How businesses can benefit by merging consumer & enterprise models

Are enterprise and the consumer opposed to each other?

I heard this from most people I interacted with. You have a great portfolio for consumer and enterprise product but is there a difference in terms of the visual elements to be used for both of them. And, my reply is almost instantaneous. The person who is using your Big Data/analytics or so-called Enterprise system is the same person targeted by Flipkart, Ola, Uber and consumer companies.

Most of the time, we create a mental boundary where we categorize our users as Enterprise or end customers without realising the fact the same people are targeted by both the parties albeit in different settings. The settings are derived from whether they access the system from their personal device or office device.

Hence, a simple question. Why not, have a convergent experience between a consumer product and enterprise product where it does not matter whether the user is using the system in his/her personal time or office time.

The benefits of enterprise-consumer convergence

Today, when I sit in my office and use an Enterprise System my expectations of the experience of the product is very similar to the Consumer products and the expectations most of the time don’t change. Why you ask? Take yourself for example and the HRMS system you use today, how do you react to something that is non-responsive, not appease you with colors or just simply take more time.

Imagine, if the enterprises started thinking of converging their Experience Design Strategy with Consumer Design Thinking and put up the simplest way to do finish tasks. Imagine, all you had to come to in morning is a dashboard which feels like an Uber, What would you like to do today? & then it recommends top 5 tasks you should plan for. Imagine, the scenario when you need to apply for leave or crunch some big data and you come to a screen looking like Google Search bar where you are prompted to type and get recommended actions rather than boring you with thousand things that the system could do.

The bottom line

I believe it’s time we think about having not the conversation about segregating enterprise and consumer experience but converging them to make, look, work and feel like same to give a user the harmonious day.

I would appreciate your thoughts and of course, look forward to understand everyone’s viewpoint. Let’s lock horns and make things easy, fast and accessible through some deep diving in Strategical Experience Design.