The Village View

Thursday, February 01, 2007

SAP works to improve the Total Customer Experience

One of my bosses at SAP, Steve Mann, is doing a lot of the work around improving the customer experience (both around buying and owning). If you're interested in this field, I'd recommend subscribing to his feed.

Today, he wrote about some recent "ethnographic" interviews his group has done. A couple of the feedback items stuck out:
  • Get to the point - give me the info I need right away and in a no-BS fashion
    • IMO, the current iterration of the SAP.com website trails both Oracle and Salesforce.com websites in terms of ease of use. SFdC's especially is really easy to use and to find information on. The SAP Developer Network website is a great example of a SAP website that is easy to navigate (not to mention the content is fantastic).
  • Overall, give us a buyer's view not a technologist views of the world
    • As all technology companies are wont to do, SAP falls into this trap at times (so do our competitors). It's fundamental that software firms remember that software is a tool, a means to an end. Especially as you move down market (to SMEs) the interest is more in can you solve my problem and less on exactly how you are going to.
I'm glad that SAP in investing resources and good people in addressing the customer experience. By the way, did you have to look up ethnographic? I did.

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