with your engineering teams. I believe there are valuable points for each of you in this book.

Of course, this leads to the tougher question: Is there enough value to write about?

Let me answer in this way: There is enough value in this book if you are empathetic with your customers and desire for them to have great experiences. And there is even more value in this book if you are in a job role in the product or engineering departments of your company.

This book will discuss how to gain customer insights faster and through new and insightful sources, elegantly linked and within your reach. It will teach you to anticipate your customers needs and to react as quickly as your customers would expect.

With these skills in place, your team, organization, or company will gain a competitive edge over the competition. In my experience, I have seen the benefits to happier employees, higher job satisfaction levels, faster and more reliable innovative releases, and happier customers by multiple verifiable measures.

Writing a book during a pandemic was certainly not on my mind. In fact, I convinced myself that writing a book was for writers, and definitely not for somebody like me. Then, one day, I talked about my customer experience passion to Pedro Garca, an author and personal brand strategist, and there it was. He said I needed to write a book. After initially dismissing his advice, I became curious and read Fernando Doglios article 8 Steps to Publish Your First Technical Book on Medium. Now I felt empowered and motivated to become a person who can write a book. Thank you for the inspiration and encouragement.