In theory, customer experience is simple. When a customer purchases a product or service from a business, the experience they have can either be a good experience or a bad experience, black and white, simple, right? If it were true that customer experience begins and ends at the point-of-sale, then it may be that simple. But, that is not how customer experience happens anymore. Customer experience can begin as early as a simple Google search that ends up on your website. Customer experience can last as long as – well ever. A customer could be completely content with their purchase and then 2 years later call with a complaint. This interaction, though 2 years later, is still part of a customer’s experience with your business.

This extending timeframe for customer experience paired with the light speed advances in technology has forced businesses to revaluate where and when the customer experience begins, when and if ever the customer experience ends and what tools and technologies have changed the way customers and businesses interact.

Big Data and New Era Customer Experience

Though some customers may not be aware of how websites personally target them with ads and deals that are created based on their past search or purchase history or geographically target them based on where they are currently sitting, but it happens. And the reason it happens so easily nowadays is because the data that is available, and more importantly accessible, for businesses and search engines.

We live in a day and age where (though slightly concerning) it is not uncommon to be able to find out where someone lives, who they live with, what they do and when they do it. Now, before we go off on a tangent about online security and privacy settings, let’s get back to what this article is about – how has this data affected the customer experience landscape?

With this information in the hands of businesses, customers can receive much more personalized advertising messages, product suggestions, and even vacation ideas. Many do not enjoy their online data being peeped on for the sake of business; however, many do appreciate the personalization aspect and it does work or businesses would not be continuing to use this data for sales purposes.

This data-driven business style, paired with geo-targeting strategies have changed where the customer experience begins. Companies that customers have never heard of may already have a personalized message and product armed and ready before the customer even knows they want the product. Kind of creepy, but really cool from a marketing standpoint.

The Rise of Technology: Infinite Access for Consumers

Another aspect of the customer experience landscape that has changed tremendously is the channels to which customers can engage with a business and also the channels in which a customer can find resources.

The first channel is through live help either on a website or direct video link. Technology has been created that allows businesses to live chat with website visitors via instant messaging or video chat. These tools aim to improve the customer experience by taking a time that is usually stressful for the customer and making their experience and simple and stress-free as possible.

The second channel is social media. Whether you reach out to a company via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Vine or MySpace (just kidding, probably not MySpace – though they do have a nice rebrand happening), businesses around the world have embraced this social media movement with open arms and have, in turn, created new avenues for sharing content with customers, engaging themselves in the current conversations and also receiving negative feedback. Social media allows customers to like and share the businesses they love, but also personally speak to the businesses they love. This technology has proven that customer experience goes beyond the point-of-sale more than any other channel in decades.

Lastly, the rise in the tech-savviness of consumers and ease of access to company information and FAQs has led to an increase in customers solving their own problems. As long as businesses have important information that is accessible via all sorts of different devices readily available on their website, some consumers will attempt to solve their problems themselves – without engaging with a customer service specialist at all. This could have both positive and negative outcomes. A) Customer does not talk to business; customer finds important information; customer is happy with business; business is happy; win-win situation. Or B) Customer does not talk to business; customer does not find important information; customer is unhappy with business; business loses customer; lose-lose situation. May be extreme, but the accessibility of online information has definitely changed the customer experience landscape.

Customers Have Come To Expect More from Businesses

I’ll keep this one short.

The best and worst thing to happen to the customer experience landscape is the increase in customer expectations. Best because businesses are adhering to customer complaints and protests and that leads to customers that are much more consistently satisfied with a much broader range of businesses. Worst because businesses may be seen as inferior if their customer experience protocol does not match the likes of the larger businesses that customers have come to expect.

Bad service should not be tolerated from anyone whom customers are giving their hard-earned money. However, because of the increase in expectations, businesses who in the past may have not needed to invest heavily in customer service may need to now just to stay afloat. Businesses may do their best to have amazing customer experience plans, but if they do not have the resources to offer live help, or 2 hour phone call return guarantees or 24/7 support then certain customers may see that as inferior. Unfortunate, but it is how the business world works. If you aren’t ready to evolve, someone else will fly right by you and your customers may just latch on to them for a ride.

