How can your organisation transform the digital experience it provides to customers and employees? The answer is to learn from the power of the latest consumer-grade experiences we are all familiar with outside of the workplace.
Today, business people will rightly expect all their providers to offer the same quality of digital experience as they would enjoy in their personal life as a consumer. From their life outside work, every business person knows how easy and convenient it is to use Facebook, Amazon or Netflix.
So what raises an enterprise digital experience up to the consumer-grade level? Among the key qualities are:
Intuitive
It must be simple and intuitive to use. Today’s consumer platforms such as Facebook and Amazon do not require a user manual. The user interface (UI) of successful consumer applications is clear, natural and obvious to explore and operate, with contextual help and support offered automatically as needed.
Accessible
A modern digital experience must enable the user not only to access it via a PC at the office. It must be equally accessible on the move with the user’s mobile device, whether via a native app or mobile-optimised website.
Resilient
In the past it was accepted that enterprise systems will sometimes go offline for maintenance or upgrades, or occasionally under severe loads. This kind of performance would be unacceptable in a consumer-grade platform. Business customers and users will now be intolerant if they cannot get tasks done at evenings or weekends—or if there are unexpected outages.
Fast
Business people want to get tasks done quickly, and have no patience for laggy performance, long load times or disjointed user journeys. They are accustomed to consumer-grade experiences— where such issues have been smoothed out through extensive user testing, iterative refinements and intelligent process design.
Personalised
People want an experience that is tailored to their needs, behaviour, likes, dislikes, and individual requirements and use cases. The system should learn and remember the way the user likes to work—not the other way around.
Always up-to-date
Users of consumer-grade experiences expect that any issues will be fixed quickly. They want frequent seamless improvements based on their feedback that occur automatically in the background—not a jarring annual version upgrade.
Inspire your thinking with a digital story on scaling user experience to the next level.
