What's Involved In Delivering a Great Customer Experience?
by Cynthia Zimber
Delivering a good or great customer experience should be the goal of any product group. Is it? Think heroic launch dates that “can’t be missed” thus, no time to test other than perhaps with internal staff*; or feature/functionality overload because of the belief that more is better when in fact more features can add layers of complexity.
What defines a good customer experience? One definition I discovered is “delivers what you expect—it surprises and delights you.” Take Amazon, for example. It anticipates what customers will find most helpful. Yet we have to ask, why are there so few great customer experiences that getting what we expect is a delightful surprise? Quite often the answer is that the customer is not included in the design process.
Demographics and market research do not address how target customers will behave, how they will actually “experience” an application. ”By investing back in the user experience, you get high loyalty and repeat usage,” says Sebastian Thomas, head of U.S. technology research for RCM Capital Management, an investment firm with a stake in Amazon.
At Tec-Ed, we define a great customer experience in simple terms: The target customers for whom the product or application was designed are successful in accomplishing the goals that the solution was intended to support; they are able to accomplish what they need to do in a straightforward manner; and the application is satisfying because its use is efficient and predictable.
There is more to consider when developing a strategy for providing a great customer experience. When working with our clients, we also consider the client’s business goals for their customer experiences, and how well those goals are met. We recently worked with a popular enterprise solution client whose objectives were to provide a good customer experience that generated more qualified leads. They also wanted to validate the personas they had developed to represent unique potential customers—were they accurate? Our user research was able to provide the data they needed to re-think their personas and make informed decisions for their Web re-design initiative.
Thus, the process of developing a great customer experience is not as simple as an intuitive UI and easy navigation. Though talented, many product teams can only guess whether what they design and launch will meet the goals of the end-user. We’d like to see that change! As Nielsen Norman reported from a 2006 study, a 10% usability budget investment (of the total project budget) will result in (conservatively) over 83% performance improvements (key performance indicators; whether site traffic, ability to complete a transaction, sales, or other business goals). An 83% ROI is a terrific statistic that surely can elicit attention from internal stakeholders!
We are delighted when clients like SupportSoft have included user research into the product development budget to help ensure great customer experiences. Learn how here: SupportSoft Case Study [pdf] . As Frank Lloyd Wright so aptly expressed, “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.” Yes, we can provide the data for getting busy with those sledge hammers, but at Tec-Ed we prefer the eraser—it’s far less costly, saves overall development time (and re-design fixes), and mitigates the huge potential for lost business.
Do you have great customer experience or successful ROI stories you’d like to share? We will be covering the ROI topic in the January newsletter, so please email your stories to cynthia@teced.com. Enjoy the holiday season!
*Internal evaluations can be risky. See Laurie Kantner’s article: A Question of Bias.