Technology and culture shape one another. Is the technology your company uses making your culture more human or less?
If the answer is the latter, you need human-centered design, especially when you're adding automation to increase efficiency.
Human-centered design puts people at the fore of every situation. It centers around asking the right questions to solve problems—who's involved, what needs to be done, what are the challenges, what systems need integrating, what's the desired outcome—to produce the best possible user experience.
After so many years of technology limitations driving critical projects (a backward philosophy), companies must reframe the way they tackle business problems. They must stop talking about “how” they’ll do something and talk about “why”—because that’s what matters.
Whether your focus is customer ops, people ops, RevOps, or DevOps, your job is to help other people do their jobs better. And whether that means updating someone's benefits or deploying a new product feature, your north star is generating efficiency so that your company (or your customer) can be more successful and profitable.
Doing that well is a huge challenge, and having the right mindset, tools, and processes makes all the difference. That said, here are some other success predictors for 2022.
1. Employee experience is as important as customer experience
The great resignation is far from over. The companies that prevail will move beyond lip service and platitudes about retaining top talent. They will pursue initiatives that put employee experience on par with what they cultivate for customers.
Along those lines, smart organizations are reconsidering how their processes and technology are valuable (or not) for the people using them. They’re asking questions like:
- Does our technology foster community? Does it provide a more equitable relationship between employees and the organization?
- Are our employees thriving as opposed to simply getting work done?
- Are we helping people further their personal development?
- Are our people doing work that matters to them?
- Are the systems we’ve put in place truly helping people do their jobs well?
Technology should foster, not inhibit, connection
Even when employees feel happy at a company, they still have days that make them question their investment. In those situations, the human-centered approach you’ve cultivated will make all the difference.
Remote work has commingled the personal with the professional. People no longer consider their work persona as separate from their real-life one. An upside of this shift is that people are seeking genuine, affirming connections with coworkers and contributing to important causes in the workplace. How are you using technology and process to make this happen today?
Beyond the emotional angle of this argument, there’s a hard business case for building community in the workplace: generating efficiency.
We work with customers that are building portals to connect employees across shared disciplines so they can contribute resources, learn together, and avoid reinventing the wheel. These systems can be anything from a center of excellence app to a curated collection of wikis, and they’re helping organizations better leverage the resources they already have.
Let’s say you’re one of many Salesforce administrators in a 5,000-person company. You know there are others like you out there, but not in your office, team, or geographic area. Not only do you feel isolated, you’re probably not as efficient as you could be. And you’re likely trying to build processes that someone else has already mastered.
In addition to helping you be more efficient, engaging with people like you will also help you grow in your career. It will broaden your perspective, generate new ideas, and help you find your purpose to do work that matters. These are the things that keep you invested in your job.
Swivel chair is out. Integrated systems are in.
The organizations that are thoughtfully considering people’s workflows understand that pivoting from one disparate system to the next is not only inefficient, it’s detrimental to personal and company growth. The longer it takes to close a deal, service customers, or connect people with the tools they need to do their jobs, the greater your risk of leaving money on the table or churning said customers and employees.
The companies that will avoid these pitfalls are looking at the bigger picture. They’re building consumer-grade, connected consoles that help people do their jobs.
Why does consumer-grade matter? Because you need to treat your employees the same way that Nordstrom treats its customers. The more seamless and easy you make a system to use, the higher the adoption, the happier the employee, and that ripples out to your customers, too.
How is a connected console different from “Customer 360” initiatives? The premise with the latter is that you’ll aggregate all of a customer’s data to magically solve all cross-department ills.
The reality is that each person in the revenue lifecycle needs a distinct, persona-based experience (like a console) to best do their job. And those consoles need to be fed with the right information from each discipline in the revenue lifecycle (no matter what system that data comes from).
That’s what connected consoles are about: persona-based experiences that provide the best and most timely information so employees can maximize revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
As Forrester says, “Happy customer service agents mean happy customers — and happy shareholders. Engaged agents also have better job performance, are more productive, and stay in their jobs longer — which is one of the costlier factors in managing customer service operations.”
2. User-specific, value experiences will win the day
For years, companies have attempted to crack the user experience (UX) code. In most cases, it’s resulted in a variety of ineffective approaches.
What do we mean by UX? It’s not just about making apps look pretty. While having an attractive user interface is important, UX is also about making an app or system as easy to use as possible.
Does the experience make you more productive, or does it eat up time? Does it make you feel frustrated and bored, or energized and relaxed? Is the app a tool for conquering your business problems, or is the app an obstacle itself?
With that established, let’s look at a common UX pitfall: one user interface to rule them all.
Companies offering these solutions have attempted to distill what works for most people. But the fact is, nothing works for most people.
When you try to design for everybody, you get something that isn’t appropriate for anybody.
To be user-centric, experiences must be designed and curated. Organizations need the ability to specifically tune their technology to each person that interacts with it. They need to leverage the data that they’re already effective at generating, but make it viable to individual users. In the next decade, the companies that invest in developing that muscle will leapfrog everyone else.
Tesla has mastered the art of delivering these types of experiences. It knows who will buy every single model of its car. The Model S persona is different from the Model Y persona, so Tesla builds the entire experience around each one. It even controls experiences geographically.
This company has taken a holistic view of what the user wants and has built everything from charging stations next to restaurants to over-the-air downloads for updating vehicle firmware to continually bringing new functionality and delight to existing owners—right down to funny easter eggs that make the experience more entertaining and human.
Tesla has completely immersed itself in what people want from owning and driving its cars. While Detroit can make an electric car, it's going to take a decade to catch up to where Tesla was five years ago on total experience.
Data needs context
In 2022, smart organizations will realize that many of the BI and AI projects underway are actually just trying to solve poor user experience in apps. Once more companies embrace human-centered design, it will become evident that a small amount of human intelligence will solve the problem with the right app.
In these types of apps, people want timely, personalized data so they can take action—this is key to delivering user-specific value experiences. For instance, most employees in your organization aren’t crunching numbers on millions of records to solve problems. Instead, they care about things like what products you’ve sold to what customers before or which customers are like each other in terms of need.
The companies that will crush their competition will serve up data in stories like these, personalized for the user. They’ll do it seamlessly, masking the data sources, so all that appears is the context of the relationship. These are the experiences that will accelerate growth.
For more projections on 2022, check out our on-demand Apps and Ops Predictions Panel with Cirrus Insight. We covered the highs and lows of 2021, and make predictions for sales app and tech trends in 2022.
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