Opinion: What should you look at when looking for tax automation solutions?
The experience designers of today heavily invest in conducting in-depth user research and analysis to understand users culturally and ensure that the experience delivered is world-class.
Business have always had difficulty managing sales tax and compliance. Quite admittedly, many of them succumb to the stress and pressure of having to remain fast and stay relevant, all at the same time. However, with the tax landscape exponentially expanding in India and worldwide and tax complexities increasing forever, business have to constantly lookout for creative and automated solutions that deliver state-of-the-art outcomes.
The school of design thought has embraced an innovative, systematic, user-centric approach to tax problems. The ability to closely work with users operating in the tax domain has leveraged the design effort in building and defining design solutions that establish an emotional connection with users. The experience designers of today heavily invest in conducting in-depth user research and analysis to understand users culturally and ensure that the experience delivered is world-class. We are obsessed with holistic user experience and just features.
What should you look at when you are looking for tax automation solutions?
A comprehensive and robust tax platform offers products to tackle tax problems in the following areas among others:
- Determining tax obligations
- Registering businesses
- Calculating taxes
- Managing tax exemptions
- Filing and remitting tax returns
The best tax solutions can integrate with many industry-standard ERP and accounting applications, making users’ whole experience productive and seamless. I addition, streamlined automation technologies help alleviate the pain of dealing with time consuming and stressful tax calculations for tax professionals.
Emotional connect with product and the role of product experience team
Product experience is a central function serving every product group. The design team aims to define the best-in-class customer journey for a wide range of tax products spanning tax calculating, returns and filings, compliance documents, and content and data insights. We build products upon a framework of design principles that are fundamental standards that communicate the core experiences we strive to deliver to tax professionals. In addition, we conduct iterative research in the tax domain involving actual users and work on rapid prototyping of newer concepts for faster go-to-market strategies; we believe real user problems are solved by embracing participatory designs, and hence we involve them in our upstream conceptualization framework, it’s our systematic approach to design products that delight customers. Finally, we have built user councils that help elicit users’ pain points and then deploy design-thinking led focus groups, surveys, and cognitive walkthrough sessions to glean insights and feedback from users.
User focus backed with right technology
Companies rely on emerging technologies and techniques to quickly bring their products to market; however, do you think speed alone guarantees the “right” kind of experience for target users? If the companies end up releasing a product into the market without ensuring a successful product-user fit, chances are they hardly meet their user’s needs, for all you know.
Software solutions that keep users at the centre throughout the software development process do more than people usually expect. They delight the users, they build trust in them, they foster long-term benefits, they help businesses attract new customers, and more importantly, make the existing ones want to “return” and be eternally loyal to the brand. In addition, products built based on user-driven design principles result in fewer errors/support calls, decreased training needs, more conversion, more use, time savings for users and development teams, and so forth.
Enhancing overall CX by building a great platform of technology will help predict escalations by using unstructured data such as support emails, messages, social media feedback, etc. AI-driven ranking and severity algorithms help us prioritize what the customer asks by remaining focused on their critical wants and needs. And all of this for bringing more delight to customers.
Author: Imtiyaz Khatib, Sr. Director Customer Experience, Avalara India.
Publication: ET Government.
