The enterprise digital experience is one that has evolved rapidly over the last five years.
What does it look like post-pandemic?
Since the world moved online, working from home and hybrid working, the enterprise digital experience has had to change, adapt and become bespoke to numerous categories of services and businesses.
The roundtable debate between Leon Gauhman, our Founder, and Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Amanda Hamilton, technology leader at City & County Healthcare Group, Karl Hoods, Chief Digital & Information Officer at BEIS, and Joanna Drake, CIO at THG discuss perfecting digital experiences for users.
Moderator Brigid Nzekwu begins the discussion by asking Amanda Hamilton to define, from her perspective, what the digital experience is.
Photo: Unsplash
The enterprise digital experience for B2B customers
Amanda Hamilton speaks with a successful background in healthcare, restaurant, retail, professional services and commercial sectors.
Hamilton responds, “Our business is one of the largest providers of community care in the UK, B2B to us has a lot to do with integrating data and digital experiences between other healthcare providers and between local governments and between third sector companies.”
“There is no one cookie cutter approach. Each local community may have its own requirement for what that digital experience needs to be.”
Hamilton continues, “Different data sets, functions and processes. It is very bespoke and very niche for us. Equally, it’s very nascent in the UK, it is a growing area with lots of innovation.”
For Karl Hoods, the enterprise digital experience “can be anywhere from core services to the systems that people use, and all of that was founded on user requirements, journey and experience. We spend a lot of time understanding and qualifying what the real requirement is.”
Joanna Drake at THG said, “putting the customer at the heart of it, and what that customer is trying to achieve, certainly in our case…thinking about the outcome they need.”
Leon Gauhman, Founder and Chief Product & Strategy Officer of Elsewhen, adds, “This really resonates with me, B2B and enterprise space.
Traditionally, software focuses on other values rather than the customer. There is a growing understanding that you should treat these customers the same way you treat consumer customers.”
Photo: Unsplash
Building blocks
The fundamental ingredients for an excellent digital experience are created from several building blocks.
From Gauhman’s perspective, “The baseline is understanding what the customer needs, their jobs, and outlines the processes and technology.”
Hamilton’s experience stems from “understanding your complexity. Address the complexity of your own processes, and then the customers on the other side of that. Big building blocks for me are customisation and understanding complexity.”
Drake adds, “Making sure every decision about that website and experience leads back to having an impact on the customer and leads to satisfaction. A balance and a clear outcome, not reinventing the wheel.”
Gauhman circles back, specifying that “when moving from theory to practice, when you say you focus on customers, you actually have to do that.”
Pitfalls in enterprise digital experiences
Like the majority of things in life there are challenges and this is the case with technology and digital experiences.
For Karl Hoods, “The user needs have to sit alongside their journey. There is very little point having a really nice front end [website] then having to move to an offline process, [mobiles/calls] it can end up quite clunky and disjointed.”
Joanna Drake hits the nail on the head, “the customer will just go somewhere else” if the user experience isn’t harmonised with what the enterprise wants to communicate across to their customers.
“Understanding the final outcome and using an architectural mindset to design a solution,” is a way that many digital companies and enterprises fix their pitfalls, Drake explains.
The value of the enterprise digital experience
The enterprise digital experience is valuable for ease and accessibility, for large enterprises to consumer-based businesses, Gauhman explains,
“Price can be paid in not just monetary terms, it is taking the organisation on a journey of change, fixing uncomfortable things and facing the truth that you have to change to do what you say you do.”
''We tell our customers that technology isn’t an enabler, it’s a fabric that is in everything,” Leon explains.
"The changes organisations face when focusing on the customer are about the entire stack. Not just about the interface. It's about thinking through the entire landscape of the organisation."
Leon Gauhman, Elsewhen Founder and Chief Product Officer & Strategy Officer
Touching on companies that are utilising the digital experience, Joanna explains “Monzo have gotten it absolutely spot on. They constantly continue to evolve, they make things so easy and visible, there is lots of control and simplification. I move away from businesses that don’t give me that ability.”
This roundtable was created in partnership with HotTopics, the thought leadership platform where the world’s most influential business leaders connect, share and inspire.
