A friend and I were chatting over the weekend about life before search engines. “The Dewey Decimal System was my Google,” he recalled. (link provided for readers under a certain age who don’t know what that is!).
Compared to those days, information is amazingly easy to access now. We’re annoyed if it takes more than two searches to find even trivial data, and we’ll pay more for convenience. I’ve bought more than a few books in two formats because I love the tactile experience of paper and need the the highlighting/search features of an e-book to work efficiently. (Note to publishers – why is this not a bundle deal more often?)
Unfortunately, a study from The Economist found that employees in large companies waste about 25% of their time looking for information they need to do their jobs. An article about the study pointed out that “Within a typical company, the average employee needs to navigate four or more applications to execute a single business process. And accessing them requires managing multiple passwords and interfaces.”
The good news: EX is being talked about extensively by leaders in 51% of US companies surveyed.
The bad news: talk != action.
This isn’t just about #employeeexperience, either. If you work in a B2B company, your client experience is someone else’s employee experience. Are the services you offer helping or hurting their efforts to reduce friction in day-to-day work?
To encourage executives to move from thinking to action, I want to make positive stories and data on ROI easier for others to find and share. You can help by answering two questions in the comments below:
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What are the best examples you’ve seen of companies making work easier for employees?
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Which B2B companies – in your experience – have a UX so good it makes work faster/more enjoyable for those who use it?
Personally, I have to call out Hubspot. I didn’t use CRM for the first few years of my business and only recently became a Hubspot user. It has completely changed how I run my business – for the better. (If you know me you know I don’t hand out praise to tech platforms willy-nilly). Not only can I customize labels and processes to match how my brain works, I know that if I get stuck there’s a Hubspot blog post on the subject one quick search away. Their content is easy to find in Google and helpful 95% of the time. Often, when I’m searching for how to do something unrelated to CRM their blog comes up anyway! I haven’t had to call for support yet, but my friend (he of the card catalog) has and reported an effective, easy, and truly enjoyable outcome.
What about you? Which tools make your work markedly easier? Has your firm implemented a tool or platform that helped contact center reps, account managers, sales people, or HR business partners get what they need without taking a wild goose chase? This intersection of #cx and #ex is the main focus of my research so any and all input and insights are welcome!
