By Chakra Devalla, tekVizion CEO
On a recent international trip, due to airline schedule changes, I was reassigned to a different flight and received an email to either accept it or call in to make any changes by clicking a link. I decided to call in and clicked the link, which routed me to a voice BOT to help me change my flight. But to my frustration, the BOT was useless and asked me to call a number for a live agent. I know several of you have experienced such rag-tag, omnichannel customer experiences.
These days one can see User Experience (UX) widely used for customer support by most companies. But how can one know that they are providing a great UX? What are the metrics used for gauging UX and how can one validate that users are receiving a great user experience?
In enterprise communications and contact center solutions, there are several factors that can impact the User Experience. Let’s look at some of the key areas for measuring and validating UX and ensure that Ultimate User Experience is real and achievable, not a unicorn.
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User Interaction
User Interaction is the first step to ensure the Ultimate User Experience. This involves monitoring factors like navigation of the application; usability of the various components; ease of accessing those components; intuitive flow; simplicity of the entire system; and finally ease of accessibility of the solution. For example, interaction can be measured as time to get the correct outcome based on the intent.
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Relevance
The next tenet required for a positive User Experience is Relevance. The user must be presented with the most relevant responses, their content, and the contextuality of the experience by the system. In narrow Artificial Intelligent systems, the personality and the intelligence of the systems are very important for relevance. Validating all these features is critical in ensuring the relevance of the system for User Experience.
For example, the number of navigation paths a workflow takes before arriving at the correct outcome based on the intent is a relevance metric. This should be measured across all workflows during testing.
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Performance
Finally, Performance is the last step in ensuring that User Experience is outstanding. It involves accuracy, error handling & recovery, contextual content, intelligence, and cross-platform availability. If the system provides the relevant information, but it’s not promptly, the response time has been delayed, or the audio/video quality is sub-par, then UX will be compromised.
As you can see, several factors can affect User Experience. One of the most important things to do is to continuously test and measure these aspects against a baseline of acceptable UX to ensure Ultimate User Experience in enterprise communications.
In the next article, you will learn about the challenges of defining the metrics and validating these factors continuously. What do you think ensures the ultimate User Experience? Email me at cdevalla@tekvizion.com to share your thoughts.