Samantha Starmer – The Holistic Customer: Beyond the Website Experience
Developing a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints is the new nirvana that everyone from Marketing to IT is talking about. Few companies are doing it well, and even fewer resources seem to exist on how to integrate the disciplines of interaction design and user experience with the long histories of customer service and brand marketing best practices. Via my experiences evangelizing these efforts at a top multi-channel retailer, I will share some challenges, strategies, and tactics for designing and implementing a truly holistic customer experience. Topics covered will include:
- How should we engage users in multiple venues before and after they use a website? How can an interaction successfully cross modalities?
- If a brick and mortar experience for the brand exists, how should it mirror or differentiate from a digital experience?
- What are the key pieces of a holistic experience?
- What is the interplay between creating consistency between channels and maximizing each channel’s differentiators?
- Is the future channel-less rather than multi-channel?
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Over the last 12 years, Samantha Starmer has worked on a wide variety of user experience and information architecture projects and strategy while at Amazon.com, SchemaLogic and Microsoft. She is currently a senior manager at REI.com, where she is creating and leading new teams for user experience and information management, and incubating work around multi-channel customer experience. Samantha holds a Master’s of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Washington and regularly lectures there on Information Architecture and User Experience topics. Samantha has served on the boards of the Information Architecture Institute and Content Management Professionals.
January 30th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Hey Samantha, it’ll be great to see you at MX! I can’t wait to hear about your multi-channel experiences – a year after moving our web dept into marketing we’re also responsible for more than just the web. We’re still trying to get our heads around it, it’ll be interesting to see how other ‘innies’ are dealing with it.