Tag Archives for Customer First

Many businesses quote generalities like, ‘the customer is always right’ or ‘the customer is king’ without truly knowing what it means. Putting the customer first is more than just a motto that hangs on your office walls. A customer-centric strategy needs to be implemented across every level of your business and is a method to structure operations to put the customer experience at the heart of everything you do.

So What is a Customer-Centric Strategy?

A customer-centric approach is simply a way of thinking about your customer and their needs in every business decision you make. It is about understanding ways to better serve them and constantly adding a sense of delight to their experience.

Why is a Customer-Centric Strategy so Important?

Putting your customer’s needs first has positive implications across all aspects of your business. Increasing customer satisfaction is simply a way of investing in your business. 

The concept of customer success is a practice where businesses actively seek out problems or issues faced by customers and solve them before they arise. 

This process leads to greater satisfaction and results in increasing loyalty which translates into a sustainable and more impactful business.

According to research, customers rank it as one of the highest considerations when making their purchase decision.

Source: insightsforprofessionals.com

• 33% of Americans agree that they would consider switching companies after a single instance of poor service. – American Express
• Faced with poor customer service, 20% of consumers would complain publicly via social media. – New Voice Media
• 85% of consumers churn because of poor service that could have been prevented. – Kolsky
• One in three customers would pay more to receive a higher level of service. – Genesys
• 80% of American consumers point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service as the most important elements of a positive customer experience. 

5 Visual Tools That Help Better Understand Your Customer

Creating a customer-centric strategy requires an in-depth understanding of your customer, their goals, motivations, desires, and much more. It involves having access to data and making informed decisions. But more importantly, it involves gathering insights into their behavior,  how they respond to different situations, and identifying the actions you can take to maximize customer satisfaction. 

Customer Journey Mapping 

Creating a detailed customer journey map allows you to align your team, uncover new opportunities, and jumpstart your customer-centric strategy. 

It is a visual tool that can provide you with a deep understanding of your customer and their motivations. It allows you to visually represent the various touchpoints where they interact with your product or service and identifies room for improvement.

A customer journey map is a useful tool that answers important questions like

• Who are your key customers?
• What point of the journey is your customer in today?
• Where are they facing challenges?
• What are the touchpoints where you could improve their experience?
• How does your product or service help solve the customer’s problems?

Creating unique and intentionally designed customer journey mapping is critical to putting your customer’s needs first and should be a process adopted by all employees in the organization and built right into the culture.

User Personas

A user persona creator is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s based on user research but contains key psychometric points that help you identify how your customer thinks and behaves. A deep understanding of your ideal customer will influence everything from product design to post transaction support. It helps you uncover ways people search for your business, buy and use your products, and gives you a basis to focus your efforts across multiple areas.

Empathy Maps

This visual tool is great for gaining insights into the mind of the customer. As the name suggests, it allows you to think and feel like the customer to develop a better understanding of the context, psychological and emotional needs. This is a fundamental step in making sure you understand the goals and are solving the right problems.

Empathy map template usually poses the following questions:

• What does the user think and feel? 
• What are their goals and associated fears?
• How would their social circle react to the user using your product?
• What would the user experience in their environment while using your product?
• What does the user say about the product experience?

5 Whys Analysis

This is a great tool to improve customer service. 5 Whys analysis template allows you to get to the root of the problem and address issues in a meaningful way so that you can prevent it from happening again. 

In customer service, putting the customer first involves more than simply saying yes to every demand. It requires a systematic analysis of the issue customers may be facing. It is important to first know who your customer is: understand their questions, needs, and concerns to affect change in a meaningful way.

User Flow Diagrams 

Putting the customer first begins from the conception of the product and in many cases, it involves designing a product around the way a customer may interact with it.

Using user flow diagram tool you can map out the identified customer needs in a systematic manner and create a detailed representation of each stage of their interaction with it.

User flows are most commonly used by product and UX teams and provide a way of thinking about design that centers around a customer, their needs and desires.

Tips for building a customer-centric culture

Service at the core: Traditionally customer service is a task associated with post-sale activities, a shift in this mindset is critical to putting the customer first. This shift requires the service team to think beyond traditional channels, such as phone and email, and meet the customers where they are.

Everyone is responsible: Shaping a customer-centric culture is a responsibility that belongs to the entire organization. It is not a task that falls to a particular department. Customers don’t care about organizational charts when they interact with a company; all they perceive, and associate with the brand, is the experience they have.

Proactive, not reactive: Putting the customer first involves solving problems before they take place. This approach is one where service and product teams understand customer needs well enough to anticipate issues that may arise and devise meaningful solutions.

Personalised: In a customer-centric model companies don’t treat their consumers as a broad demographic or a random data set. You need to gather rich insights and understand the individual relationships each customer has with your product.

