The old adage that “the customer is always right” has long shaped the activities of businesses the world over.
The annals of time are littered with the remains of one-time giants of the corporate world who have fallen foul of this golden rule and whose legacy now serves solely as a cautionary tale for any business that even contemplates disregarding the wants and needs of its customers.
So the idea of the customer being the lifeblood of an organisation is certainly not a new one; indeed, it’s as old as the concept of business itself. But the growing role of social media in the modern business landscape is taking this idea to a whole new level, to the point where many organisations are now firmly focused on increasing the power and value of the customer experience they provide.
The imperative to interact with customers whenever, wherever, and how ever they want is changing the go-to-market strategies of organisations right across the vertical spectrum, motivating them to invest in upgrading their customer-handling infrastructure. Technology is now a requirement that enables suppliers to deliver consistency at scale, and placing the customer at the centre of the decision-making process is critical to the success of any customer experience philosophy.
Organisations are coming under pressure to differentiate themselves within the marketplace every minute of every single day. Increasingly, that differentiation is being found in “who” that organisation is and “how” it interacts with its prospects and customers. And in response to the need to provide a standout customer experience, many organisations are beginning to rethink how they engage with their customers, employees, partners, and suppliers.
But what exactly does the term “customer experience” mean? Well, at IDC we define customer experience — or CX for short — as the entire process covering the interaction between customers and an organisation with which they engage over the whole lifetime of the relationship. In this context, customer experiences can range from a single transaction to an ongoing relationship over a period of many years.
To be authentic and effective, a customer experience strategy must become part of the organizational culture. While many corners of today’s organisations understand and believe in a customer imperative, these departments often do not come together to collaborate on CX initiatives.
The reasons for this are numerous, but they often include a lack of clear direction from management, a poor understanding of how each functional area contributes to the overall customer-led go-to-market strategy, the prevalence of disconnected systems that hamper internal communications and information sharing, and a perception that work processes are by nature siloed.
The drive to enhance the customer experience is an opportunity for enterprises to not only serve the customer better through their direct customer-handling processes, but also to focus on and transform the experiences of employees, suppliers, and partners that contribute to serving the customer. To that end, the customer experience incorporates many elements, like a set of prescribed processes, corporate strategies, and customer perceptions.
The road to customer experience optimisation can take a variety of paths in different organisations, but what they all have in common is the alignment of corporate goals to create an experience for the customer that meets their expectations and facilitates a state of satisfaction.
At IDC, we also believe there is a need to orchestrate internal business processes to create a flow that is planned and architected in a manner that makes interaction from the customer’s side as easy, quick, transparent, positive, and full featured as possible.
Moving further along the maturity curve, successful CX strategies are typically built on an ability to provide for, manage, and optimise customer experiences end to end — from the moment the customer becomes aware of the product or service offered to when the customer decides to make a purchase to the process of managing the customer’s experiences in order to improve customer retention and gain greater leverage over the relationship.
As hinted at previously, the organisation’s culture is central to making a CX strategy work. Leadership must show support for CX initiatives because the ripple effect through the organisation can be profound. And while customers must obviously sit at the centre of any CX philosophy, the company’s employees are just as important (if not more so), as they are directly responsible for delivering the customer experience. Ultimately, employees are the customer-facing advocates and evangelists for the company and should be trained and treated accordingly.
Customer experience initiatives are on the rise within end-user organisations across the region, with technologies such as collaboration, analytics, social, business process automation, and community applications all playing an increasingly key role. But technology alone cannot ensure the delivery of a robust CX strategy — it must also be supplemented with clear directives from management, a facilitating corporate culture, a commitment to giving the strategy an opportunity to become ingrained, and willingness for all employees, partners, and suppliers to embrace it. Without such support, you may just find that your efforts become little more than a cautionary tale all of their own.
— The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC
