Enterprise wide user interfaces - taking control of your end to end customer management processes

Most organisations have a multitude of applications that staff use throughout the various end-to-end customer management processes (i.e. sales and servicing) the business depends for success.  We’ve found these systems have the following characteristics:

• Each system has a very different user interface, and each is hard to use,
• Each system was developed in response to a specific business need at the time and so, by definition, only handles a small part of the end-to-end process,
• Staff often need to re-enter data between systems,
• Data about customers will be spread among different systems,
• The systems don’t all talk to each other,
• Staff need to work with many systems simultaneously to achieve their activities,
• Staff workflow is reduced to data entry, with no clear relationship to individual and business goals,
• Training is about learning how systems work, instead of how to do the job.

The following impacts on business, staff and customers are seen:

• Staff take 6 — 12 months to get up to speed on all the different systems, because they all work differently,
• The end-to-end process to complete a customer process takes twice as long as it needs to,
• Your key sales staff are tied up with administrative tasks, significantly reducing their available time to sell,
• Additional staff layers are in place to absorb the increased administrative overhead,
• Staff perform the same functions in very different ways, causing high variations in compliance, consistency and quality of service.

How do I cost justify an enterprise wide UI?

Almost all business are interested in the key performance indicators of sales, profit, customer satisfaction and staff satisfaction.  The benefits of an enterprise wide UI are many, including:

• Increased time available for sales and service activities,
• Decreased cost of ownership by having only one system to maintain,
• Reduced training costs and rapid learning time to get up to speed,
• Faster completion of the end to end customer process, with increased customer satisfaction,
• Better quality data, increased compliance and reduced variance.

While all these indicators are importance measures of success, time is the one with the most profound impact on the business.  Let’s take a look at this example:

Assume your current sales workforce operates as following:

-50% of their time is available for sales and 50% for administration

-Using 50% of their time, they can achieve $10 Billion in sales

With an enterprise wide UI, we have at least halved the total administration time.Therefore:

-75% of time is available for sales, and 25% for administration

-Using 75% of their time, there is the potential for another $5 Billion in sales (pro-rata)

You can easily see that halving administrative time can deliver a potential $5 Billion increase in sales.  The additional 50% of available time has a profound impact on the organisation.  That time may not be spent just on sales, it can be also spent on servicing and customer retention.  Often, reducing churn has a more significant impact on profitability, as we all know it’s cheaper to keep a customer than it is to find a new one.

It’s not too good to be true.  However, there is one catch — an enterprise wide user interface will only be successful if you engage the right skills to design the user interface.  As far as the end user is concerned, the interface is the application.

Enterprise wide UIs have been attempted in many businesses and mostly they are spectacular failures. Why?  The age old reason is that the end users didn’t get it — they couldn’t use the interface.  The new system technically works, — but it doesn’t work the way people work.  Rather, it slows them down and gets in the way of them getting on with their real job — sales and servicing.

Think about your own organisation.  You’ve probably seen that your own applications have very different user interfaces — some work OK, but most don’t.  This was caused by different people designing the different applications or different vendors with different applications.  With no consistency in UI design, it’s no wonder that good UI is very hard to do.

Good UI design is not a skill not generally found in IT departments.  IT is excellent at system architecture and development, but the skills to design a world class user interface that can integrate disparate systems is a complex endeavour.  At the end of the day, the UI is less about technology and more about people, workflow and psychology.

In the same way that you wouldn’t get the person who installs the elevator system in a new skyscraper to design the building, you need a user interface architect to create the foundation for a scalable, flexible and usable interface.

The next section describes why enterprise wide UIs are hard to deliver successfully, followed by the main steps in creating such an enterprise wide user interface.

We’ve covered many of the reasons why most large software development is unsuccessful, but here is a summary of the relevant ones:

• The application base is picked first, without the full requirements being known.This means it is very hard to make the application bend to the way the organisation works,
• The UI is design by developers, who do not understand the psychology of people and work,
• The UI embeds processes as they are, rather than looking for opportunities to simplify
• The applications are designed to capture the most complex situation, and are therefore make simple situations very complex