Serving the customer better by understanding their top tasks

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.