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Practice paper

Serving the customer better by understanding their top tasks

Gerry Mcgovern
Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal, 4 (2), 108-116 (2018)
https://doi.org/10.69554/DHSS4799

Abstract

The biggest influence on the customer experience, particularly in digital, is the experience customers have as they seek to complete their top tasks. Digital tends to be a very functional, utilitarian environment. Even in social spaces, people are very active. People may not mind wasting time on Facebook with their friends. However, Facebook would not survive long if people felt they were wasting time uploading pictures or trying to figure out how to tag those pictures. Time is a brutal determiner of success, and digital leaders measure customer time in milliseconds, not seconds. Digital is an explosion of possibilities — an almost unlimited world of content and tools. Yet, what truly matters to people when making a decision remains very small and concise. ‘Top tasks’ are those things that matter most to someone when they are deciding to buy a car, choose a university, or select another product or service. By contrast, ‘tiny tasks’ are those kinds of organisation-centric tasks that explode with content, often severely disrupting customers’ top tasks journey. Thus, an important step in delivering excellent customer experience is to remove or mitigate the influence of tiny tasks. This paper aims to explain how the Top Tasks methods work and how you can apply them to develop a better understanding of what matters most to your customers.

Keywords: customer experience; user experience; digital strategy

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Author's Biography

Gerry Mcgovern is Chief Executive Officer of Customer Carewords, where he specialises in helping large organisations such as Microsoft, Cisco, European Commission and Toyota, deliver a better customer experience through making customers’ top tasks easier. He has written several books including ‘Transform’ which explains why digital transformation is far more about culture change than technology change and, his most recent book, ‘Top Tasks – A How To Guide’.

Citation

Mcgovern, Gerry (2018, September 1). Serving the customer better by understanding their top tasks. In the Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 4, Issue 2. https://doi.org/10.69554/DHSS4799.

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cover image, Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal
Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal
Volume 4 / Issue 2
© Henry Stewart
Publications LLP

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