By Jeofrey Bean
The success of people interacting with your technology is a critical part of the customer experience for your potential and existing customers. You can inspire people to go into the future with an extraordinary customer and user experience.
Putting the time, money and expertise up front to develop a pleasing IT user experience for people who interact with your technology gives people confidence and motivation to embrace the new. It is like a light, people will go to places in the future they would not see or understand if using the technology was a cumbersome and dark experience.
Tom Parham, is the Principal of Technology Leadership Services. He’s an accomplished Information Technology (IT) leader with experience at Deloitte Consulting, Genoptix and NBC Universal. – “If your newly developed IT based service dovetails with a known and desired need then you’ve got it easy. Produce it, market it, sell it.”
On the other hand, what if you have come up with something faster and better, but something nobody has been asking for or even yet imagined?
How do you avoid being a technology looking for a market? Parham says “It’s not merely a matter of bringing it to people or figuring out how they want to use it, it’s inspiring the interest and the need to begin with.”
In taking people into the future with newly innovated technologies, Parham learned early in his career to consider where users will respond best along a spectrum. The spectrum begins with leveraging the familiar and ends with taking users aggressively into the future with the new and unimagined. Parham describes it as “into a place that you have figured out they will want to be. But they would not natively want to go.”
Parham would rather take people more aggressively into the future with technology. He refers to a transition with change management. But not the usual change manager. This time the change manager is the user experience (or UX) that people will help him to develop.
Parham is unequivocal about UXs role in crossing the bridge between inventing and innovating – “User experience is a change manager that will help people to get a place that is not visible to them now.” It’s an experience so comfortable people quickly know and feel how the new technology works and what it will do for them. This inspires them with confidence that gives more motivation to engage. To leave behind what just became old.
For Parham, a new, delightful user experience with technology is the transition and future at once. “It inspires you to go there. That’s what technology leadership is about.” Apple, ProFlowers, Square and start-up PricePatrol are companies that exemplify this leadership.
When using technology that is pleasing, people adopt it as their own in what they do at home or on the job. Then they go one important step further. Since their experience with the technology enhanced their overall customer experience with the company, people are more willing to advocate for the company’s products and service. They do this simply by sharing their extraordinary experience with others in person or through the powerful social media that they select to use. And that is an effective contribution to The Fleet Customer Experience Revolution.
See this column again in April as we continue discover the best practices and decision making that can help you deliver experiences for your customers that inspire them to advocate for you.
Reference Links
Jeof’s web site and e-mail address
http://www.delmarresearch.com/
[email protected]
Keynote speaker highlights (3 minute video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znpNuczexiA
Jeofrey Bean’s Amazon author page
http://www.amazon.com/Jeofrey-Bean/e/B006K2L0XI/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
Tom Parham’s LinkedIn profile and web site
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasparham
http://www.technologyleadershipservices.com/services.htm
