Insulation from the user experience
When a small enterprise offers a lousy user experience, the person in charge learns about it, fast.
Customers leave, visitors bounce, complaints roll in. It’s expensive and it undermines the goals of the organization. Fortunately, in a small organization, the person with the ability to make change happen hears about it and can take action.
In a large organization, like my bank, the resources to make things better are dramatically bigger and largely underused.
That’s because the person who should take action has other priorities. Not only aren’t they exposed to the valuable feedback that frontline workers get (because the organization doesn’t reward ‘bad’ news), but they haven’t prioritized getting the user experience right.
It seems more important to please the boss, go to meetings and keep the numbers on track than it is to fix what might not feel broken.
Spend some time in the store.
Visit your own website to get work done the way a customer would.
Answer the tech phone calls for a few hours.
And figure out how to turn the user experience into a metric that’s as easy to measure as how much money you made last month.