Why You Need a UX Strategy for Business Growth

by Lidia Balio | Jan 27, 2021 | Customer Experience, Development, Strategy, UX

If you own a company that offers products and services using technology, whether that is via an e-commerce website, a mobile app, an enterprise application, or all three, you need a UX strategy for business growth. Why you might ask?

Let’s start by defining what a UX strategy is. According to Foolproof:

UX strategy is a long-term plan to align every customer touchpoint with your vision for user experience.

So, let’s break that down a bit: what are customer touchpoints? This refers to every way in which customers engage with your business. When a customer retweets you on Twitter, that is a touchpoint. When a customer requests a quote for a service via your company’s website, that is also a touchpoint.

This begs the question: what is a “vision for user experience?” According to Nielsen Norman Group:

“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

So, a UX strategy is essentially a plan for ensuring that all your customers have good experiences every time they engage with your company. And below are three reasons why you need a UX strategy for business growth.

Reason #1 Why You Need a UX Strategy for Business Growth: A Bad Experience Turns Customers Off

First off, a UX strategy can help improve the experiences customers have with your business’s touchpoints. The inverse is also true, however: when customers have a bad experience with a touchpoint, they will probably be less than thrilled. Think about it: what happens when a customer tries to get in touch with your company? Do they fill out a form on your website? Do they call you on the phone? Do they email you? If you’re like most companies, they probably do all three and more.

And then think: what happens after they contact you? Do they immediately get a response? Or do they have to wait for some amount of time? And what are they doing while they’re waiting? Are they doing nothing? Or are they shopping around with your competitors?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then you don’t know what your customer’s experience of these touchpoints is. And these are just three touchpoints! You need to ensure that your customers are having a positive, engaging experience with every touchpoint. Otherwise, they might not engage again.

Reason #2 Why You Need a UX Strategy for Business Growth: As You Grow, You Will Have More Customer Touchpoints

Another reason you need a UX strategy is: if you’re a large company, you might have dozens of touchpoints. Many business owners can relate to starting out with only a few touchpoints, or even one. Many of us remember cold calling potential customers for days, weeks, or even months in order to build a customer base. Or emailing them. Or messaging them on LinkedIn.

But as your company grows, so will your touchpoints. If you’re a company with over fifty employees, you probably have many touchpoints. If you’re a company with five hundred employees or more you may have hundreds of them.

And as your touchpoints grow, the experiences customers have with each one will likely vary unless you have a strategy for ensuring each experience is a quality one. Using the above example, the touchpoints customers use to contact you: do you have a plan for ensuring that each and every touchpoint results in a positive experience for each and every customer?

Let’s drill down even further to one channel: contact forms on websites. Do you have one or do you have several? What experience does a customer have when filling out each contact form? Does it make sense, given what they’re asking about? Do you have a separate form for each product or service you offer or a large, general-purpose one? The experience a customer has at a touchpoint as simple as this can mean the difference between a customer hitting submit or not on that form.

On the other side, you may have much more complex touchpoints like email newsletters that send automatic responses based on customer behavior on your website. Existing customers may get very different types of information than prospective customers. And: what happens at each point in this chain? If you don’t know the exact answer to that question, if you don’t have data to back up your assumptions, then you can’t be sure that each and every touchpoint is working for each and every customer.

Reason #3 Why You Need a UX Strategy for Business Growth: Many of Us Are Building Technologies to Support Our Business Bottom-Line

The third reason you need a UX strategy is that, like it or not, many of us are building technologies to support our business, whether we are in a technology-related field or not. Organizations in industries from education to sports to manufacturing are requiring more and more technologies to support their business operations. These technologies may include:

IT infrastructure: servers, cloud technologies, computers, networks, hardware, software
Customer-facing business applications: websites, mobile apps, enterprise applications, social media channels, email marketing channels, support forums
E-commerce: online sales, revenue tracking, multichannel e-commerce across existing channels
IT monitoring: systems that track your other tools to ensure they’re in constant operation
Email and collaboration tools: email accounts that work across your business operation, tools and resources that your employees use for all form of collaboration

Not all of these technologies are customer-facing, but many are. And many are very complex and bundle a lot of customer touchpoints into one place, like your company website. Your company website may be viewed on hundreds of different types of devices, from large desktop displays to small smartphone displays that are several years behind the current technology. Are you certain that customers on every type of device can navigate, use, and find information on your website?

Add e-commerce to this mix and you have even more touchpoints from adding items to a cart to checking out to follow-up communications after an order is placed. Are you sure that every one of these interactions leads to a seamless, positive experience for your customers? Have you asked them? Have you tested each touchpoint?

If this article is causing you anxiety, then you might want to engage someone with experience in UX strategy to ensure all your touchpoints are serving your business. This is the purpose of UX strategy, after all: to fuel business growth through effective planning.