As part of an initiative to get out of the usual circle of thinking and space we are in and to have some fun, everyone in the Creately team was encouraged to contribute ideas and understand how the world is evolving in terms of technology and innovation. The main prerequisites were to do a talk on anything that caught our fancy but to keep it interesting and exciting.

So we all ended up casting lots, and I got the first shot at this interesting initiative. Being a QA Engineer, I chose to offer some insight into what we techies call – Usability. This term can be defined as “how well users can learn and use a product to achieve their goals and how satisfied they are with that process”. Usability also refers to methods, which help in improving ease-of-use during the design process of any product.

It would be an impossible task to transfer everything that we discussed onto this space. Rather it would be more useful if I were to just state the more pertinent factors of the presentation, which would make it more easy to digest. Now, there are 5 basic factors that are used to assess Usability. They are:

• Learnability – Is it easy for users to accomplish basic task of a system, application or a particular product when they use it for the first time?
• Efficiency – How effectively can you finish a task on the system?
• Memorability – How easily can users recall the steps of a particular task, after not using the app for awhile?
• Errors – How many critical errors do users make and can they recover from such errors easily?
• Satisfaction – How pleasant was  the user experience?

One of the chief benefits of understanding such a potent topic is that it would educate the non-geeks and subsequently lead us to further improve Creately by thinking more proactively. And this is where it gets interesting. I used practical examples to show how theory fits in perfectly.

Common usability mistakes in web design

Now we are going to look at some common usability mistakes in web design.

Bad search

The most common mistake is a bad search facility. Literal search engines reduce usability, because they are unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens and other variants.

PDF file for online reading

There are many reasons why PDF files for online reading leads to reduced usability. They are as follows.

– Users may not enjoy coming across a PDF file while browsing because it can break the flow of the browsing experience.

– Even simple things like printing , saving a document are difficult because standard browser commands does not work

– Users cannot find a simple way to return to the site

– Users have to wait way too long to view the document because it takes ages to load depending on the browser.

Not changing colors of visited links

Due to this common “oversight” users cannot identify the visited links and they may end up revisiting the same link again and again.

Non-Scannable text

Reading a wall of text is usually a painful experience. But there are ways through which you can have text that supports scannability. Consider taking into account some of the elements below.

– Subheadings

– Bulleted list

– Highlighted key words

– Short paragraphs

– Simple writing style

It would make sense to break this post into two, since it would give you some time to ruminate over what has been stated here. Make sure you stick around for the final part of this post on Monday.

References used: www.useit.com, www.usability.gov

Creately was always about intuitive diagramming that was fast and smart. We’ve always made it a point to keep upgrading our systems to ensure that you face no delay at all when it comes to creating those all-important diagrams. So as tweeted by Nick yesterday, you should notice an increase is speed when it comes to certain functions.

A faster app means a happier diagrammer

Some of the improvements also includes a faster response time when it comes to functions such as Create, Save, Open, Rename, Copy, and Delete diagrams, amongst many others. Other improvements include a quick response to opening the document manager and selecting as much as five diagrams at once! It’s a no brainer as to how this could translate to real-world benefits.

We reckon our performance upgrade would save you a whole lotta time, thanks to time being reduced when it comes to the usual diagramming functions such as opening documents, creating diagrams, saving and publishing them.  But there’s more reason to cheer, our performance upgrade has inherently improved the response time for Central Desktop as well. Read on to see how.

Central Desktop is fast, real fast

As most users may already know, Central Desktop offers a complete Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration platform, which allows business teams to communicate and collaborate online. This collaborative workspace gets more powerful now with Creately’s integration into Central Desktop’s platform that offers customers the ability to translate their ideas graphically.

The new online diagramming feature makes it extremely easy for users to create a visual diagram and embed that into online documents, wikis and discussions with just a few clicks. The good news is that this process has got quicker compared to what it was.

Access our Public Diagrams faster!

A real testament as to how versatile and easy-to-use Creately is would be the vast amount of diagrams drawn by our users. Currently we have in excess of 100,000 diagrams that encompass everything from Block Diagrams to UML Diagrams. This page has been a constant source of inspiration for new diagrammers and there are many diagrams that could be graded as Novice at one end to Professional at the other end. Despite having thousands of diagrams, the time taken to load a page is now quicker than what it was. You can click a diagram to view it on the Creately Diagram Viewer, which is also fairly fast now.

There are more improvements along the way (very soon!) in the form of bug fixes. We appreciate all the bug reports you guys have sent us and we’re hard at work to make sure Creately is that much smarter to work on. We’re all for constant improvement; if there are certain things you want improved, you’re more than welcome to pop us a tweet or send us an email.  It’s true what they say, sometimes it’s those small details that can make a world of difference.

