Last week, we introduced our new journey-centric Success Center experience and highlighted a few key learnings from our customer journey workshops. This week, we’re diving a little deeper into end user experience. What it is, why it’s important in the context of customer experience, and the process we use for gathering end user feedback.
End User Experience 101
What do you do when you want to understand how your products add value to your customers’ workflows?
How do you use your customers’ experiences to really understand the benefits your product provides?
How do you circle back to sales leaders and communicate what’s effective (and what isn’t) when it comes to each customer’s product journey?
As the saying goes, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” The same is true when it comes to a digital interface. If your product or service doesn’t work for your end users, your proverbial first impression will be a bad one. That’s why end user experience matters. It brings the all-important human factor — how your end users interact with your product or service — into the heart of your technology project.
When we were working directly with our customers during our workshops, we noticed we had an opportunity to lean into building a strong foundation focused on the employee and the end user experience that our customers could leverage throughout their journey. Using design thinking techniques and customer experience strategy, our team has been leading an initiative to gain greater insight into our customers’ journeys. Our findings from this work are informing our Customer Success methodologies and shaping a collection of tools and resources to help our customers bring people-first, experience-driven practices to their organizations.
The End User Experience Kit
Though many of our customers already do a wonderful job engaging with their end users and focusing on employee experience, we saw an opportunity to create a definitive guide — with proven tips, tools, and templates — for driving successful end user engagement activities. We used our findings from our customer workshops, as well as our own experience and expertise in user experience and customer experience, to create the End User Experience Kit.
Why End User Experience Matters
The End User Experience Kit examines the importance of end user experience in creating a positive employee experience.
Focusing on end user experience drives greater employee productivity. It leads to increased retention. And it makes talent acquisition easier as word spreads that your organization cares about its people. In short, creating a positive end user experience directly influences three key factors crucial to running any successful, competitive business:
- Retention: Helping retain your current talent
- Acquisition: Helping you to acquire fresh talent
- Optimization: Increasing productivity without compromising your employees’ work/life balance
Conducting Interviews and Pulse Surveys
The End User Experience Kit also outlines and defines the key processes and tools any organization can use to gather insights about their end users’ experiences, including interview guidelines and pulse survey best practices.
The processes we outline in the kit aren’t just hypothetical frameworks — they’re the same methodologies we use when we gather feedback from our own customers. Our one-on-one interviews with our customers helped us capture sentiments that would have otherwise been overlooked in a group setting or lost in quantitative surveys. And they gave us a chance to hear our customers’ personal, individual user experience stories. The pulse surveys we field throughout our customers’ journeys help give us a global perspective on the efficacy of our products and keep us connected to our customers.
We’ve included sample interview questions and pulse survey guidelines in the appendix of the End User Experience Kit. Be sure to download and fill out these templates as you plan your own end user engagement activities.
These simple yet highly effective end user engagement strategies have helped us get closer to understanding our customers’ wants and needs — and they can help you get closer to creating the experiences your end users want and need.
Measuring End User Experience
You can’t truly understand your end users’ experiences if you can’t effectively measure them over time. Measuring end user experience synthesizes the data you’ve gathered from your end users and packages it in trackable, repeatable metrics.
Every organization will have its own set of experience measures that are important to them. But the important aspect of measuring end user experiences is determining what information you hope to glean from your interviews and pulse surveys so you can act on it — always keeping the interests of your end user at the heart of your research. We’ve included a selection of sample success measures and their uses in the End User Experience Kit.
What’s Next?
End user experience research is iterative and ongoing. We’re continuing to reach out to our own customers to better understand their experiences — and to improve the way we serve them. The more we engage with our customers, the more we learn. And each experience is a little different than the next.
We hope you’ll find inspiration in our End User Experience Kit to bring an experience-first focus to your own projects. If you have any questions about end user experience or if you’d like to speak to our experience team and share your own story, please email us at CSM@citrix.com or leave us a comment below.
In the next installment of this blog series, we’ll explore our new Change Management Kit and share strategies for bringing change management practices to your organization.
— Jose Sanchez, Senior Customer Experience Strategist, Customer Success Management
