UX in the c-suite
Executive sponsorship and business alignment are key to exceptional UX
September 19, 2019 | By Burk Buechler, TEKsystems Director of Digital Solutions
Picture a website or app that you love. Why do you love it? Is it the design? The ease of accessibility? How quickly it answers your questions?
That’s the beauty of a good digital experience. The people and strategy behind that website or app created a memorable and enjoyable digital experience that was easy to use, provided the information you needed and allowed you to make a more informed decision going forward.
Your customers are expecting an experience like this every time they interact with your website or app. Every business is challenged with creating an exceptional customer experience. Leading brands are working constantly to raise the quality of interaction, many others are merely playing catch-up.
The challenge is figuring out how user experience fits into the business strategy, prioritizing it, finding the right people to get it done and ultimately delivering on it. A small ask, right?
Secure sponsorship: Appoint a chief experience officer (CXO)
A relatively new role that has emerged, a CXO has become an imperative. A CXO looks across the full customer life cycle and creates a strategy to engage, convert and serve. It’s important to have UX leadership working closely with the business because that’s where you define the outcomes you want to achieve.
Putting the right people in place and investing in state of the art digital platforms will become an actual priority when leadership is invested. Putting customer experience in the c-suite ensures user needs and values are addressed with the same criticality as a CFO monitors an organization’s bottom line.
Synergize: Set a strategy that speaks to users and the business
Next up, you need to truly understand your users. Weaving a proper data and analytics strategy into your UX process will provide immense insight. Think: real-time customer feedback and personas that inform your UX and UI design and continuous experience optimization.
Our clients see the value of proper UX and UI, but most are scrambling on how to execute. B2C companies are ahead of the curve; within B2B, they’re under a lot of pressure to match the B2C experience. An example of this is, B2B customers are users of Amazon in their personal life and are transferring those personalized expectations into their professional lives.
This is where partnerships with companies like TEKsystems Digital come in—digital managed services provide the talent, market intelligence, martech knowledge and business strategy that all play a major role in creating, implementing and scaling an effective outcome-based UX strategy.
When we partner with clients, we first take them through the necessary initial activities of strategy, research, user and audience definition. Creating roadmaps, conceptual designs and implementing technical architecture all underpinned by analytics. From there, it’s iterative—always using data and analytics to serve future adaptations and designs.
Address gaps: Fill in gaps in talent, technology and process
As awareness and the importance of the user experience grows, demand in the marketplace for talent and proper technology also grows. UX design is a premium skill set—the cost of hiring and retaining these individuals is high and only keeps increasing. UI design, while a different skill set, is also a priority because it can bring your UX vision to life across multiple channels using the latest UI development frameworks (i.e. React, Angular, Bootstrap).
How does a company drive their UX/UI strategy and acquire talent without significantly exceeding their budget and HR costs? Smart scalability. Stay tuned for our next article on building creative studios to scale your UX strategy and ultimately delight your customers.
Burk Buechler is the managing director of digital solutions at TEKsystems. Burk believes in a business-first approach to digital transformation. Digital is at the core of the enterprise and integral in driving business impact. A dynamic leader with over 25 years of experience across industries and sectors, ranging from healthcare and commercial to financial services and retail, Burk brings a distinctive blend of innovation, leadership and problem-solving expertise. Before TEKsystems, he most recently spent 12 years at Dell, leading their entry into digital services worldwide.
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