Unlocking ROI from the Inside Out

How exactly does one measure the actual worth of User Experience (UX) to an organization and is there a way to justify the spending on UX? It is quite a challenge to calculate the ROI of UX for B2C products and services, and an even uphill task when it comes to enterprise companies. With user experience being considered as the backbone of consumer products and services, its influence is now majorly extended to cover even internal applications, intranet or portal projects across industries. While the preliminary gushing-over of the apparent benefits of good UX is welcome, the focus needs to shift to solidly measuring its utility and viability. UX practices are critically essential to create a user-friendly, universally-loved product, but if it falls short of providing business value to the organization, it isn’t really worth much in the end.

The key here is good UX – design thinking is what actually elevates user experience, thereby driving better returns for the organization. Thus, from marketing to operations, enterprise companies are beginning to build a competitive edge and attaining high ROIs by capitalizing on ever-improving UX practices.

Calculating the ROI on your UX investment –

Before proceeding towards calculating the ROI, it is necessary to have certain UX metrics in place. Here’s a list of percentile parameters to consider –

• Increase in productivity
• Impact on revenue
• Impact on profit
• Impact on brand recognition/perception
• Customer retention
• A decrease in operational costs

Take a cue from a boutique investment bank that helped individuals and organizations with a niche set of services like –

• Obtaining growth capital
• Personal liquidity
• Special situations like mergers and acquisitions

They built an internal CRM to help them with the initial conversations with prospects. With time, their service portfolio and team both grew leading to complex navigation and overwhelming information architecture. This drew the product away from the natural way in which the users would use the product. A lot of their work involved phone conversations with prospects who had to be kept engaged. The account manager (the individual making the calls at the bank) would frequently refer to different information like

• Potential conversion of the prospect
• Past conversation between prospect and
• Be able to raise smaller tasks and follow up actions

Being in a niche function and dealing with a prime set of prospects it was almost necessary for the bank to constantly improve their system and ensure that their team of limited set of people were able to work efficiently and do justice to the workload at hand. Poor conversation experience could make them loose business even before it started.

What they had was a really optimistic and robust team along with a great development partner who were open to ideas/change and innovation. They reached out to Koru to be their UX partner and we engaged an agile UX approach comprising a mix of research and  UX methods that would help build a process that would constantly innovate and evolve.

Our approach consisted of

Research & Synthesis

• Analyzing the brief
• User stakeholders interviews
• Workflow mapping
• Identifying key problem areas
• Drafting a feature list

Ideation & Design

• Building concepts
• Prototyping
• UI standardization
• Integration
• Performance testing

Post integration and performance testing, we learned that the integrated solution had made a huge impact on their success.

• High adaptation rate with a 100% shift to the new CRM within 45 days
• 38% increase in the number of conversations done each day by individual account managers, thereby directly impacting the overall conversion ratio
• UI standardization meant faster implementation cycles and more time for testing and innovation
• Improved cloud-based experience offering mobility and ability to managers to conduct conversations on the field
• Within the following 3 months, the bank surpassed its immediate 3 competitors in terms of business and revenue
• Hundreds of dollars worth in time saved

The hidden benefits of UX are manifold

It is practically difficult to obtain a precise ROI that is wholesome enough because the impact of UX doesn’t always take place in a tangible manner. Numerous other aspects like operations, execution, and marketing, also influence the overall impact of UX.

• According to the tech giant, IBM, a company can expect an ROI of anywhere between 10 to 100 times by making their product or service user-friendly.
• An investment in user experience research helps avoid future losses by clearly outlining areas of opportunity. Knowing the fate of the pipelined idea saves tremendous time as opposed to reworking the weak or unworkable features once it has been rolled out.
• A UX-friendly organization promotes a culture of cross-departmental collaboration and helps implement a unified vision. The ROI of an undertaking such as this transcends monetary gains.
• An institutional focus on experience design and design thinking creates friendlier and trustworthy technology along with increased adoption and user productivity, which has a direct correlation with business revenue.

Experience design, thus, leaves a lasting impact on tangible parameters like production cost and time taken, along with intangible ones like employee/user satisfaction and happiness. Any product which delivers a good experience is obviously used more and popular. A solid grasp of ROI and an appreciation for the efficacy of UX renders the company a clear advantage over competitors.

More Resources:

How to Design a CRM System? 5 Actionable Tips on CRM DesignThe Ultimate

Glossary of UI-UX Terms for Designers

Top 5 Ways A UX Audit Can Boost Your RoI