End User Experience

In the preceeding section on Monitoring, we discussed how monitoring is necessary to understand how our users are using our IT systems; and how it helps us evolve a judgement about future needs.

Let's go back to our shopkeeper example. What else does the shopkeeper do apart from noting the timings when customers come and go; and the types of fruits they buy? Have you seen how shopkeepers indulge in small talk with customers who are in a queue, befriending them and making them feel like it is their own shop; or how some of the most interesting / oft used and inexpensive items like chocolates & pens are stocked very near to the till in a mall, or how often a new till is opened if a queue gets long. You would have seen how sales representatives in a shopping mall are well informed about latest trends in cosmetics/ fashion/ electronics and can help the customer with making the right choice. Very clearly, the shopkeeper is trying to improve the customers feel-good factor in these cases. Why do they need to do it? Obviously, to keep their customers happy & to gain an edge with competition. I have often wondered how much this really improves sales in the shop; but, if shops do it; then it may well be. Like obviously, you'd prefer a shop that does do all these things over a shop that does not ! :-)

So then, like all our examples so far, we should apply the same principal to our IT systems.
We should try to understand how our end users are finding the front end - does it respond fast enough for them to be happy customers? What are the times when customers like to use the IT systems most? In peak times, are we allowing for a sufficient number of concurrent threads, so that queuing delays within our system do not bring down the happiness quotient for our customers?

Do we know what the happiness quotient of our customers is - in short do we know what SLAs form tolerable limits from our customer's view point?

Understanding which are the favourite transactions that customer's perform and using that knowledge to drive more business is what business analytics tools help with nowadays. Advertisements of new banking facilities/ interest rates for example could be displayed on pages where the customer is most likely to land during his most favourite or frequently done action / transaction like check balance, on the website of a bank for example.

IT systems may be able to sometimes read the mood of a customer based on the data that is being thrown up to the customer and provide content-sensitive feedback/ advertisements/ pointers to the customer.

End user experience is actually a lot more beyond "response time". It's not just about deploying a robotic monitoring tool and reading response time data from it to figure out how well responses are going back to the tool or deploying network monitoring or passive client agents. It's about the layout of the website, making it easy to navigate, friendly to specially abled people, making the customer feel comfortable, secure and at home; basically a joy to access the IT application and use it. To me, response time and business intelligence, analytics and CRM need to be viewed together; to really make a solid difference to the business & to improve the end user experience!