Helping Small Businesses Cope with the Continual Shift of User Expectations
By Kat Richards
Last month, I had the opportunity to speak as part of a panel of UX and product specialists for MilwaukeeSpin, a technology and product-focused meetup.
One common theme kept resurfacing; as a result of the pandemic, customer perceptions continue to shift. They no longer rely on basic needs alone. Instead, customers favor brands, and subsequently, products and services, that align closer to their personal values.
No surprise there, we’ve seen reports from McKinsey and Forbes noting these patterns even back in 2020. But many brands and internal teams are now realizing the necessity of building sustainable growth and uncovering what “customer first” truly means.
If there’s anything we learned throughout the pandemic, it’s that our customers have more choices than ever before. How do we attract and keep customers loyal at a time when they have endless options? The key is achieving sustainable growth by making sure we understand our audiences’ pain points, motivations, and what they value. Luckily, we have evolved from NPS alone and there are more options for determining customer happiness. From brand perception studies and surveys to in-depth user interviews.
“By understanding what our customer values, we can then align what our brand stands for and how that shows up in the experiences we design.”
Making sure our experiences are easy to use and helps people in a delightful and efficient way will continue to keep customers coming back, which, in turn, is much less expensive than going out and building new client relationships.
The question is how to empathize with our customers in a cost-effective and timely matter. While we can do in-depth research in lab spaces and longer diary studies that may be costly and time-consuming, we can also understand our audiences and what matters to them in a lightweight fashion. Lean approaches to learn and empathize with our customers includes looking at the competitive space and seeing what we’re competing against. Many of your competitors have put in a similar effort and learning where the expectations are with our customers and where there is white space to claim for our brand is a way to build onto the efforts of others. This can include secondary research (Mintel and Forrester, to name a few), reviewing other competitive benchmarking tests, reading reviews through social platforms and Reddits, to interviewing users directly, and primary research via usability/guerilla testing. It’s not one size fits all and we should approach research with agility and an open mind.
Much of the audience at MilwaukeeSpin had low UX maturity at their companies. For these organizations, prioritization and internal alignment are often hurdles. We shared ways to combat that, depending on the project and ask, it could be from tech feasibility and desirability point of view, or by business opportunities through white space against competitors, or user need compared to level of effort. Examples included $100 prioritization workshops were a fun way to get clients involved and to start the conversations, or even dot voting to drive discussions. Our role as UX specialists and strategists is to be the mediator/therapist to help internal teams and client teams solve problems together, through provoking questions and driving healthy discussions.
While our customer’s expectations and needs will continue to shift as time continues, one thing will remain constant. And that’s our approach and mentality to organically learn from our customers and identify the right problems to solve through ongoing research.
Additional event background:
Topic: What Keeps CEO’s Up At Night: Top 5 Challenges Business’s face today and UX insights to stay above the Competition
Audiences: product owners, tech folks (developers, business analysts, UX-ers); audience came from companies that have low UX maturity where they’re pushing to expand a UX team and showcase value it brings to a business
Kat Richards
Associate Director, Experience Strategy
Digitas | Milwaukee, WI
Kat Richards provides well-rounded strategies and educated recommendations through qualitative and quantitative data. She’s a systems thinker, creating solutions people love by connecting the dots through an inspiring vision and roadmap. Creating human-centered solutions that challenges the status quo and yields measurable results is her passion.
With 10 years of experience, Kat’s generated delight and engagement for brands across a variety of B2C and B2B and specializes in improving experiences through validated learnings with users, as well as aligning agreement with stakeholders to truly enhance a brand. She thrives in finding clarity in chaos and communicating effectively to others.
See other topics she’s written about here: https://medium.com/@katkrichards
