We are all sick of hearing about the customer and their absolute and certain center in the universe. But it is true. Although we know we should be constantly focused on them, we often forget to on a daily basis. There are two types of customers, 1.) the actual business customer who is buying something from your organization and, 2.) the internal customer who is being served by another part of the organization to receive your services and products. In reality, they are all part of the same value chain.
These days every business customer receives product value that has your service built into it, whether it is an highly information technology (IT) intensive product such as an electronic airline ticket delivered via the Internet or a deceptively less-obvious IT intensive product such as a chair which was actually designed and manufactured using IT. Your on-line employee benefits plans on your company website fall in this category as well.
People using IT inside an organization are customers as well. That means everyone. If the computer on your desktop isn’t working, you are an unhappy customer. Similarly, if the head of the marketing department in your organization is unhappy with the poor market data they are receiving from you as a market research analyst you are letting your customer down. You need better data collection and analysis tools to make your customer happy.
Historically, many IT organizations are notorious at forgetting about customers. This is changing quickly in most organizations today. It may be because people traditionally in the IT function have been more technically focused than service focus. ("Well, it's works don't it!? What are you complaining about?") Internal IT customers have the same complaints that external customers have—there are long waits on the Help Desk line for service or they have to interact with highly inflexible customer service handling software has been put in place to allegedly streamline operations. ("Push #1 to hear about how much we care about you as a customer, Push #2 for Yanni Music On Hold, Push #3 for Kenny G. Music On Hold, Press #4 for John Tesh, Press #5 for Dropping Your Call...")
Whenever you are reviewing or implementing new processes or designing applications and systems, think like a customer. And what customers want is an experience from beginning to end. Many times business processes and systems are conceived and implemented with the functional requirements that the organization building it thinks they need. When this occurs, the customer is usually out of the picture. And when the customer attempts to use these systems, they come to feel they have been left out of the equation. Their only diminished role is to provide information as a servant to the process and the application.
We only have to compare how different automated teller machines treat us from bank to bank. Some politely inquire into our language preferences and our user wants and needs first while others meet great us with password requests and nary a warm “hello.” The former focus on customizing a customer interaction while the latter only seems to care about the bank’s security and control problems.
Try booking a flight via the Web. Some airline reservation sites like Virgin Air, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines are remarkably customer centric in their overall ease of use. Yet other larger major carriers on the Web demand exact flight information and force you to select dates in a manner that is counter-intuitive to the manner in which you naturally plan a trip. Yet other customer interactions make you go all the way back to the beginning and start all over if you decide to change your payment terms.
Great software companies like Microsoft and Intuit spend a great deal of money conducting user research to make their products easy to use. Apple Computer seems to do the same almost intuitively.
In the Digital Habitat you should design a customer experience like you would an amusement park-make it interesting and engaging. Begin by taking the process you are either implementing and changing and think about it from a customer’s perspective. Think like a cartoon animator actually story board how it will work and how customers will interact. Make it as human and entertaining and interactive as possible. Test it out on customers repeatedly to get their feedback and make improvements as you go.
You should do this for internal customers within your organization as well. If you are developing a Customer Help Desk application, make sure it is designed to help Customer Service Representatives answer questions in the sequence and order by which customers actually ask them. If it is an internal accounting application such as posting credits, work with the accounting personnel in your organization to find the optimal way for entering credit transaction information from their perspective.
Sometimes you will find real limitations to the system in place. If that means customizing an entire application package that is already in place, then think about how to get that internal IT systems customer educated into using it in a new way. If they ultimately find it unusable or inefficient then you have selected the wrong system. You will learn to get them involved in your next systems selection effort.
Involve your external business customers and partners as well as your internal customer or system users early on in the application and systems selection process. You will probably begin by looking at off the shelf software packaged solutions. As you increase customer feedback and involvement, you will find that your customers all think they have unique requirements. (They don't in many cases, but don't tell them that! Remeber the last time you bought blue jeans?)
Your choices are simple: you must make certain the packages you select most closely provide the interactions your customers prefer or you will have to customize your solution, a much more costly and sometimes very inefficient choice. But under either scenario, if you involve your customer early and show them that you are interested in providing them with a completely satisfying IT experience, they will help you and better understand the tradeoffs that are being made in the ultimate solution you select.
Customers are kings and queens in the Digital Habitat.
