This is a question I get asked most often during my speaking engagements- how do you make a case for improving the user experience? Today, I’m going to provide you all (ok, well, not all but enough) resources and techniques to help you affect this change.

1) Demonstrate ROI for Usability and social media to improve the customer experience. There are many resources and papers that demonstrate ROI for usability:

ROI 1 – Business Benefits of Usability

ROI 2 – How Ebay Measured ROI

ROI 3 – Usability Case Studies

ROI 4 – 24 Page White Paper Full of Case Studies

ROI 5 – How the American Council on Exercise Improved Their Conversions 43%

ROI 6 – Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox Article on Usability ROI

Here are resources and papers that demonstrate soft ROI for social media:

ROI 1 – Barry Tallis’s Presentation: How Nike, CNN, and Bank of America Measured Their Social Media Success

ROI 2 – General Motors’ ROI on Blogging Case Study

ROI 3 – Dell’s Regeneration Graffiti Facebook Campaign

ROI 4 – Sony’s Facebook Widget Vampire Campaign

One of the reasons you won’t see an abundance of papers explicating the ROI of social media is because it is still very new. If you imagine how long it takes to fully roll out a website (from 6 months to 2 years), putting together a social media plan and executing on it takes about the same amount of time. On top of that, you have to accurately track the success of your website or social media plan. In order to do this, you have to wait another year to get accurate tracking data. All in all, this process takes anywhere between 1.5 years to 3 years. Those who have demonstrated success so far are the early adopters of social media, allowing them to create informative white papers like the ones I’ve linked above.

2) Send your execs and members from other departments (ie. engineers, designers, and web team, etc.) to an educational conference. This method accomplishes two things:

First, it allows your engineers to get on the same page as you are regarding the vision of the website. This way, those internally are also defenders of the initiative thereby making it harder for an executive to refuse when so many are on board with a certain plan.

Second, they are hearing it from someone other than yourself. When someone hears the same information from industry experts, it lends more credibility to your position, takes away animosity from yourself, and lastly allows them to ask the questions directly to a credible source.

3) Hire an outside consultant to conduct a usability / social media analysis. The reasons for this are very similar to that of sending your execs and other departments to conferences. However, it might be more effective since it takes less traveling and less time commitment.

It’s easier to get a CEO to sit in on a 2 – 3 hour presentation at their office than getting them to drive or fly to a conference. Also, a diagnostic / analysis will be catered to your company’s specific needs versus a general presentation that might or might not apply specifically to your situation. And lastly, in some cases, it might be more cost effective. For example, our company charges anywhere between $10k to $20k for a usability diagnostic. Most conferences cost about $1,500 for registration plus another $1,000 or so for flight, hotel, and meals. Therefore, if you want to send about 5 people, it will cost $12,500 for the full conference. Of course there are exceptions to this rule such as the OMS Tour in which the conference is local and very inexpensive for 5 people to attend.

So, these are all the techniques that I have come up with. Do you have any other techniques to justify a business case for increasing the customer experience? If so, please share it!

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