Getting the Customer’s Voice into Web Applications

“When left alone with a perfect product, there’s always a perfect customer who walks away.” Nobody who has ever had anything to sell will argue. Perfect customers walking away from perfect products is bad for the brand and it’s bad for business.

The best - arguably the only - time to manage this reality is within the “Judgment Window (SM).” That’s a moment in time on a web site when a user will either accept or reject the value proposition. When I was U.S. Head of eBusiness at ING, the Judgment Window (SM) and the innovative research techniques used to manage it, represented an opportunity to focus on customer while at the same time enable and manage our brand strategy (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote an article about it). And this task had to be accomplished with very, very limited resources.

The key was to bring in a highly regarded expert in the area of “user experience risk management” (that’s the before, during, and after of the Judgment Window (SM)) and work with him to develop an industrial-strength version of a process he’d implemented literally a thousand times before, though never at an enterprise level.

Focusing our attention on customers had amazing results: For starters, in less than 9 months we were able to identify over 750 problems that had to be fixed in order to improve customer acceptance of our deliverables. Despite best-in-class everything (IT and marketing resources, internal/external resources), all our existing processes missed these problems.

Furthermore, in a complex and highly political organization, all stakeholders agreed that every one of these issues needed to be addressed. In other words, we were able to get the whole company on the same page on hundreds of different issues because our system focused on high-risk projects that directly affected customer needs.

Oh, it also worked.

Postscript: In my very own “I liked the product so much I bought the company” story, this program was so effective and unique that when I left ING, I invested in this system and signed on to help market it to other Fortune 500/e-Centric businesses.

If you are interested in learning more about this company (Usentio, LLC), please call me or visit http://www.usentio.com.