Yes, delight. So, what exactly does it mean to delight a customer? Well, let’s see how delight is defined:
Delight: To please (someone) greatly
Interesting. It means to please someone GREATLY. But what does greatly mean? How can we track that, or quantify something like that? To do this, let’s put ourselves into an administrative role or a sales role. We rely on technology to help us do our job. We want efficiency, intuitiveness, and simplicity. People want a tool that is simple and friendly to use – one that makes them WANT to use it, not feel like they MUST use it.
Hmmm… WANT versus NEED. Delight can spawn desire; do your employees or consumers desire to use your product? Or do they feel they have to use it out of necessity? Is it a frustrating learning curve, one in which change is avoided because of the problems it may cause? These are important questions to ask when assessing your current product or software of choice to understand if it is delighting your end users.
Why is delighting someone so important? Technology is in an exciting time right now, and experience and design are why products succeed or fail. You can no longer rely on having just the functionality, as there is too much competition out there doing the same thing. You need to build an associated desire or need for your product. This can be developed by taking the time to understand the people who you intend to use your product, empathizing with their needs and tailoring the experience to support those needs.
So, how can we optimize Salesforce to delight someone greatly? We all know Salesforce is a powerful tool, widely acclaimed across the world as a way to solve enterprise problems. Salesforce recognizes the importance of user experience and design, and has been unveiling their new user interface for a few years now. Salesforce is no longer just a powerful tool that users feel they MUST use, but it is now transitioning into a tool that users WANT to use. Salesforce’s new user interface offers a modern look and feel to their application as a whole; but, there are still a few integral steps an organization needs to take in order to ensure Salesforce is being leveraged to its potential.
1. Do Your User Experience (UX) Research
In order to successfully choose the correct Salesforce product, you need to know the purpose behind your organization’s use of the platform. Be it for your sales team to be more efficient, or your organization to have access to company data and information from anywhere, or looking for the ability to build powerful applications for your organization – consider the purpose(s) behind your choice. Once you hone in on your purpose, set up times to interview the real end-users of the application. Look at your organization or potential users and ask questions. Don’t assume the wants or needs of your users, figure them out.
Salesforce has a great set of exercises you can go through to understand the User Experience Research process. At CodeScience we take UX Research seriously. We are all about getting to a solution quickly, and the fastest route to a better solution is by doing your homework. We want to empathize with the end-users and tailor Salesforce to be a delightful experience for them. Let’s not spin our wheels making what we think is right, let’s do our best to get as close to the target as possible.
Check out the Salesforce Trailhead for UX
2. Understand the People Using Your Application (Personas)
Ok, you did your research and you start to understand the different types of people who are going to be using your application. Salesforce offers a list of predefined Personas you can review and map those to the people you have identified to be using your product. By understanding how your users map to Salesforce personas, you can be confident in the type of product you are choosing with Salesforce and you can begin to tell the story. By crafting an engaging story that intertwines the personas you unveil how everyone works together and benefits. You begin to unearth the opportunities to delight! How can you automate mundane tasks? Set your sales team up for closing leads faster? Have clear communication across different roles? How can you create interesting and easy to understand visualizations of data? What devices are your users depending on to get their job done? Defining your personas and mapping them to Salesforce allows you to begin to understand the array of opportunities you can take advantage of on the Salesforce platform.
Check out the Salesforce Trailhead for UX Personas
3. Start Creating (Prototyping)
Ok, this is a big one. Once the research has been gathered, the personas have been identified and defined, the process of creating can begin. As mentioned, Salesforce is a powerful platform. It gives you so much functionality that it can be a bit daunting at times if you just look at it out of the box. This is when prototyping can come in handy. There are two routes you can prototype.
The first route is to use the platform out of the box. The new Lightning interface offers a simple and fun way to customize or build layouts for your application. You can drag and drop components into layouts so you can customize them to fit your user’s needs. Understanding everything that the platform has can be quite daunting, but your personas and research should serve as your guiding light in making the right decisions as to what fields or layouts to optimize and reveal. You can prototype these experiences right in an Salesforce org. Test and iterate. A two column layout isn’t working for someone? No worries, switch to a three column instead and see how that works! Too many fields on the Contact page interrupting the focus and flow of a user? That is ok! Edit the page layout to optimize the fields to fit your user’s needs.
As you begin to prototype with default offerings from Salesforce you might come to a point where you need something that warrants customization. Again, don’t worry. Salesforce has the tools to set you up for success. Salesforce has a library of design files and patterns for visual designers to reference to quickly mock up components and interfaces. These design tools are created to look just like the Lightning experience so you are guaranteed a cohesive and seamless experience for your users. Designers can quickly create layouts to present to users and iterate upon those before diving into actual code. Again, we are getting closer to the mark and not assuming solutions.
Check out the Salesforce Trailhead for UX Prototyping
That’s it!
Those are the three integral steps for providing a delightful experience on the Salesforce platform. Before you begin to create a new Salesforce app or implement the platform for your organization, practice these three steps. If you are unsure how to implement the above steps, find someone who does know how. Employing individuals who are experts in experience design is just as important as the administrator of the platform or the developer building code. None of these things should ever be done in isolation – they all work together to create a successful AND delightful experience.
Need help developing a Salesforce app, or updating your offering with the Lightning experience? Drop us a line to start a conversation about how we can partner to delight your customers.
