Today’s interview is with Bansi Mehta is the CEO and Founder of Koru UX Design, a global leader in strategic enterprise UX for the healthcare, telecom and finance industries. Bansi joins me to today to talk about how UX is changing and what should brands and organizations be paying attention to, what the future of UI/UX/CX look like, how she was able to scale her business to become one of the leaders in the UX space for B2B businesses and the trials and tribulations of being a minority, female leader in this space.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – What you are doing right now will be the hallmark of your entire career – Interview with Tom Peters — and is number 382 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Here’s the highlights of my chat with Bansi:
- A computer engineer by training but a designer at heart.
- Enterprise products could benefit from user experience design.
- The last 12 months has shown how adaptive the human spirit is.
- The user experience has become ever more important, especially with the massive rush to digital and the spike in e-commerce.
- The rush to digital for many has also meant a rush to stay relevant and survive.
- That has meant doing things faster than ever before. Bansi and her team overhauled a telehealth solution for one of their clients in 2 months that is now recording over 10 million minutes of use every month.
- It’s very hard to empathise when you are not seeing your users, your customers or your co-workers.
- Enterprises have had to stay nimble, iterate fast and continuously and experimenting all the time, reducing their sample sizes and data needed to test and learn.
- We have seen a rise in intuitive design that makes people’s likes easier. For example, look at how Google Maps changes from light to dark and back again when driving through a tunnel.
- We have seen a rise in micro design communities that is building more and more awareness in terms of what it means to design meaningful and beautiful experiences.
- Behavioural design techniques are now being tempered with ethical and user/customer care elements and that’s guiding what people do now from a design and usability standpoint.
- When we look at our customers or users only through data then it is like looking at our employees only through numbers and spreadsheets. Operating this way may tell us somethings it also makes it very hard to build empathy.
- Getting closer to customers or users means connecting with them irrespective of the logistics.
- What really counts is the effort that organisations expend to do that as well as the mindset of both the leadership and organisation.
- So, getting to know customers and the research that goes with that needs to be at the centre of innovation and product/service development.
- Customer centricity requires a mindset change at the organisational level rather than just changing tools and processes. Changing tools and processes is easy enough. Changing the mindset really requires the leadership to believe in it. To push up for it.
- Walgreens in the US are a great example of a brand that has adapted well. They’ve always been known for how they connect with their customers and superior value and service they deliver to them. Here’s three things they have done:
- They adapted their Ask The Pharmacist series into a series of short, informative videos that answered customers common questions related to Covid-19,
- Quickly converted an existing email campaign into a video ad explaining how people can safely take advantage of the online care services and free prescription delivery, and
- Helped combat the challenge that many communities faced with access to Covid-19 tests by instituting drive through testing for first responders.
- Jeff Bezo’s letter to stakeholders in 2013 talks about how a customer driven focus is one that is underpinned by a certain type of proactivity. He went on to say that when we are at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding in benefits and features, before we have to. We invent before we have to.
- Effort combined with commitment will take you a long way.
- I come from a culture where women are taught to avoid conflict and be docile and play nice. So in reality, when the time came where I had the opportunity to play equal, it didn’t come naturally. And it’s in these moments I realised that I really needed to push myself to go beyond the self doubt and to ignore the discomfort that I felt that came from years of conditioning.
- In those moments, winning the inner battle has been decisive in terms of how far I have come.
- Two of the biggest lessons that I learned was:
- Never undersell yourself. Your work speaks for you, and you should speak unabashedly about your work.
- When you speak with authority, people listen with sincerity.
- Research shows that 84% of companies expect to increase their focus on CX measurement and metrics in the coming year.
- At the same time, enterprises around the world are currently increasing their research budgets by 25% to help them better understand their user needs.
- Bansi’s advice:
- 1. Make sure the team structure inside your organisation, their KPIs and incentives are all aligned towards delivering a superior customer experience and that they are not stacked against each other.
- 2. Cultivate the respect for research and experimentation.
- Bansi’s Punk CX word(s): Curious, troublemaker.
- Bansi’s Punk CX brand(s): Slack, Medium.
About Bansi:
Bansi Mehta is the CEO and Founder of Koru UX Design Inc. She is fiercely passionate and driven to build a culture that helps people be their best selves at work. Strengthened by over a decade of power-packed experience, she believes that UX for workforces should be tailored to meet the needs of employees, managers, and business owners. A better enterprise UX does not only result in a happier work environment, but also boosts performance, productivity, and revenues. She has led the design of many healthcare products, applications, and tools with respect to user-centric design. She has pioneered the need for research-led design within organizations and proven her point of basing design decisions on insights, and not intuitions.
Check out Koru UX Design, say Hi to them on Instagram and Twitter @koruuxdesign and @koru_ux and do connect with Bansi on LinkedIn here.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
