In recent years we’ve come to realise how important User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are to businesses across the board. As consumers we have become so used to online forms and sites working seamlessly that even something as small as having to click into the next field when entering credit card details has become annoying. We expect to have all the key information we need on one page and be able to take action with only a few clicks. That’s why, as Salesforce consultants, we need to constantly be thinking about UI/UX when building out functionality.
Increasingly our clients are putting this at the forefront of their projects, ensuring that their internal users have the right information at their fingertips and their customers can navigate their websites to find what they need quickly and easily. I have worked on a number of customer service projects where the user experience for the Customer Service Agents has been the driving force behind our solution. It’s essential that agents are not clicking around different pages to find necessary information. A good UI can be the difference between a phone call taking 2 minutes or 5 minutes to resolve – over the course of a day that adds up and has a huge impact on service metrics. Additionally, poor UX/UI can have a massive impact on a business’s bottom line. For example, recent studies have shown that:
- Every $1 invested in UX results in a return of $100 (ROI = 9,900%)
- 85% of adults think that a company’s mobile website should be as good or better than their desktop website
- 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience
- Mobile users are 5x more likely to abandon a task if the website isn’t mobile-optimized
- If a website needs more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of the people leave the website
Essentially, this shows that every company should be investing in UX and UI design. Some of our clients have employed specialist UI/UX experts to help them understand what a good interface looks like. This is a fantastic place to start, however, it’s always a good idea to include someone who has experience with Salesforce in these projects, or at least have the UI/UX specialists work in collaboration with a Salesforce partner as there are some practical constraints within Salesforce itself that need to be taken into account.
We always try and incorporate key UI/UX principles whilst still maintaining a level of Salesforce standard functionality. It might be visually more appealing to have key headings in a bold green font but we have to weigh that up with the level of customisation required to make that happen and how easy it would be to update in the future. It’s important that we, as Salesforce experts, collaborate with the UI/UX experts and the client subject matter experts to ensure we are putting the most effort into items that are going to give the most benefit to the end users.
Over the past few months makepositive has been working on creating a Service Cloud Accelerator offering to assist in getting customer service clients up and running quickly with a best practice solution, both in terms of functionality and UI/UX design. This means we now have a fully functioning service template which can be deployed quickly and easily as a whole. This also means that there are some functions within that template that can be independently put into a client org.
There’s an example of this below, where using standard Salesforce functionality we can give Customer Service Agents quick access to the common tasks they need to perform on a daily basis. As a standard, this would look like the image below. If we were to customise the look and feel of this from scratch for each client it would take weeks, if not months and we would need to weigh up the benefits of look and feel vs time and effort required.
One of the brilliant things about the Service Cloud Accelerator is that we have spent the time and effort to build this function in to the solution, and now it is possible to offer that component to clients with a reduced amount of effort. Suddenly your case actions have gone from a boring list to a dynamic, interactive Service Action Centre.
As users and customers continue to demand fast and easy access to information with minimal clicks, we will need to continue to increase our focus on UI/UX design for our customers, their employees and their end users.
Get in touch or click here you’d like to learn more about our Service Cloud Accelerator.
