Can Your IT Deliver Great CX?

Take a look at what the industry analysts are all saying about customer experience (CX). It doesn’t matter which industry you are focused on, it is typical to see that improving CX is now considered to be one of the most important strategic priorities – often it is more important than the more traditional revenue maximisation and cost reduction strategies that most CEOs focus on.

But when you explore what CX transformation really means, it is clear that modern CX is largely supported by IT systems. To create a modern CX environment requires not only a major investment in IT and communication systems, it requires an understanding of these technologies and how they can blend with your people and processes so CX is improved.

This requires multiple skills. Executives investing in the technology systems that are now being used to improve CX may know the technologies, but have no personal knowledge of CX or customer service principles in general. So it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate just how much the various technologies have changed in the past few years. Supporting CX today is no longer focused just on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems alone. This CMSWire article details five key areas where you might want to think again about the kind of technologies being used today – and where we were in the recent past:

• Moving from websites to apps – it’s no longer enough to have corporate information on a website. If you really want to interact and build a relationship with customers then you need the interactivity of an app.
• Moving from Web Content Marketing to Artificial Intelligence (AI) – online content is great for brands, but AI will allow brands to automatically share relevant content and to build their content library automatically.
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) moving from a static repository to the centre of your digital assets – instead of just tracking all your digital assets using a spreadsheet, create a culture of sharing every digital asset, even photos and videos, and utilising the DAM database as a key asset throughout the business.
• Moving from data use to help the marketing team to predicting what the customer will do next – don’t just use data on customers for marketing mailshots, study their behaviour and figure out what they will do next by using predictive data analytics.
• Personalisation based on strict rules moving to AI – Machine Learning and AI allow you to get much closer to customers by creating a completely personal experience, not just the same experience every customer has. More and more customers are already insisting on this as an expectation.

Robotic Process Automation, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud delivery and Data Analytics. The list could go on. All these emerging and complex technologies are being deployed in solutions that are specifically designed to improve CX, but as this list suggests there is also a need for executives to think beyond what they knew as cutting edge two years ago.

When selecting a technology partner for a CX initiative you should keep in mind that they need to have expertise in the specific technologies you want to deploy, but also talk to their team about how they see these technologies evolving. CX is driving so much investment into these technologies that none of them are static. You need to consider how best to plan for a solution that delivers today and can flexibly grow with the business in future.