Customer Experience Landscape Conclusion

In today’s article, we have briefly touched on how much the customer experience landscape has drastically evolved in the past decade. With the emergence of new platforms and the increasing uses of mass consumer data, the idea of what a customer experience means has grown from being a business to consumer transactional relationship into an around-the-clock engagement relationship, regardless if a transactional sale is made or not.

The cool thing is that the platforms and technology used by customers and businesses to communicate with each other will always evolve, but the idea of great customer service and successful businesses responding to what their customers want is timeless.

If you have anything to add to the conversation, be sure to leave a comment below. I hoped you had as good of a time reading this as I did writing it.

A conversation that many business owners have with their software development team is about the cost of software development and how it can be somewhat startling. Many businesses tend to underestimate the time and financial resources required to build quality, functional software applications. In reality, more goes into software development than you might think. Software requires an in-depth understanding of business processes combined with a variety of skilled individuals working together. Here are a few of the components of a development project.

Business Analysis

The first step to every development project is business analysis. Developers need to understand your specific workflows before they can actually start developing. Every business is different – some businesses have similar workflows, but almost every circumstance has unique requests. The business analysis works as the blueprint for your software and involves a commitment from both yourself and your development team. Every dollar that is spent during the business analysis phase comes back to you during the actual development phase.

Database Development

Next is the information management component. Both internal and external data needs to be managed. If businesses lack modern databases, then those need to be created.

Data Analysis

Developers need to ensure your data is being pulled correctly and transferred into usable results. Data analysis involves advanced mathematical, and in some cases scientific, calculations that drive business processes and decisions.

Research

Whenever software is developed, industry analysis must occur. If a software development team has never worked in the medical industry, but need to develop a system for nursing and medical information, then extensive research needs to be completed before they can completely dive in. Every industry has their own jargon, processes, standards and preferences that need to be considered.

UI/UX Design

Once a framework for a software system has been agreed upon, there needs to be time allocated to both user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design work. It is important that each client has a design that speaks to their business specifically. The design of a system must be both intuitive and visually appealing. The experience must be crisp and simple enough for everyone to utilize the new system without extensive training. This stage usually involves multiple mock-ups and prototypes.

Development Phase

Once business processes, information management and UI/UX design have been agreed upon by all involved parties, the “real” development begins. The complexity of your system will determine your total projected development time. Also, you will need to determine which development process your development team uses. Each process has their own pros and cons, can take more or less time, and involve extended or concentrated time commitments from the client.

QA Testing

Testing or Quality Assurance (QA) is critically important during development. QA is the aspirin – they relieve all of your headaches. QA constantly tests your custom software and ensures that everything is working correctly and they offer recommendations on how to make the experience better for your users.

Deployment

Software needs to run in an environment. This may mean your servers host the system or the development team hosts it for you. This system must be accessible and optimized on whichever specific environment fits your specific needs. If deployed on a new environment, tests will need to be run in order to ensure complete compatibility.

Training

You are now at the training stage – you are nearing the home stretch. Members of your development team will help train your staff or train your trainers that will in turn train your staff. Training may be a few afternoons over video chat or maybe it is a few days of in-class training. This is completely dependent on your software complexity and the workflows that you have had developed.

Post-Implementation Support

Congratulations, your software has been completed! Moving forward, your client-development team relationship continues. Support is vital for custom software and in building post-implementation relationships with clients. Support is usually phone-based and involves multiple levels of escalation. Post-implementation can be small bug fixes, additional feature development or more staff training. Businesses often overlook post-implementation. Post-implementation is not seen as an additional expense, but an additional investment into your software solution. Custom software is never deployed and then left alone – it is an ongoing process where both parties involved reap the benefits.

Changing Requirements

There may be a handful, but not many development projects stick 100% to their original blueprint. Features or workflows are discovered or uncovered and cause adjusted projections. It is bound to happen, but when it comes to software development, finding new features or bugs is not a bad thing. To mitigate the costs of changing requirements, you should have pre-planned alternate routes or software detours. These routes should have tiered off-ramps that allow you to save money and ensure your key features are included.

Why Software is So Expensive – Conclusion

Overall, the costs come from not just the development team, but the efforts of the designers, QA, data analysts and many others. The simple reason that software development is so expensive is because it takes a village to develop good software. For people and organizations that think custom software development is as simple as calling up their local software developers and asking for a system, you have overlooked the importance of the process.

