Experience engineering: What is it and how to embrace it? – II
Quick Recap & Preface:
In the previous blog on experience engineering, we covered the basics of how enterprises should lay a strong foundation for enabling total experience to improve their current workflows and overall efficiency. In this article, we will look at the steps involved in augmenting digital experience.
Let us divide our digital goals into two categories: fast wins and long-term digital experience goals. Communicate the goals to the teams involved so that there is clarity on expectations while we stay committed to continuous improvement.
Automating Repetitive & High-Volume Experiences on Legacy Systems
One of the quickest ways to simplify human experience is to use technologies to automate predictable, repetitive, and high-volume activities or experiences handled by legacy systems. We can leverage automation to mimic human actions such as:
- Document Understanding: Scanning a document to search for information
- Data Entry: Importing data into Line-Of-Business (LOB) applications such as ERP and CRM
- PO Processing: Automated PO generation based on user requests
- Helpdesk Automation: Chatbots that resolve support requests instantaneously
You can create and deploy digital assistants using Intelligent Automation Solutions (RPA, iPaaS) and chatbots which release human agents to perform higher-value work. Digital assistants can reduce transaction execution time, thereby elevating total digital experiences.
Combining UX with outcome-driven approach for Total Experience
Each person who interacts with your business, whether it’s a customer or an employee, needs a particular experience in making them highly efficient. Empathizing with your target persona, and identifying and objectively examining experiences are vital steps to achieving your total digital experience goals.
Customer experience
While every customer is different as an individual person, there are finite ways in which they interact with your business. Determining each of the possible touchpoints along with examining their needs, outcome and expectations will provide the necessary insights to help you serve your customers better. Each touchpoint brings out unique behavioral aspects of your customer persona. Let us understand this through examples:
- Browsing through an e-commerce website, adding items to their cart, then completing their purchase.
- Tracking an order online.
- Reporting an unreceived item. Initially the customer will go through the FAQ or help pages online, but then may want to speak to someone for further assistance.
In each of these circumstances, the customer is in a different mindset and expects a particular outcome from their interaction. Understanding the expected outcomes from each touchpoint will better inform how systems and processes can be adapted to perform optimally and deliver what your customer wants in an interactive single pane.
Employee experience
Every employee’s role in your organization has a different purpose, goals and their experience of performing the function of their job is just as important as the experience of your customers. In order to understand how they can perform their role most effectively, you need to define their personas individually and also based on how they collaborate with colleagues and interact with customers.
An employee will use various digital systems to perform their role. It is important to get an oversight of all the types of systems they use while performing different tasks. Here is an example:
- A customer service employee receives a notification that a customer requires help tracking an order.
- They communicate directly with the customer using an instant messaging feature on the website.
- The customer gives their details so the employee can find the right order and check its status using an internal digital system: it confirms that the order is packaged and ready to ship that day.
- The employee can report back to the customer to give them an update on their order status, telling them exactly where their order is and when it will be dispatched.
Understanding the employee experience through the lens of digital user experience will reveal areas for improvement. These insights will result in a smoother process, which will increase job satisfaction for employees and improve their quality of the work resulting in better customer experience.
Platform/Product Experience
At an enterprise level, your company might be using different software platforms and products to achieve business objectives. How often do you assess the usability of these platforms to determine whether your stakeholders are able to achieve their transaction goals in as few steps as possible?
Here are some improvements to product workflows that could enhance the user experience:
- Refining the user interface (UI) and UX to create the most logical and accessible layout. For instance, this could mean moving, removing, or combining job functions.
- Integrating customer support into an app so customers can speak to an expert directly from within the app.
- Using chatbot technology in the software to help users solve problems more efficiently.
- Developing actionable analytics functionality so that users don’t need to manually export and analyze data regularly, but instead, have real-time access.
- Provision of predictive recommendations based on past data and workflow patterns through AI/ML.
By increasing the usability and efficiency of the platform/product, you increase customer satisfaction and can reduce the amount of time it takes for employees to resolve any issues, thereby elevating the total experience.
How can a System Integrator help?
With so many technologies available to build digital solutions, it can be difficult to determine which would be suitable for your enterprise’s specific needs. The expertise of an experience engineering consultancy like iOPEX brings strong benefits to your enterprise. Our specialists have the expertise to analyze your systems and suggest where the right changes can be made to optimize your digital user experience, as well as determine the best methods with which to enhance your processes, minimize existing technical debt and develop new technical capabilities to meet your organization digital goals.
At iOPEX, we are experts in creating a fully integrated digital user experience through experience engineering. To find out more about experience engineering and how it can optimize business operations, download the experience engineering blueprint.
Synopsis
The Experience engineering Blueprint
The previous four blogs have helped us understand how experience engineering can drive seamless digital experiences for different personas in an organizational ecosystem and what could be the potential benefits it could bring to different teams thus improving the overall productivity, employee engagement and efficiency. While these outcomes can give us all the excitement on a strategic level, leaders involved in the decision-making process should carefully understand the challenges it poses and how it could drain the whole system if a proactive approach is not in place.
iOPEX as an organization does not believe in a “one size fits all” policy, and that is why it is highly important for companies to identify and invest time, resources, and energy at the beginning of a transformation initiative. While these blog series might have provided you with the necessary information as to how iOPEX helps you deliver seamless digital experiences for different personas within and outside your organization through “Experience Engineering” - we want to offer you the roadmap through this whitepaper.
This ready reckoner will cover how some of the leading technologies like ServiceNow, UiPath, Microsoft Power Platform and Google AppSheet can be integrated into your existing system of records to enable the desired total experiences for employees, customers, and partners.
Also, check how iOPEX helped a leading telecom from the UK to save up to $15 million with a technology framework that improved customer experience on a consistent basis.
