Making B2B more user-centric
“The workplace and work practices have fundamentally changed. Employee engagement is now one of businesses’ top priorities.” — Alan Colville
Award-winning UX designer Alan Colville was our most recent guest at UCD Bristol. It was an exciting month for the meetup, as we moved to a new venue — we’re now at Framework, in King Street — and had an experienced speaker delivering a talk and Q&A session on how to unleash the power of CX to improve the B2B space.
Alan started by asking an important question to the audience: how customer-centric are B2B organisations nowadays? According to research conducted by B2B International, only 14% of large B2B companies are truly customer-centric. The top challenges listed by businesses, according to the Enterprise UX Industry Report 2017–2018, are:
- Improving UX consistency
- Testing designs with customers
- Clarifying requirements
“We’ve sharpened our tools and we can take that and offer value to B2B. (…) UX is a business tool, not just a design tool; as UXers we actually change businesses.” Exploring the employee mindset is key: “you have to think about the employee mindset, difference from the casual B2C user. They think about career progression, about succeeding. Personally, I find that absolutely fascinating.” According to Alan, what people are looking for in B2B is actually predictable: reliability is an example.
The solution is to do the hard work and work to simplify complexity.
“If you’re afraid of complexity, it will come back to bite you in the ass. You can’t design what you don’t understand.”
Alan shared three steps to break down the complex path ahead of UXers trying to unleash the power of CX to improve the B2B space, but before putting on your walking shoes, you need to get set up for success.
In any project, start by establishing your KPIs and make sure that not only are you taking care of the business, but especially taking care of the people in the business: “start by listening” and then move on to the first step in the process.
Step 1 — Get to the human emotions behind the functional business
This first step is all about arriving at a shared understanding of the business’s customers. Also think about what information you would add to a B2B persona and consider your archetypes: their motivations and specific roles, for example. When building these personas, Alan’s advice is to have two different sides to the same archetype: an emotional side and a functional side.
“In B2B, research has to be handed with care” because it has never been straightforward; it’s always complex, so make sure you are “flexible with your recruitment” and create a behaviour axis that will help you establish common themes.
Step 2 — Give confidence by clarifying and simplifying complexity
“Increasingly, we see business challenges through the lens of customer journeys” because they help bring insights to life, among other advantages.
Start by working with different types of data, including descriptive data, behavioural data and emotional data. The latter will answer why customers do what they do. Still, “it’s difficult to get people engaged in the customer journey”, so experiment with tools like stick-figure exercises, which introduce the journey mapping process in a gentler way.
Step 3 — Centralise before communicating to the business
At this stage, another challenge arises: communicating information. Making sure your information is clear, concise and actionable will make this process easier. “The story you tell an engineer is different from the story you tell marketing. But the way you tell the story is important —it turns the good into great.”
Alan’s advice is to develop a detailed version and a lite version to allow you to communicate the information differently depending on who you’re talking to.
According to Alan, there’s no silver bullet, simply ongoing commitment to observation, insight and improvement.
If you wish to learn more about how to unleash the power of CX, Alan is delivering two masterclasses on the topic in Bristol, in March and October 2019. Click here to find out more information on his website. There is also a masterclass happening in London on a different date.
For now, click here to access Alan’s UCD Bristol presentation (link will expire on 28th February).
UCD Bristol will be back on Wednesday 20th March. More information will soon be shared on our Meetup page.
We are currently accepting talk submissions, so if you would like to feature in one of our next meetups as a speaker, complete this short form. We can’t wait to hear about your awesome ideas!