The best software and the happiest customers are not created during the development process, but the planning process. The more an organization gives in terms of communication, the more the software solution will facilitate their specific needs and the more value they will receive. Software development involves research and feedback. It is a give and take relationship that goes much beyond purely transactional. A good development team sits down with their client and finds out what it is exactly that they need. Every business is unique and the processes that they go through on a day-to-day basis are ever-changing. This is why custom software is so expensive.

If this conversation speaks to you, don’t worry – you are not alone. The true benefits and value of custom software are often overlooked. Software development is not just lines of code. Software development is a partnership between a business and a developer that leads to improved processes and overall satisfaction. If a business wants to complete a specific goal, than off-the-shelf is a good choice. However, if your business wants a tailored solution, than custom development is a route you will want to consider.

Every business is unique and so is the software they need. Get your free Personal Needs Analysis today.

Quick, we need to jump into a meeting. What’s the first thing that jumps into your head? If you’re like 47% of the respondents in a recent Igloo survey, you’re thinking things like “boring”, “necessary”, “tedious”, “useless”, “pointless”, “long”, etc. It seems that there is a lot of distain for meetings, which isn’t entirely unfounded.

Meetings are often seen as a necessary evil. When effective, they can help teams collaborate and stay on track, but if not well executed, they can lack productivity or get viewed as a waste of time. A recent study conducted by Verizon Business found that 89% of individuals thought that their meetings could be improved with better technology. So today, we are going to explore a few new technologies to get you some productive meeting time back in your day.

Tools for Scheduling meetings

CoreUM – Full Disclosure, our team built this software, but there are free plans available and we think it’s the best thing for meeting coordination.

The frustrations typically begin with one of the most difficult parts of the meeting process; the actual coordination of the meeting! If you’ve never been on the receiving end of a reply all email or mass communication thread, it typically goes something like this:

John – “Is everyone free Wednesday at 7:30pm?” 
Bill – “Not at 7:30, but I can do at 6.” 
Suzy – “Tuesday works better for me, I’ve got softball on Wednesday nights.” 
Jen – “Can we do Saturday instead? But only before 2:30.”

Using a meeting scheduling app like CoreUM allows users to simply poll and coordinate available meeting times with invitees.

Step One – Provide meeting details (name, location, etc.) and propose a handful of dates and times. 

Step Two – Select your invitees. 

CoreUM takes care of the rest to gain consensus.  

Your invitees select the times they’re available, allowing you to select the option with the most availability.  

CoreUM is the only system on the market to include CORPORATE BRANDING, QUORUM and GROUP MANAGEMENT. Whether you are using CoreUM for organizing your next committee lunch, gathering the best dates and times for your annual golf trip, or planning your next corporate outing, CoreUM may become your favourite productivity application and revolutionize the way you organize meetings. 

CoreUM is free to try the VIP subscription for 30 days. If you like CoreUM, use coupon code “muniserv” at checkout when upgrading to a corporate membership to receive 20% off of your first year of corporate membership.

OK it’s meeting time.

For hosting meetings

We love GoToMeeting. It’s a staple, been around forever, and almost everyone has some familiarity with the user interface. Simply create your meeting and send an invite link and you can instantly share your screen, have a video call, chat forum, record your call, and see who is engaged and paying attention. Yes, you are able to see when individuals click away from the tab that you are showing them. GoToMeeting isn’t free. You’re paying at least $26 per month in order to use the software.

Other options include Skype for Business (free if you use Microsoft Office 365), ON24 and Adobe Connect.

For keeping track of your ideas

Now that you have coordinated meeting times with CoreUM and began your GoToMeeting, which tool can you use during your meeting to keep track of your awesome ideas? We have a lot of experience with this area as we’ve tried a lot of different software packages. There are a couple of great options:

1.   1. Evernote – Evernote allows you to post lists, images, and ideas while also collaborating with your meeting attendees. The best part is it’s free to use, but in order to sync across multiple devices, you will have to purchase a paid membership ($46.99 to $120 per year). Their mobile app and search features are big sellers here. I personally store all of the PDF of important documents and manuals in Evernote so I can easily come back and reference them. They also have a handy chrome app that allows you to clip webpages and save them directly to Evernote. We did run into some issues with syncing when multiple individuals were editing the same note.

