What’s holding back consumer-grade digital experiences in the enterprise?

As consumers, we’re used to frictionless digital experiences – but this service remains relatively uncommon in today’s workplace. For enterprises to compete today, my advice is to bet on experience, particularly in Asia when seeking to engage the young, digital-native workforce of tomorrow. What will it take to deliver a more consumer-grade digital experience in the enterprise? It starts and ends with a shift in mindset.?

Every experience should be consumer-grade?

Consumer-grade experiences should apply to every digital product or service within the enterprise. Even seemingly technical tasks benefit from an emphasis on simple and empathetic design. We at ServiceNow have seen that first-hand in the process of software development: our low-code and no-code workflows have enjoyed immense popularity not just from business users, but also seasoned technical developers both within and outside the company.??

Rather than asking where we should deliver a consumer-grade experience, we should instead ask: where do we need to involve people in organisational processes? In many cases, automation will accomplish the task far more effectively, allowing us to focus on areas where human interaction is essential (for example, mentoring or recruiting). In such areas, we should naturally consider not just whether the experience allows users to get the job done, but the way it makes them feel.?

Treating form and function as equals?

We often associate consumer-grade experiences with end-user satisfaction, and enterprise experiences with productivity and efficiency. When we look closer, however, it’s clear that this distinction is false. In fact, a more satisfying and engaging experience for employees often translates to better outcomes for customers and higher revenues for the organisation. Conversely, powerful apps or digital services that aren’t simple or intuitive to use can easily frustrate employees and hinder them from reaching their full potential.?

Organisational leaders need only look at modern history to realise this. Take early motorcars, which positioned their engines in the front of the vehicle. While they very capably transported passengers from A to B, the smoke that blew from the front into passengers’ faces almost ruined the experience – and quickly evolved into the rear exhausts that we enjoy today!?

Leaders will do well to adopt the mindset that form and function are at least equals in the enterprise digital experience. I like to employ the “Jobs to be Done” methodology to think about what “jobs” a service or internal product might perform: not just functional, but also emotional and social. The social experience is especially important in designing consumer-grade digital experiences for enterprise today: people increasingly feel a need to connect, share, and be a part of virtual communities, both on consumer social media and in their workplace environments. Aspects like these define the quality of the consumer-grade experience and its reception amongst users.?

Adopt “revolutionary thinking” for digital experience?

The most successful consumer-grade experiences make extremely complex tasks look simple and seamless, shielding users from the sophistication of the systems that do the work behind the scenes. Those systems need to be even more powerful and streamlined to not only handle complexity, but hide it beneath a frictionless and intuitive environment. Consumer “super apps” like Grab or Amazon offer compelling examples of this concept.?

From what I have seen, enterprises struggle to build (or transform into) such systems because of legacy. That may include outdated processes, technology debt or locked-in assumptions about how the organisation can or should operate. Organisations with that legacy often try to change their systems incrementally, in a bid to maintain their existing “rice bowl” of revenues (and please both public and private stakeholders) while trying to invest in the future.??

Building consumer-grade experiences requires enterprises to switch out incremental improvement for revolutionary thinking. They would do well to imitate market disruptors like Grab or Amazon who have built their systems from scratch to delight the customer. Or learn from the rarer incumbents who have dared to reinvent even their core systems and processes (like Fujitsu, which used our platform to replace 20-year-old core approvals workflows) as part of digital transformation.??

This does not have to come with huge internal disruption. One of our Asia-Pacific customers in the financial sector initially introduced the ServiceNow platform for only IT services, before expanding it to HR. When the pandemic hit, it sought to reduce high turnover by targeting one particular pain point: employees’ onboarding experience. The organisation’s leaders managed to completely renew the onboarding experience by connecting their IT and HR services on ServiceNow – but only after extensive consultation with employees themselves, and detailed analysis of data from the existing process to identify where people encountered the most problems.??

Revolutionary thinking challenges organisational norms and is prepared to continuously adapt processes to better serve employees’ and customers’ goals. Without applying mindset to back-end systems and platforms, leaders will struggle to deliver a consumer-grade experience no matter how well-designed their outward-facing services may seem. Delivering these sorts of experiences will require leaders to rethink the importance emotional and social needs of users within the enterprise – and open their minds to more daring ways of transforming systems to serve their people, not the other way round.?