Is your tech helping or hurting your customer’s buying experience?

In a complex purchase decision process for highly engineered products or services, your prospect’s journey from awareness to purchase may not occur with uniform speed. We often assume that this path is a straight line, and we invest our resources uniformly based on this uniform assumption. But greater insight into your customer’s buying experience may yield some surprising results. “Information hurdles” may exist in places where they were not anticipated.

So how can technology help – or hurt?  In today’s hyper ebusiness world, your customers will interact with numerous ecommerce technology touch points. Another important, yet often overlooked, part of this buying experience is how your internal teams interact with your internal-facing technology such as CRM, Reporting Tools, Internal Portals etc., and how those interactions can benefit or frustrate the efforts of your team to create great experiences for your prospects.

Insight into how these technologies affect your customer’s experience can be gained through a number of “well understood and practiced methodologies” such as “Eye Tracking” and Usability Testing. But quantifying how much they can improve the buying experience requires a new way of enumerating the value of customer experience through the purchase decision process. Ultimately, this should be the critical lens used to focus your technology investment.

Improving the efficiency and experience of these internal and external technologies can decrease the time it takes to create a great buying experience and can lower or remove the hurdles in the way. Ultimately, the speed at which we create a great buying experience is perhaps the best, measurable success metric.

Through a combination of customer insight, business process review and analytics, it may be possible to uncover other opportunities to more strategically invest in enhancing your customer’s buying experience.

How do you evaluate the experience of your customers – and your team – with your technologies? Please comment below and join the conversation.