2.   2. Google Docs – If you want everyone to be able to edit your notes as you work, Google docs has you covered. Many individuals can contribute new ideas and edit documents in real time. Sometimes this can cause the “too many cooks in the kitchen” challenge. The best part is that the Google suite of products is free to use and corporate membership is only $50 per user per year. You don’t need to have a Gmail account.

3.   3. Basecamp – We love basecamp. Basecamp is more of a project management tool but If you need to collaborate on a project with internal and external individuals, it works amazingly well. There is a group chat (they call it campfire), a message board, schedules, tasks, to do lists, storage for documents and files, etc. they even have automated reminders. Project participants can get notification of progress and updates on the status of changes to the action items and to do’s in the projects. The reason it’s not number one on the list is because the cost is $99.

4.   4. OneNote and Microsoft Office 365. OneNote works similarly to Evernote but it’s the product from Microsoft. This means that it integrates into other Microsoft products. It will easily let you store meeting notes and agenda items as well as share those notes to other individuals in your organization.

All of these examples are inexpensive and can really help organize and structure your meetings. They’ll even let you upload pictures from that awesome brainstorming session.

Bonus tool – Consider not having a meeting using Slack

While I feel the most effective way to have a meeting is face to face, I know some companies are limiting the number of meetings they are having using productivity apps like Slack. Instead of getting together for a daily status meeting (or Scrum, for those in the Agile world), they use simple automatic reminders to ask the team what’s going on. Each person responds with their top priorities, from wherever they are. Managers scan the channel to address any questions, and it saves about 15 minutes of time per employee every day.

The Conclusion

These are just a few of the tools we use to try and make the meeting process easier and is by no means an exhaustive list. This won’t prevent your sales manager’s noisy dog from barking in the background when their working from home or your customer service manager from forgetting to put themselves on mute, but it is a start to make the organization easy.

Thanks for reading

CoreSolutions Software.

Part Eight in the Series: Software Development Guide for Business Leaders

Determine Minimum Viable Product Features

As you build your functional requirements, you must choose the features and functions needed to create a Minimum Viable Product or MVP. A minimum viable product has just those core elements sufficient to deploy the product and no more. Using an MVP style of development encourages feedback from the stakeholders, costs less to develop and is a good strategy to use when developing customer facing apps.

Utilize the MoSCoW Method

When developing your MVP, break the requirements for the down into sub-categories. A handy method for this is the MoSCoW Method. With the MoSCoW method, you break each element down into the categories: Must have, should have, could have and won’t have.

I like the MVP and MoSCoW methods because they use standard language and terms that we can understand easily.

Critical to the success of creating a MoSCoW frame is a budget and a time-box or end date. If you had unlimited time and budget, it would allow you to have everything in your product.

Since there are seldom cases where the budget and timeline are unlimited we then employ the MoSCoW Method to determine:

• Must Have Items: requirements that are critical to the success of the current development time-box.
• Should Have Items: important but not necessary for the current time-box.
• Could Have Items: desirable but not necessary for the current time-box.
• Won’t Have Items: won’t be included in this time-box as agreed upon by the stakeholders.

As an executive, your biggest problem will be the classification of each requirement and to avoid making each one a “Must Have Item”. Facilitate this process with your Project Manager.

Two Methods for Breaking Your Development Project into Parts Conclusion

Your PM may have some tools up their sleeve to facilitate a workshop or meeting but here is a tool that you can use to focus the session and attain a good result. The device is called the Prioritization Matrix. With it, you can easily have a stakeholder meeting and get everyone to agree which requirements are going to have the biggest impact and then the “must have” items for your next sprint.

MoSCoW, MVP, and Agile go together well. Start each sprint with a MoSCoW session, build your MVP and you’re ready to start. Evaluate each successive time-box and apply the MoSCoW method iteratively.

CoreSolutions of London, Ontario, is a locally acclaimed software development firm with over 25 years of experience. CoreSolutions’ team of experts, including developers and project managers, build web and mobile applications using the Agile Methodology and tools. CoreSolutions will assist you through all phases of your project including brainstorming, requirements planning and project management.

Connect with CoreSolutions today to start your project with a Free Needs Analysis.