Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Without them, there would be no profits to distribute, no people to serve, and no reason to continue operating. To keep your business running on a path to growing success, you need to offer a customer experience that will make customers choose your brand every time.

The importance of customer experience

When a customer interacts with your brand, whether they’re simply browsing through your website, buying a product, or creating a review of your service, this is already part of the customer experience. What they feel, do, and think at that moment affects their whole perception of your brand. Their impression of it, whether positive or negative, can make or break your business.

Customer experience is also a way for businesses to communicate with their customers on a deeper level. What you do matters more than what you say. Giving a great customer experience demonstrates that you prioritize customers’ needs and wants, which leads them to prefer your brand over others.

If you’ve ever played Wordle, learned a new language on Duolingo, or worked out with Peloton, you may be familiar with daily app notifications that nudge you to keep at it—or risk breaking a streak of consecutive efforts. Do you or don’t you heed the clarion call?

If you do, you’re in good company. Consumers, our latest research shows, are more likely to continue doing something when their recent repetition of that behavior is logged and highlighted to them—as many apps are programmed to do these days. Conversely, when consumers are made aware of the fact that their streak is broken, they’re less likely to keep up the behavior.

In fact, we discovered that consumers go to great lengths to maintain these “streaks” because they deem it to be a meaningful goal in and of itself, independent of what they hope to achieve: keeping fit, learning a new language, etc.

Our findings suggest ways for businesses to better leverage technology to keep customers coming back, as well as for consumers to motivate themselves to pursue desirable goals. Organizations could also improve efforts to increase employee engagement and motivation.

Have you ever tried switching bank accounts online, only to end up feeling confused by the technology? If so, you’ve been a vulnerable consumer. Consumer vulnerability is fluid and dynamic, and we move in and out of periods of being vulnerable. Our personal circumstances—such as going through a bereavement, a divorce, or a period of ill health—can make us more fragile at certain times in our life.

In the business world, consumer vulnerability refers to any situation in which an individual may be unable to engage fully or effectively in a market. This may result in an increased risk of being exploited by unscrupulous organizations or not getting a fair deal. It’s important for businesses to assist vulnerable consumers so they can get the goods, services, and support suitable for their needs.

A more inclusive approach to designing products and services guarantees they are accessible to, and usable by, as many consumers as possible. Yet inclusive design isn’t always well understood, and organizations are often unsure where to start. In my interview with him, complaints management expert Michael Hill explains how standards can ensure everyone gets a fair deal.

As an environmentalist who totes kids around town, I would love to buy an electric car. But here in South Carolina, the cheapest electric vehicles (EVs) are at least three times as expensive as my used VW Jetta. What about those big government subsidies, you ask? The truth is that EV subsidies overwhelmingly benefit the rich, not moderate-income people like me.

The U.S. federal government will give you up to a $7,500 tax credit for an EV, but you only get this money at tax time, and you only get it all if you pay a lot in taxes. In 2016, 78 percent of federal EV tax credits went to taxpayers with incomes over $100,000.

The conditions that led to a shortage of baby formula were set in motion long before the February 2022 closure of the Similac factory tipped the U.S. into a crisis.

Retailers nationwide reported supplies of baby formula were out of stock at a rate of 43 percent during the week that ended May 8, 2022, compared with less than 5 percent during the first half of 2021. In some states, such as Texas and Tennessee, shortages were over 50 percent, which has prompted parents to travel long distances and pay exorbitant sums of money to grab dwindling supplies of formula for their babies.

Ever found yourself hitting the wrong button and then flipping through the manual in a frenzy, trying to figure out how to get that thing to stop doing what it’s doing? If your answer is yes, you’ve been an unfortunate victim of bad user experience (UX).

UX is defined as all aspects of a product, such as a landing page, website, the product itself, the community, the service, all of it—as experienced by users. Why is UX so important? To put it simply, UX tries to fulfill users’ needs and includes every single touchpoint of their interaction with your organization. This is how prospective customers will form opinions about whether to purchase your products, and existing customers will decide whether to stay.

Although UX is a fundamental and critical part of the success of software, it’s often neglected.

Today, UX is at the forefront of tech and is pivotal for the success of modern businesses. I’ve asked the mastermind behind the UX and design in Howwe Technologies, Sara Tavasolian, to give us a glimpse of her ideas, vision, and view on the importance of good UX.

Katarina Bennich: What is the impact of a great user experience in a product like Howwe, a SaaS enterprise-execution software?

More than a half-million healthcare workers in the United States have quit their jobs in recent months, driven to the breaking point by the Covid-19 pandemic. But greater use of technology could help save jobs by reducing the kinds of inefficiency and stress that lead to burnout for many hospital doctors and nurses.

“When we think about digital transformation and leveraging that digital technology, we tend to think about how it can help on the clinical side [with] things like precision medicine or using AI to detect signs of cancer,” says Hummy Song, a Wharton professor of operations, information, and decisions. “But there’s a real opportunity in using these tools to make big improvements on the operational side.”

By 2035, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to increase business productivity by up to 40 percent. It’s already a part of people’s daily lives and its use is only expected to increase to solve more critical problems that assail our world.

Businesses are looking at AI to achieve cost-effective customer success. Integrating AI into customer service is revolutionizing the ways customer problems are resolved. From managing never-ending support tickets to responding at the right time, AI is helping customer support representatives by giving them timely information at their fingertips. It’s helping business leaders customize experiences for users and create high-touch experiences for customers at every touchpoint.

Here are four ways that AI is benefiting customer support.

As a step toward improving our ability to identify and manage the harmful effects of bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommend widening the scope of where we look for the source of these biases—beyond the machine learning processes and data used to train AI software to the broader societal factors that influence how technology is developed.

Whether it’s bananas, olives, potato salad, or cereal, many products are priced according to their weight. That weight is likely determined on a scale tested and certified by a specially trained state or local inspector. Weights and measures underpin approximately half of the United States gross domestic product (GDP), so it’s important to get things right.

To ensure you are getting the correct amount of product at the supermarket, inspectors routinely examine and certify scales for accuracy. To do that, they carry what they call “field standard weights,” which are designed to be used outside of their state or local laboratory. For instance, the field standard weights for inspecting grocery scales usually contain increments of 1 lb, 2 lb, and 5 lb so inspectors can test a scale to full capacity (usually 30 lb for most grocery scales), as well as smaller weights to ensure that the scale is accurate at smaller loads.