Principles are a valuable and unifying tool in a world where businesses strive for consistency and excellence across all touchpoints. Principles—whether they guide customer experience, design, brand identity, product development, or service delivery—are a compass for decision-making, ensuring alignment across teams and maintaining the essence of what makes a product or company unique. But with so many types of principles, when do you apply which, and how do they bring value?

Let’s break down a few of the principles in our toolkit: customer experience (CX), design, brand, product, and service. Understanding their distinctions and specific uses can help teams make strategic decisions that consistently drive better outcomes.

CX Principles: Guiding the entire customer journey

Purpose: CX principles are crafted to deliver frictionless and valuable customer experiences across every touch point. They are typically broad and customer-centric, providing direction on how to enhance interactions from start to finish.

Application: Use CX principles when looking at the big picture—spanning multiple channels and touchpoints—focusing on how a customer feels throughout their journey. These principles help ensure that customers’ expectations are consistently met or exceeded, no matter which channel or team is handling a particular part of the journey.

In healthcare settings, CX principles guide everything from appointment scheduling to post-care follow-up, and all the evidence points to higher patient satisfaction and medical adherence. 

For example, Harvard Business Review reports. 57% of healthcare providers are setting out to proactively improve their CX, placing it above the need to lower costs and increase revenues.

Value: The primary value of CX principles lies in their cross-functional approach to ensuring that every part of a customer's journey is delightful and frictionless, contributing to stronger loyalty and advocacy.

Design Principles: Ensuring a user-centric approach

Purpose: Design principles guide the creation of products, services, and interfaces that are usable, accessible, and appealing. They address how something works and how users interact with it.

Application: These principles are most effective when designing user interfaces, digital platforms, or experiences where usability is paramount. They help ensure that the solutions are functional, elegant, and intuitive.

Value: Design principles create cohesive, user-friendly experiences that solve user problems effectively. They promote consistency and reduce users' cognitive load navigating a product or service.

myRyman, the Ryman Resident App, showcases how strong design principles can drive user engagement and business value. Focusing on hyper-accessibility, the app improved elderly residents’ interaction, offering a seamless digital experience. The app has 98% of residents using the app weekly, averaging 7.2 sessions each week and a CSAT (customer satisfaction) score of 88%. This demonstrates how well-executed design principles can increase satisfaction and drive measurable results. myRyman was awarded a Gold Pin at the Best Design Awards in 2024 for ‘The value of design’↗ .

Brand Principles: Shaping identity and perception

Purpose: Brand principles convey the business's identity—its values, personality, and tone of voice. These principles ensure that every interaction reflects the core ethos of the brand.

Application: Apply brand principles to every communication with customers, including marketing campaigns, on the website, in service communication, and even in customer service. These principles ensure that the tone, style, and messages always reinforce what the brand stands for.

Value: Consistent brand expression builds trust and recognition, making the business stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Product Principles: Crafting the experience of what you deliver

Purpose: Product principles focus on the core philosophy behind a product—what it should do, how it should behave, and the value it should deliver to the user.

Application: Use product principles during the development phase to prioritise features, guide decisions on scope, and maintain consistency across iterations. They help answer questions like "Is this feature aligned with what we set out to create?"

Value: Product principles are valuable for maintaining product focus and ensuring that development efforts create meaningful, aligned features that resonate with users and solve key problems.

Service Principles: Delivering consistency in human interaction

Purpose: Service principles guide service delivery—whether digital or in person. These are about creating positive interactions between staff (or service channels) and customers.

Application: These principles can be applied in customer support, service design, or any setting involving direct customer interaction. They ensure every service touchpoint is infused with empathy, efficiency, and consistency.

Value: Service principles are valuable for ensuring that all service representatives uphold the same high standard of care, which is crucial for customer retention and satisfaction.

Valuable in matrixed and highly regulated industries 

In regulated industries like healthcare and aviation, principles serve an additional crucial function: they help organisations maintain consistency while navigating complex compliance requirements. 

For example, when a pharmaceutical company implements new patient support services, these principles work together to ensure the solution is compliant (through service principles) and patient-friendly (through CX principles). This becomes particularly important in matrix organisations where multiple departments might interact with the same patient journey.

The unified value of principles

The power of principles lies in their ability to align diverse teams, drive consistency, and foster trust—both within the organisation and among customers. By understanding when to leverage each set of principles, businesses can make decisions that resonate more deeply with customers, create cohesive brand experiences, and ultimately elevate the overall customer journey. 

If you need help co-creating guiding principles and creating alignment within your teams, please get in touch. We would love to help you Solve and Evolve.

* Reference material

Harvard Business Review, The Customer Experience in Health Care