OwnerEx: The Core of Virtuo’s CX Practice
- Gary Stein
What is OwnerEx?
Virtuo is a customer experience company, first and foremost. At the heart of our company is the framework we call OwnerEx, short for Owner Experience. We’d like to bend the thought-leadership rules here just a bit and talk about ourselves. Well, not necessarily about ourselves, but rather about how we incorporate human-centred design thinking into our business. Please think of this more as a share out than a pitch. Cool?
Find the most broken thing and fix it
We often talk about finding the Centre of Friction in a customer experience: the moment in a journey where emotions are lowest, and work is highest. A well-known Centre of Friction in homebuying is the move itself. Getting all your stuff from where you are to where you’re going causes people immense stress. It’s usually on the list of things people least want to do, up there with root canals and going to jail.
A big part of the problem is that no one has ever been able to help the homeowner manage this step, so the problem just sat there. It was (as one of our customers calls it) the worst part of the best experience.
Part of Human-Centred Design thinking addresses this exact situation. Design is not about aesthetics; it’s about solving problems in the simplest and most powerful way. It’s as true for designing products as it is for designing experiences. A lot of home services companies have embraced this approach, but the move itself was a gap.
That’s where we applied our effort, creativity, empathy, knowledge and passion. Solving the move. Taking the worst part and making it amazing. If we were going to reengineer an experience, we might as well take on the worst one.
Building on the fix: the OwnerEx Framework
Another part of Human Centered Design is having a clear definition of what you are doing, and why the human is at the center. Our definition of OwnerEx is this:
OwnerEx is the overall experience of a person finding, moving into and living in a new home, with a consistent focus on making the experience as pleasing, positive and enjoyable as possible.
As you can see, the definition is bigger than any one service we provide. It is about the underlying drive and the way we design each part of every experience. The next key thing in our approach is to have a simple set of things we want to do at every step and with every development. Here are the four components:
Delivering the expected, unexpectedly
We think great customer experiences deliver the expected, unexpectedly. They give people exactly what they need, but in ways that are remarkable. Our OwnerEx framework helps us design and build out those experiences.
Virtuo works with home builders, realtors, financial institutions, and insurance providers to deliver exceptional experiences for their customers. Learn more.
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