In this competitive business world, “business-centric user experience” (UX) and “customer-centric user experience” (UX) are the most important brand differentiators for any business.
Following customer-centric user experience (UX) principles can actually lead to competitive success by providing feasible solutions to your customers. But, at the same time, business-centric user experience (UX) strategies help businesses to launch innovative products & services and become trendsetters in their domain.
The key to unlocking success is to understand what matters today in this digital world. This is the reason many businesses consider hiring top web design companies who understand customer-centricity and value business propositions at the same time.
This article walks you through complete information on business-centric UX and customer-centric UX and an in-depth comparison between both these terms, ultimately helping you to select and implement the right UX strategies for your business.
What is Business-Centric User Experience?
Business-centric user experience revolves around adding value to the products and services that help meet business goals and objectives. Here, businesses follow the approach of making products and services that align with sustainable business objectives, are cost-effective, and can be churned quickly. All the business processes and strategies are planned around the products & services delivered to work accordingly for the advancements. With a basic understanding of the business and its value proposition, you can craft an experience that can lead to the success of your business.
How do Businesses create Business-Centric User Experiences?
Streamlining the workflow
To create a business-centric UX; it is vital to streamline the workflow. It ensures that the process runs smoothly at the right time. It also removes the unnecessary steps that hamper productivity and diverts from achieving the business objectives. When you take out time to streamline the workflow, the chances of errors occurring reduce, thereby creating an excellent business-centric user experience.
Automating tasks
If you want to produce an exceptional business-centric user experience, then automating the tasks is the key. Having the right set of tools for automating the tasks can reap major benefits in terms of saving time and money. Automating the tasks will tap into the smart work mode and improve overall efficiency in decision-making, which can help you in achieving your business goals seamlessly.
Delivering better products and services
A business-centric approach to UX helps build high-quality products and services by aligning user requirements with business objectives. With focus on building the best application or product, the emphasis is on quality of product and services which will result in higher position in market. This approach works best for innovating or a new ground up feature as it misses out on user’s perspective.
When should you use Business-Centric approach in UX Design?
Business-centric approach is the designing approach in which the business goals and objectives drive the design. Following a business-centric UX approach can be beneficial only if you are sure that your digital product is highly demanded by your users. For example, the ads on Youtube can be irritating for the viewers, but they still don’t stop watching videos on that platform. This is because viewers find the information on Youtube valuable enough to ignore the inconvenience caused by the ads. At the same time, Youtube is a free-to-use application and needs to monetize through ads to survive.
Similarly, the below-mentioned scenarios need to be considered while following a business-centric UX approach to meet your goals.
- You are selling best-in-class products or services in your niche.
- You have gained a reputation as the most customer-friendly organization in your industry.
- Customers are addicted to your product or service and are already engaged and loyal to your brand.
Only under these circumstances, you can follow a business-centric UX approach to gain success.
What is Customer-Centric User Experience?
A customer-centric UX approach requires putting your customers’ priorities at the core of the business. Being customer-centric means understanding consumer requirements and challenges and eventually building a solution to sell them. Organizations that follow a customer-centric approach develop and deliver products that align with their present and future customer needs.
Apart from delivering brilliant services, customer-centric UX also transforms from customer journey to building customer loyalty. When businesses turn every customer into a profitable asset, it increases the valuation of the company. Further, it also influences the investors to invest in your firm.
Today, the customer-centric user experience is crucial for companies. It will enable maximizing revenue and generating profit. It also means offering more than just good service and support.
Customer-centric UX strategies follow an approach that allows for creating experiences that are –
Considering the above approach at an initial stage helps deliver excellent user experiences, eventually improving customer retention and generating higher business revenue.
Now, let’s look at the steps to follow to create customer-centric user experiences.
How to create a successful Customer-Centric strategy?
Prioritizing Customer Relationships
Maintaining good relationships with customers can benefit your business to a great extent. Having good relations with your customers can help you gain brand popularity resulting in increased sales. Use the right methods and technology to nurture your present customers, as they can be your brand advocates.
Centralizing customer data
Centralizing customer data ensures minimum mistakes while dealing with the customers. Following up with irrelevant issues with the customers can lead to bad user experiences. Thus, centralizing customer data becomes important to ensure that your employees are approaching the right customers at the right time.
Conducting in-depth research
Researching what your customers require and prefer is important to design customer-centric solutions. You can find out what your customers’ needs are through surveys and feedback forms and design your customer-centric UX strategies accordingly.
When should you use Customer-Centric approach in UX Design?
Following a customer-centric approach requires availing of user-friendly web design services. Besides that, it is also about examining how people use your product and making it more effective for your target users. Consider having a customer-centric approach in your UX design when –
- You have strong consumer insights and the capability of attracting relevant customers immediately.
- You are open to customer feedback and can incorporate it into the products for a better user experience.
- You have a high investment budget allowing you to handle the customers’ changing preferences.
Business-Centric UX or Customer-Centric UX: Which is better?
Customer-centric companies keep customers as the center point in every strategy they form and every innovation they make. Customers’ preferences are considered when making every decision and action. Changing customers’ needs brings a significant level of new pressure to the companies, creating a more substantial need to make a difference in the market. Starbucks is one company that keeps innovating to accommodate the demands of its customers. The company is known for being customer-centric.
Business-centric companies expand their productivity, transactional, and operational efficiency to create less cost, agile processes, and high productivity that can yield high customer flow. The process is to re-engineer to adapt to the upcoming technologies. Several businesses that were never online created their presence online during the Covid-19 Pandemic. These companies stand as the best examples of business-centric companies.
So, should you be customer-centric or business-centric? The answer is to follow a 70/30 rule. Here, 70% is to be customer-centric, and the remaining 30% is to be business-centric. Both are required for business growth.
Before finding or settling on any approach, it is essential to understand what your business offerings are. If you are planning to build a unique service that has not been in the marketplace yet, then going for a business-centric user experience might be beneficial.
Whereas, if you are into delivering highly competitive products and services, going for the customer-centric user experience can be beneficial.
If you opt for customer centricity doesn’t mean that you ignore product success. It still lies at the core of your business. The difference here is that the company’s vast experience will be towards customer-centric strategies. Similarly, following a business-centric approach doesn’t mean that you totally ignore customer experiences.
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Source: Goodfirms