A customer doesn’t want to buy complexity. They want their problems solved with Quality People, Tech, Design and Customer Experience!

Remember this in customer experience design, ALWAYS: your customer is looking to solve their issues, not exactly to buy your solution.

A few years ago, Kris Gale, ex VP Engineering at Yammer and now co-founder of Clover Health, said it all in one simple quote:

“Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer. Sometimes complexity is a necessary cost, but only organizations that fully internalize the concept can hope to prevent runaway spending in this area.”

This simple graph expresses and other professionals approach to delivering the right features at the right time with the right process and technology with minimal overwhelming user/customer impact and maximum intuitiveness. Those are the basic pillars that enable easy services, customer and user experiences and we will discuss it in deep in future articles about CX leadership.

20 real steps to cutting the waste

1. Roadmap prioritization: create the “MVP” minimal viable list of features and functionalities for customer and user benefit. Avoiding quantity but focusing added value and quality of design.
2. WSJF: As Mike Biggs advice consider using the weighted shortest job first (WSJF) model from Agile, this helps while choosing the right path with the right focus in prioritization, considering risks, business value, cost of delay per feature designed.
3. Monitoring features and functionalities with measurable KPI’s: Always align a feature with a way to monitor how this is being adopted attaching a KPI metric or measure to it and checking adoption and usage If adoption is poor, this might be something you can cut.
4. Do not overload customer with features or functionalities: The stress created leads to churn instead of adoption. Roland T. Rust, Debora Viana Thompson, and Rebecca W. Hamilton have a great old HBR article about this: less means literally more when creating an objective user and customer experience design.
5. Budget Impact and change: Complexity and useless features and functionalities have a high Your customer….All features request budget allocation. What will be the impact if this feature will not be available for customers anymore? Will the company customers or their willingness to keep working with you?.. and What will be the impact on loyalty, satisfaction, and revenue? Sometimes is better to keep a feature than to lost a customer even if is useless to you. Analyze it well always.
6. Add maximum value per feature experience: Remember, we want to cut the features that provide the least value. It is very important to think about how the user will experience the functionality step by step. “Process flows” can be created to show this, by thinking about what the user is trying to do (what the initial problem is they are solving) at each step and describing the flow in that manner. The flows should be based on how the user will receive value, not how they access specific functions in the product.”
7. Use emotion to connect but do not focus in your emotion to decide what should stay or go: Collaborate with your teams, customers, discussion groups, test, prototype and marketing, services teams and all possible communities and touch points. Make sure you leave what will benefit customer solution usage outcome and your application target. Simple! Cut the rest!
8. Don’t think that many features and ways to solve an issue is a good thing: Options are good, but customers don’t want to be overwhelmed. Always think about the human design-centric impact.
9. The user will have access to different features than the management: Cut what is unnecessary for them. Leave the clear and crispy features and functionalities needed.
10. Defining rules, parameters, and business logic: Don’t clean the dirty laundry in public. The end user doesn’t need to see or understand your whole back end. Think of Amazon. They have a very complex back-end but all you see as a customer is a box to type in and some products that display after a search. The customer doesn’t care about the bells and whistles. They care about getting what they need.

 This article was originally posted on Eglobalis Blog with 20 suggestions.

Our previous articles:

• The Pillars of seamless “IOT” transformation into better servitization customer experience and living experiences
• How do enterprise technology companies simplify their products services and experiences? Part II
• Customer Experience Simplicity in Technology: How Quality & Design Impact the Bottom Line Part I
• The One Element Of Product & Tech Design That Kills Customer Experience
• My recent guest post on @JeanneBliss website CustomerBliss.
• --> Come on board our 4200 members Facebook Group: All Customer Experience and Customer Success leaders, innovators, and thought leaders in one place! Check out here!

Twitter @RicardoSGulko

Ricardo Saltz Gulko is the founder of Eglobalis (Global Experiences Information - Insight - Innovation), a global strategist, thought leader, practitioner and speaker in the areas of customer experience, experience design, customer success, and global professional services. Ricardo has worked at numerous global technology companies, such as Oracle, Ericsson, Amdocs, Redknee, Inttra, Samsung among others as a global executive, focusing on enterprise software, services, design thinking and customer experience. He currently works with companies of varying sizes to transform themselves around CX, customer success pathways, and professional services. He holds at J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Evanston, IL USA and Undergraduate studies in Information Systems and Industrial Engineering. Ricardo is also a global citizen fluent in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew and German*. Currently resides in Munich, Germany with his family.

A diabetic who wants to wipe diabetes from the Earth for all of us, the proceeds from his forthcoming book will be going to the Faustman Lab. The Lab is working to eradicate it, based out of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. You can also support and donate to The Lab. It would mean a lot to me, and millions of others struggling with diabetes.

You can learn more about him, his passions, and his charitable causes at his LinkedIn or Eglobalis or Facebook or Twitter.