We talk so much about the concept of “experience”. Whether it be a customer buying a new smartphone, an employee working at an organization, a customer engaging with an airline from ticket purchase to on-boarding a flight, or anything else where the core of the relationship is exchanging money for services or products. We can’t under-estimate the importance of the experience because it truly does drive repeat purchases and maximum promotion of the brand to customer peer groups. It also works the other way around with negative experiences. Case in point: the Kentucky doctor who was forcefully dragged off a United Airlines flight because he refused to give up his seat due to flight overbooking. The tweets, social media posts, and those videos… that experience will live forever online and it does not favour United.

I work specifically within the tech industry, and I would like to point out something that I have never talked about. HR/Recruitment tech communities essentially have 2 audiences. The first audience is the end-user, which for a social recruitment tool is the Recruiter. For a health and wellness company, it’s the employee itself. Now the second audience, which I am going to focus on in this post, is the administrator. I fully realize that SaaS software does not require an army of administrators to maintain software so that the user experience is awesome. That was 20+ years ago. But, depending on the software the organization still needs to have a person, or a couple of people, “own the adoption process”. These people are the conduit between end-user and vendor. No matter how easy a tool is we still need to ensure that adoption sticks and that employees realize maximum value from using the tool.

Here’s the Million Dollar Question

Why am I seeing more and more that while the end-user experience may be awesome, the experience of the administrator royally sucks?

Here’s an Example

This post is not about making vendors look bad, or calling them out. I am simply trying to shed light on a trend that I am personally witnessing. Maybe this is old news, and that’s fine, but I haven’t really seen any conversation around this.

Let’s use the example of a disruptive wellness company looking to take the traditional health and benefits offering to mobile. A pretty slick app was built and launched, which allows employees to manage their own health spending, and find health services (e.g. chiropractic, physio, massage, etc…) from geographic locations. If I am travelling to Vancouver and I need a massage I can simply go on the app and search for massage within my geographic location, and then see ratings, costs and insurance coverage. For the agile and mobile employee this is awesome. What’s the problem? Well.. the back-end of the service really sucks. Actually, that’s an understatement. It’s horrible at best.

Why?

However you slice and dice this particular software it still requires a degree of administration on the back-end with the company administrator. Costs need to be managed, health insurance policies created, tweaked and deleted, and the relationship between administrator (usually falls within HR) and vendor still needs to be A1. But this particular vendor has spent all of their energy and resources on building an amazing B2C experience that they have virtually neglected the B2B experience. Vendor reps have very subpar education on how the Canadian healthcare and health insurance system works, and the software does not allow administrators to see monthly spending reports, at a minimum. Forget about analytics, they can’t even get a fricking report on costs.

The point of all of this is that you can never forget about anyone that is impacted by software. You need to focus on everyone, from the end-user to the administrator, and everyone in between. Now this particular vendor that I am speaking of may very well be working towards making the B2B experience better. I certainly hope so because I fear that if they don’t, they will start losing customers.

The neat thing about customer experience is that it doesn’t cost a lot of money or time. It requires education of vendor reps, and simple capabilities of the back-end of a software solution to do this. Does it have to look sexy like the front end (i.e. what employees see)? Of course not. If you ask any software administrator what they care about most, I know with 100% certainty that all they want is to be able to extract the information they want when they want and be able to easily make changes when they need to. That’s it.

Experience always matters, for EVERYONE involved. Don’t forget that.