B2E UX explained

There are two types of apps for enterprise: customer-facing (business-to-consumer or B2C) and employee-facing (business-to-employee or B2E). 

• B2C apps provide an easy interface to an individual’s account or any other self-service dealings with the company.
• B2E apps focus on specific business processes. Often, workers use them for hours — or even days — at a time.

Companies invest in the usability of B2C apps, especially if customers demand it. But employees rarely get a say in the use of a particular business application. 

So, why is it a good idea for companies to invest in UX for B2E apps?  

Poor tools in any industry can lead to employee turnover. People get frustrated using unresponsive or clunky software in any context. And poor retention, new hire training, and lost knowledge carry high costs. 

On average, employers may spend 6-9 months of an employee's salary to find and train a replacement. That means an employee who earns USD60,000 per year may cost between USD30,000-45,000 to replace. 

For example, you have 20,000 employees performing a common task. The task takes one employee 60 minutes to complete (per 8-hour day). What if your software had a better user experience to reduce the time by 4 minutes? You can save 32 minutes per employee, per day (totaling over 10,000 hours per day). This would allow your company to hire 1,250 additional employees. 

If those employees had a better B2E experience:

• They could provide a better customer experience by focusing on the customer's problems instead of the technology. 
• They could also do things faster; crafting beautiful experiences and demystifying usage patterns from scratch takes considerable effort. Instead, building on existing design patterns — such as the Pega Constellation design system — allows teams to get to done quicker and better.  

In the early stages of developing UX programs, teams that work on customer-facing applications may be siloed.

• Developer teams that handle employee software may operate separately from developers that create the company's customer-facing products — and by extension, customer service features, such as chatbots.
• When the customer submits a request for help, they need an end-to-end experience. The experience is a set of interactions from the beginning to the end of customer relationship with the company. End-to-end experience means that customer requests must go to the right team, right away, without repeating information. 
• When the handoff between front- and back-end teams are compromised, the result is a poor experience for the customer.

Besides uniting front- and back-end teams, B2E UX helps the organization break down broader silos in companies. In the enterprise world, it is important to build on familiar experiences for employees — not just in a given application but also across the suite of solutions that the organization may use. Broken-down silos allow teams to multipurpose and quickly pivot to new work areas if needed.

Today, UX is more important overall 

People take note when UX is terrible, especially in the lack of proper eCommerce and web services. The Wall Street Journal reports that some 66% of consumers surveyed in 2020 said that they experienced a problem with a product or service, up from just over half in 2017. Customers air frustrations on social media, in customer service interactions, and ultimately with their wallet. Customers instead choose to support companies that have invested in their eCommerce infrastructure. And crisis scenarios, such as the 2020 pandemic, have furthered the consumer reliance on eCommerce and the need for effective workflows in enterprises. 

Everyone wants multi-channel and end-to-end experiences 

Companies now realize that both customers and employees expect multi-channel (desktop/mobile, as well as email, chat, and more), end-to-end experiences from any brand. In 2016, Bain & Company conducted a study that illustrated that previously nice-to-have functional benefits — such as saving time, convenience, customer service and accessibility of web services — are now baseline expectations for customers dealing with companies. The benefits are baseline expectations for employees, too. 

What do all of these expectations have in common? They are part of the purview of user experience teams.

The baseline expectations about user experience continue to evolve. 

Imagine that you work in customer service for an insurance provider. If you sold insurance policies ten years ago, you might have compared its tools for customers and agents with those of other insurance companies. Today, your expectations for UX (in or out of your working environment) is likely much broader: you compare your company's approach to B2C and B2E to that of tech giants like Amazon or Apple, whose services you use in other areas of your life, personal or professional. 

Your company's user experience is now comparable to any brand's.