In case you haven’t heard, user experience (UX) is about more than making your apps look pretty. And good UX is not just for your customers, it’s a way to drive engagement inside and outside of your company. In software, you get what you give.
To engage your stakeholders, you must create meaningful connections that deliver value and support buy-in from your workers, suppliers, partners, and your customers. By giving your users valuable data, insights and tools, your software can accelerate engagement.
On the other hand, when you ask for something from users without giving then real value in return, you can actually cause the opposite of adoption: software abandonment.
Whether your go-to-market strategy is B2C, B2B, or B2B2C, better stakeholder engagement through a better software UX can powerfully strengthen relationships, redefine channels, and grow net-new opportunities. Check out these ways you can make your software more effective with great UX:
Encourage employees to engage with the right data.
To accelerate engagement, first make sure that your people can quickly find and interact with the vital information they need to do their jobs. If the software your employees use makes their lives harder, they’ll quickly abandon it in favor of their own “unapproved” workarounds, in the worst cases, storing critical customer data in highly insecure ways.
User adoption comes from delivering value with effective user experience. Gartner Research Group reports that by redesigning user experiences around the unique needs of each user group, you can increase user satisfaction rates by 40%.
Build a system that meets your employees’ needs every day, that helps them to anticipate what they need to do, that helps them get their work done more efficiently, and that solves problems for them. Then, you’ll get adoption and more productivity and higher quality, to boot.
See how this company did it.
At this major insurance company, users had trouble navigating the company’s CRM because of a cluttered, fragmented user interface. User abandonment of the existing CRM soon reached untenable levels, hovering around 70%.
By taking user feedback seriously and redesigning the user experience, through partnership with Skuid and Fujitsu, the company saw a 50% increase in user adoption and was able to deliver dynamic, just-in-time intelligence about its customers to the users who needed the information most.
Drive coworker interaction.
The best-designed user interfaces (UIs) work for both the individual and for the group.If you feel cornered into sacrificing individual needs for those of the group, or vice versa, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Look for a user experience (UX) or user interface (UI) platform that can deploy different processes and UIs to different user types without losing the big picture.
Instead of forcing employees to adapt their workflows to a generic, vendor-driven process, design a UI to match the processes that work best for your employees, that help them collaborate in the most efficient ways possible.
Current company culture should play a critical role in the design process. If you try to design a system that doesn’t reflect the group’s core values on some level, you’ll quickly find yourself back at square one. Even if there’s a behavior that’s not present on your team, which you would like to encourage in the future, the software must encourage that behavior on the users’ terms.
Learn from a seasoned pro.
Elizabeth Churchill, currently director of user experience at Google, knows firsthand the importance of social dimensions when building internal tools, as she presented during her keynote at the 2017 Enterprise UX conference.
“We create and permeate a culture of human-centered technology experience in the enterprise by asking questions, sponsoring and running studies, building tools, communicating our results, and creating/fostering collaborations,” Churchill says.
During her time at Fuji-Xerox, Churchill was tasked with improving collaboration between the company’s Tokyo and Silicon Valley teams.After researching the state of communication between the teams, Churchill determined that they needed something to help them create a sense of shared experience, with mutual ownership.
Churchill installed interactive boards between the two offices, to help people get to know each other. The solution soon became a foundation to establish trust and exchange of information, which led to an increased use of other productivity tools.
Drive communication with customers.
When your employees have the tools they need to get their jobs done and effectively collaborate with one another, they are more productive, more engaged, and often, they’re happier. And that’s good news for your customers.
Armed with the right information, employees can handle bigger workloads because they’re not wasting time doing unnecessary data entry or trying to find a key piece of information. With the right software UX, workers can deliver a more stellar customer experience.
The happiest employees are those engaged with their work, their coworkers, and their clients. Happy employees are less likely to leave, Snagajob says. And this becomes a virtuous circle, happiness leads to engagement which leads to happiness.
Read Intuit’s story.
Intuit, the force behind household names like Mint, TurboTax, and QuickBooks, needed an entirely new sales process to equip 1,600 sales reps to sell their new subscription model and make more deals, faster. Before the transition, Intuit’s sales reps used three separate tools in their process.
The result was a disparate workflow with data siloed in three different places, time wasted waiting for data to be transferred between systems, and ultimately low user adoption. Intuit used Skuid’s platform to build one application to manage online sales, a 360° customer view, and business development.
Sales reps estimate being up to 79% more productive in their daily processes with Skuid, and they’ve observed more than a 90% improvement in their KPIs since making the switch. Intuit estimates that user adoption from their sales reps has improved up to 80%.
Discover the platform for enterprise engagement.
With Skuid’s platform for engagement, you can crank out gorgeous new portals, desktop apps, or mobile apps up to 90% faster. Getting a true 360° customer view has been the holy grail for decades. With Skuid, 360º can be your reality today.
You can connect to data from just about anywhere, defragmenting disjointed systems into seamless systems of engagement, made to order for each stakeholder. Your only limit is your imagination. Ready to learn more? Get a free live demo today. Get demo