DevOps Benefits for Business: What It Is and What It Can Do for Your Company

by Lidia Balio | Jan 20, 2021 | Customer Experience, Development, DevOps, IT, Operations

If you’re here to learn about DevOps benefits for business, you’ve come to the right place. As a company or organization that is continuously evolving, adding content and services, or implementing new technologies, it’s important to have an understanding of DevOps and what it can do for your company. However, before you get started in understanding exactly what you need to be doing, or what you expect from DevOps, it’s important to know what DevOps really means. Not only that, but we also discuss some of the major benefits of adopting a DevOps philosophy at your company.

What is DevOps?

The term DevOps actually comes from two different sides or focal points of a company: Development and Operations. But aside from being a simple combination of two different words, DevOps is so much more than that.

As Gartner defines DevOps:

DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture), and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology— especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.

DevOps has increasingly become a philosophy that a company should implement in order to improve communication and collaboration across teams that may have otherwise been siloed or have been working mostly independently of one another.

How Can DevOps Benefit your Company?

Many large tech companies such as Amazon and Atlassian have started to promote the power of DevOps philosophies in their work structure and how it has helped them create better products and services. So, how can DevOps benefit your company? Below are just some of the important benefits DevOps can create.

DevOps Benefit for Business #1: Increased Communication and Collaboration

The first major benefit of implementing DevOps is increased communication and collaboration in your company. What makes this improvement so important is how it changes the mindset of the various departments in your company. Communicating more often across department lines and focusing more on working together can help your teams focus less on department-specific goals, and spend more time focusing on company goals and how they can contribute to them. The more that employees work together across departments, the more likely they are to see the value in each other’s skill sets and how they impact the final product or service. Increased communication and collaboration also fosters innovation and ideation across the company as more opinions and thoughts are shared with more people.

DevOps Benefit for Business #2: Speed and Efficiency

The second major benefit of a DevOps philosophy is increased efficiency and speed in the work that your employees do. Due to the collaborative nature of DevOps, development cycles can be shortened, which means quicker deployment of systems, services, and products to the customer. DevOps can also help you do continuous service delivery for everything that your company has to offer, which is becoming essential in almost every industry. People want products and services that provide instantaneous support, updates, and upgrades.

DevOps Benefit for Business #3: Better Customer Experience

If your teams are communicating better, working together better, and the products you offer are getting delivered faster, you are also delivering a better customer experience. The customer experience no longer ends at the time of purchase. Consumers want support. They want help utilizing products and services. They want to make sure they’re buying the best product or service to meet their needs. And if they begin to doubt any of these things, they will look elsewhere the next time they decide to buy.

It is easy to lose sight of one or more elements of the customer experience. With multiple departments in the same company (production, marketing, sales, logistics, support, etc.) it is easy for wires to get crossed. It is easy for individual customers to fall through the cracks.

By increasing communication, collaboration, and development, DevOps can help your company ensure that every customer gets their needs met. It can improve customer satisfaction and customer retention.

If all of this piques your interest or you’re looking to implement a DevOps philosophy in your company, reach out to us at YetOpen and we can help you get started!

The 3 Cybersecurity Threats Every Large Business Should Be Worried About

by Lidia Balio | Jan 13, 2021 | Cybersecurity

Large businesses often suffer from cybersecurity threats they might not even be aware of. Even if your business has not been impacted by a data breach, there’s always a lingering threat of cybersecurity attacks on your business that can cost time, money, peace-of-mind, and client trust. But the good news is that there are measures that you can take to prevent your business from falling prey to the most common types of cybersecurity threats.

Cybersecurity Threat #1: Brute Force (Password) Attacks

Simply having a password in place is not enough to keep an account secure. Users often create passwords that are fairly easy to guess or recycle their credentials across multiple platforms. The result? Hackers and those who want to break into your business’ accounts can do so easily.

Hackers often create software programmed with algorithms designed to guess passwords. Your business can make it more difficult for hackers to carry out brute force attacks by:

Increasing the length of your password
Using a strong, random password generator to create passwords
Mandating that passwords in your company are changed every 90 days
Limiting the number of password attempts and locking accounts after the number has been reached
Mandating CAPCHA or verification code use with login attempts
Blocking IP addresses after a specified number of attempts

With these measures in place, it is less likely that a hacker’s brute force attacks will be successful.

Cybersecurity Threat #2: Cloud Attacks

Many businesses now use cloud-based software to store data and carry out important functions (such as marketing, file storage, document management, bookkeeping, and internal communications). While the cloud does offer powerful opportunities at reduced cost (as compared to more expensive desktop software), it does come with additional risks.

