5 lessons enterprise software can learn from consumer products
Enterprise software doesn’t have to look like enterprise software.
One year ago today, I was hired to be the Head of Product at Kustomer, A NY based SaaS company. The company aims to reinvent how companies interact with their customers. Our co-founders have a successful track record of creating and scaling customer support startups (see Assistly- acquired by Salesforce, now Desk.com). I have a background in getting teens to video chat with each other. We hope to combine decades of SaaS industry experience with the user-friendly aspects of consumer products into something valuable and intuitive. Here are my observations from my first year.
B2B software doesn’t have to be ugly.
What image comes to mind when you think of stereotypical B2B Software? For me it looks something like this:
Prior to Kustomer I had never designed a SaaS or B2B product. I’d just left a job as product manager at Airtime- where we built consumer video chat apps. Upon joining Kustomer, I set out to better understand the product landscape but was disappointed when I discovered the following common threads among enterprise software:
- Dull, monotone, data tables
- Slow adoption of the latest design/UX trends
- Cluttered user interfaces
Essentially, all function, no form. With that in mind, it has been my goal to help “consumerize” a category not generally known for cutting edge innovation: customer service software. At Kustomer we’re focused on combining the beautiful and intuitive aspects of consumer products into effective application. Our goal is to build enterprise software that people can enjoy using every day. Here are five guiding principles that have shaped our product design in its first year.
#1: Look to B2C when you’re solving B2B problems.
Compared to B2B companies, consumer products often take bigger risks, iterate more quickly, and often have a larger set of users to validate (or invalidate) cutting edge user interfaces. During the past year we have faced some difficult UX challenges while building Kustomer. Our primary objective is to present a new way of digitally interfacing with customers- by rendering them as complete people, not “cases”. To accomplish this goal, we’re challenged with organizing data from many disparate sources into a single interactive interface.
In order to solve this problem, we looked at social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter. These products inspired our timeline, where you can see all of a customer’s activity and interactions in a singular view. We first defined the problem, then looked for how consumer products have already solved it.
#2: More options don’t equal more productivity.
Everyone wants their SaaS product to be beautiful, but they also must accommodate feature requests from their customers, sales executives, or CEOs. These competing goals often result in an abundance of data, buttons and features cluttering the interface. Too many options may dilute a user’s ability to make an important decision quickly. Leading design trends are often minimalist with lots of white space, which contradicts the basic need of a B2B tool- to display a lot of information.
It’s always easier to add features to your product than it is to take them away. Even when adding the smallest of features, it’s important to always evaluate the business, product, and design goals. Hire amazing designers and empower them to say no. At Kustomer, business needs, product and design are all on equal footing. Every day we fight feature creep and try to balance them against the need for simplicity and clarity.
#3: Speed is your friend
While it seems like speed is the mantra for every startup nowadays, in reality the pace of development is often much slower in B2B organizations than in B2C. Why? I believe one explanation is that SaaS companies fear changing a product that existing customers are paying good money to use. However, moving fast doesn’t have to stop you from delivering a quality product.
At Airtime, we iterated on features daily, which is something we’ve tried to replicate at Kustomer. Our Agile sprints are one week long and we keep the teams small and fast, leaving flexibility in our sprints so that we can quickly react to bugs and other feedback. Our Head of Customer Experience is a previous Product Manager and we talk daily about how to iterate to make the product better for our customers. This process enables us to develop new features quickly while being responsive to the needs of our existing users.
#4: Make activation costs (and effort) disappear.
At Kustomer, we think it’s shocking when companies charge tens of thousands of dollars to customize and activate their software for clients. It’s even more appalling when these clients are start-ups who have limited capital and time to spend on long consulting projects. Consumer products are easy to set up and the same needs to be true of B2B products. No one explicitly teaches you how to comment on a friend’s post on Instagram. Toddlers are able to use iPads before they’re able to walk. Actions need to be intuitive from the start and every feature needs to serve a purpose. Before we started building the interface for Kustomer, we spent months architecting the foundation of our platform so you can easily integrate new data sources and quickly customize the tool with limited help. Our goal is to empower companies to customize their software without requiring the aid of third-party consultants.
#5: Deliver dopamine hits.
I’ve been an avid gamer since my dad brought home the original NES (Nintendo) in 2nd grade. In Junior High, I spent months playing World of Warcraft. Few products are able to keep users engaged for extended periods of time as well as video games can.
While I don’t get to game very much today, I’ve been fortunate enough to have KPCB Partner and gaming legend bing gordon as a mentor in my career. He continually expresses the importance of using “dopamine hits” to incentivize user behavior. By rewarding certain actions, video games cleverly advance gamers through their intended storylines. These dopamine hits may be as obvious as a “point reward” or as subtle as a joyful sound. We seek to emulate that cascade of dopamine with Kustomer, though admittedly, we are just getting started. The best way to reflect the offline world in the online world is through providing “wow” moments, by stimulating the brain through dopamine.
The consumerization of IT isn’t a fad that is going to last a year. It’s a fundamental change in how B2B software will be designed. Business users deserve software that’s as fun and easy to use as their favorite consumer products.
To learn more about how Kustomer can increase your customer support efficiency, check out https://www.kustomer.com/product.
