Vidya serves Customer Experience Professionals. Her research focuses on the future of digital experiences — specifically, how companies organize, staff, and create design processes that help them deliver breakthrough experiences via websites, mobile, and other rapidly emerging digital touchpoints like tablets and apps. She also helps Customer Experience Professionals find, evaluate, and effectively partner with outside agencies to help them deliver experiences that drive their firms’ customer experience strategies.
Her research coverage includes interactive design agencies, digital experience organizations and strategy, web and mobile research, design, and usability. Vidya regularly teaches workshops on design processes and tools and performs reviews of websites, mobile and tablet applications, personas, and brand experiences.
Vidya comes to Forrester with design and strategy experience from the technology industry. Most recently, she was a user-interface designer with the award-winning customer innovation and design team at Symbol Technologies. In that role, she led the design of the mobility platform that allows Symbol customers to manage their fleet of mobile devices. Prior to Symbol, Vidya was in the office of the CTO at Critical Path, where she helped shape new product strategy for the mobile application provider.
Vidya’s work has ranged from user research to interaction and user interface design. She has published work in the 2004 BT Technology Journal as well as the ACM conference for User Interface Software Technology (UIST).
Why Customer Experience, Why Now?
We’ve entered the age of the customer — an era where a focus on customers matters more than any other strategic imperative. Companies are waking up to the fact that customers’ perceptions have a profound impact on business metrics ranging from brand equity and customer loyalty to increased revenue and cost savings. But while every executive knows that customers matter, most companies simply don’t approach their interactions with customers in a disciplined way. Lip service won’t cut it anymore. For businesses to succeed, they need to get serious about the way they define, implement, and manage the customer experience.
But where to designers and other experience professionals fit? Far too long they’ve been toiling to implement pieces of the experience but are still viewed as a cost, not a requirement, for doing business. To flourish in the age of the customer, researchers, designers, usability professionals, experience architects, and many other roles have to join forces and educate, inspire, and transform customer experience into a discipline.