Cloud attacks have emerged as an important cybersecurity threat to businesses. Cloud attacks on a business can be executed by installing malware in a multitude of ways: on a business’ computer, uploading an infected file to an account on the cloud, using email to phish for login credentials to unsuspecting users, etc.

To avoid cloud attacks, make sure that your business takes the following measures:

Install security software on all devices that employees use
Make regular software updates to electronic devices
Teach employees to avoid accessing suspicious websites, downloading files that are flagged as insecure, or opening scam emails

Cybersecurity Threat #3: Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware does just what the name suggests: it is software that a hacker uses to lock down access to your files so they can demand a fee to restore access to those files. Hackers are able to deliver ransomware to your device through malicious software that encrypts your files.

Through preventative actions, you can decrease the likelihood that your business will be the victim of a ransomware attack:

Use and update security software. Security software has been programmed with the ability to detect, isolate and destroy malware. When activated, they can warn you that a website or a file seems untrustworthy.
Be wary of emails from unknown senders. Scammers can easily get a hold of your business’ email address and create fake identities that can convince you to click on a link or download an attachment. Before you even open an email from an unknown sender, put it in your spam folder to look at when you have the time to analyze the email. If an email subject or name of a sender is in all caps or has misspellings and grammar mistakes, chances are it is from a scammer.
Update your software and hardware. If you’re not using the latest version of software or are using hardware that is outdated, you make it more likely that scammers can exploit your system.
Archive your computer desktop on a regular basis. Invest in backup system that backs up in real time so you never lose files, even if they become corrupted.

If you do end up as the victim of a ransomware attack, do not pay the ransom. There is no guarantee your access to your files will be restored if you pay the ransom.

Even if your business does take all these preventative measures, there is no guarantee that your business won’t be the victim of a cybersecurity attack. Hackers are persistent and continually develop new ways of penetrating security defenses. But with a good defensive game, your business can drastically decrease the likelihood of falling prey to common cybersecurity attacks. And of course, calling in IT experts to do a security check on your system can point out weaknesses, if there are any.

Open Source vs Proprietary: Which Technologies Are Right for Your Business?

by Lidia Balio | Jan 4, 2021 | Open Source

Trying to choose between open source vs proprietary software? You’re not alone. When looking to increase the productivity of your company through the integration of technology, you may have come to a crossroads where you are comparing a lot of very similar services. Some of these services advertise themselves as “open source,” but what does that really mean?

Below we explain what open source technology is and why you should consider it for your business.

What is open source technology?

As opensource.com explains, open source technology “is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.” Additionally, it’s designed to be publicly accessible. This means that open source technology can’t lock your data, information, or code away in a place you can’t access it.

What are the benefits of open source technology?

So, why would your company want to utilize open source technology? When looking at the many benefits of open source technology, its hard to beat its price. Many open-source options are free, or nearly free in comparison to the cost of proprietary technologies. Being able to save money on open source software allows you to put that extra money into something else that your company needs.

One of the main benefits of open source technology, however, is that it’s highly customizable. Because there are so many open source libraries of free code you can access, you can always add the features that you need. If you don’t have a particular feature that you need to be successful on a future project, you can simply add it to what you are currently using.

Finally, open source provides your company with scalability: you can expand what you currently do quickly. If your company gets bigger and offers more services, open source technology can grow with your company as needed — and without a giant price tag.

Open source vs proprietary technology

The other side of the coin is proprietary technology. Proprietary technology is “commercial software that can be bought, leased or licensed from its vendor/developer.” Essentially, if a piece of software doesn’t say it’s open source, then it isn’t. A company owns all its code, content, data, and possibly a good chunk of any of your information you’re storing on it. It all depends on the license you agree to when using it.

Remember all those user agreements you clicked on when signing up for the apps you use on a daily basis? All those agreements granted companies various types access to your personal information, including for the purposes of personalized marketing and other invasive forms of data mining.

The Lure of Proprietary Software

You might be asking yourself: if open source is so great, why are most products proprietary? In a word: money. The top open source companies in the world (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Zimbra, Zabbix, etc.) make plenty of money, but nothing compared to a giant like Google or Microsoft. That’s really the only reason to make a product proprietary: to make more money off of it!

And because of this, the vast majority of software available to businesses is proprietary. And we’re so use to this fact, that we don’t question it. We just pay our licensing fee and go on with our lives.

Free Doesn’t Mean Without Expertise

At the same time, just because open source technology itself is free or low cost, doesn’t mean you don’t need help getting it installed, configured, or developed. Just like any tool, it needs to be customized to your needs. You need a partner who is skilled at adapting open source technologies to your business needs.

The Choice Is Yours

Ultimately, the decision of which technologies your business decides to utilize is completely up to you. There are definitely good reasons for going with proprietary technology. If you want lower cost and greater customization, however, the choice is clear.