Diagram references: http://www.psdgraphics.com/icons/psd-red-speedometer-icon/

Business is all about change and Creately is no exception to this rule. We have been thinking about how we can improve the plans that we offer to Creately premium subscribers. We want to improve them by making them more approachable and simpler to understand for all our users. Now that we have done our thinking it is time for you to have your say – after you see the new plans below we are going to ask you to complete a short survey after which we’ll give you a discount code to save on your next Creately subscription.

We have designed the new Creately plans to achieve the following:

• Simplify the choice you have to make when deciding on a Creately premium plan
• Make it easier to find the plan that best suits your organisation or business
• Provide the features you expect no matter which premium plan you choose

The new proposed new plans are below, we have given them especially boring names so that they don’t influence you. You’ll also notice that we haven’t shown any prices we really just want your feedback on the plans themselves:

	Free / Public	Personal	Team A	Team B	Team C	Team D
Universal Features		SSL connections, Diagram Export, Sharing, Embedding, Publishing
Diagram Types	Public only	Private & Public
Number team members	No Team	No Team	5	10	20	Unlimited
Projects per plan	1	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Collaborators per project	3	Owner only	5	10	20	Unlimited
Diagrams per project	5	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Collaborators per diagram	3	10	5	10	20	Unlimited

So we can be sure we have got the design of these plans correct please click here to complete a short (6 question) survey about the new plans.

As a thank you for completing the survey you’ll receive a 20% discount code which is valid until the 31 December 2010 and can be used with your next Creately subscription. The code is shown after you submit your survey answers. To remind yourself of the current plans please click here to view them.

@nick_foster

Last week, we announced the launch of Creately’s new image search option and highlighted its features in brief. Now, the time has come to give you a deeper look at our new Image Search Feature…

With hundreds of shapes in the Creately library, it was getting a little difficult to find all the right images. This is exactly why we’ve introduced the Image Search option allowing you to search internally as well as from Google Images and IconFinder.com.

1) Instant Search Box

We’ve added an Instant Search box within the Shapes panel making it easier to find the shapes you need to put together the perfect diagram. Instead of scrolling through the tons of Shapes that come with Creately, you can now simply type in what you need and Creately will automatically load the right images for you. The results show up instantly while you type, this is real fast!

2) Search from Google Images and IconFinder.com

Well that’s not all, there’s more to this! If you can’t find what you need in Creately’s object libraries you can also look up for images from Google and IconFinder.com.

For example, you’re looking for a Posterous Icon/Image and you couldn’t find any from the results. Simply click on the drop down menu that appears on the left of the Search box and see the available search options – you can click to select Google Images and/or IconFinder.com to search for images related to Posterous. Once you find what you need, simply drag-n-drop any of these images from the left panel or use your arrow keys to scroll through the results and hit ‘Enter’ to insert the selected image into the canvas.

3) Import directly from the Web

And, if you still can’t find what you need, click on the Import Image button on the Main Toolbar to upload your own images. We’ve now added the ability to import an image directly from the Web by specifying the image’s URL. Just type/paste the URL of the image in the Import Image dialog and watch the image appear on your drawing canvas.

This will save loads of your time, as you no longer have to save the images on your desktop to import them into Creately.

We believe these new developments will not only make image search easier, but also make online diagramming with Creately incredible. Give it a try now, and here if you’d like to see Image Search extended to other image repositories.

@Creately

After a recent comment on the original Creately Diagram Viewer post I thought it would be a good idea to follow up with a full post to help all the other Creately users who also use Google Code and Google Project Hosting.

Google Code projects allow you to add Google Gadgets to the Wiki for the project. This means that you can add your Creately diagrams of the design, features and UI mockups for your project to the Wiki for all the project members to see and work with.

Creately Diagram Embed Code Google Code Projects

Due to the way that gadgets work in the Google Code Wiki there is an intermediary handler which means that the document ID that you want to display gets lost during the rendering if you use the regular variable names. In order to fix this it is possible to use the wiki markup similar to this:

<wiki:gadget url="https://creately.com/player/gadget/createlyplayer.xml" height="500" width="500" border="0" up_did="gcqjqs762" up_dlogo="true" up_dtitle="Embedding in Google Code" up_bgcolor="#EEEEEE" />

The variables of interest are:

• up_did – The Creately diagram ID that you would like to see rendered in the wiki page.
• up_dlogo – Display the Creately logo, either “true” or “false” – leaving it true gives us some promotion 😉
• up_dtitle – Sets the title for the diagram – you don’t need to worry about this for the Google Code wiki as it won’t be seen.
• up_bgcolor – The background colour behind the diagram being shown in the player. The default is: “#EEEEEE” and looks pretty good.

The size of the player in the wiki can be changed using the “width” and “height” variables – they set the size in pixels.

You can see a working example of the viewer in a project wiki here.

Thanks to Niels for posting the original comment which led to this post – you can see his Google Code project here.

@nick_foster