Technology leaders are inward-facing professionals. We usually don’t interact with consumers directly — we’re just surrounded by loads of software and a bunch of fellow technology geeks. In fact, some of us may have just become part of our board of directors. Can our efforts really impact the brand value directly?
Traditional CIOs had a rough decade in the digital age, and conventional methods had to cave in for the idea of the “transformational CIO.” In addition to operational efficiency, CIOs are sharing the responsibilities of budget optimization, CX and revenue growth. “Digital” has made it to almost all industry verticals. Whether or not digitally born, businesses are adopting click-and-mortar models that allow their customers to digitally interact with their brands. This opens doors to new opportunities while posing a new set of challenges to the IT leaders.
A CIO may not directly participate in customer engagement, but they can enable the workforce who does to perform their part more effectively.
Every other department in an organization desires an ideal ecosystem to serve customers better and increase brand value. Marketing teams want to attain extreme personalization in campaigns. Sales teams want a CRM with a built-in Magic-8 Ball. Operations teams want the status of the supply chain in as real time as possible. The support folks want to have a bird’s eye view during interactions. We coach our teams, we bring in the most amazing technologies, we optimize the processes and we bend over backward to align business perspectives with everything else.
But do our efforts create a strong enough ripple effect to reach the customers on the other end? Sometimes, they don’t. Over the last decade, I’ve been taking notes each time an initiative beyond the strategy worked wonders. I usually share them with the close network of IT leaders, and I’d like to share my notes with you today.
Let the technology meet touchpoints.
End-to-end customer journey mapping is CX 101. Get a clear visual picture of how the customer is discovering the brand, what the customer is expecting, how they’re feeling during engagement and the friction points that affecting retention. This understanding will help you fix the flaws of the targeted omnichannel uniformity. Explore automated workflows and reduce the manual touchpoints for faster throughput, smoother interaction and better trackability — at a lower expenditure. Connecting with other business unit heads who have already been exercising customer journey maps would help this process.
Customers of the digital age are very social, and they leave hints of this for us everywhere. Customer support data, app stores, social media — there are multiple ways to include feedback in product/service enhancement. Collect data from every BU and apply customized algorithms to identify your most engaged customers. Whenever there is a new feature, do canary releases to a selected subset for faster feedback.
Shadowing is a very underrated practice.
“My computer is slow.” “I can’t find that information.” “I can’t access that tool.” These pain points may sound simple but these are legit problems many associate teams face.
We pen down the strategy, set schedules and give directives, but it’s the employees who need to execute. An ill-equipped and under-trained workforce is a prescription for a bad customer experience. List out the teams that interact with customers at various stages from discovery to retention. Make schedules to buddy up with an employee from each team, shadow them and walk in their shoes while learning about usual consumer expectations and hurdles. This not only unveils a different perspective of the customer lifecycle but also gives you first-hand experience of the process, areas of improvement and unrecorded insights.
A solid employee experience (EX) is the fastest route to a superior customer experience (CX).
Engage in cross-team leadership.
We need to have a 360-degree view to make every interaction and transaction enjoyable for the customer. So, in addition to the associates of other departments, start teaming up with the leaders of other business units too. To expand organizational boundaries further, the individual strategies of each BU need to break silos and include dependencies of adjoining teams. Encourage the culture of continuous improvement and innovation, and constantly explore opportunities for processes automation to reduce the burden of repetitive tasks on the human workforce.
Offer great UX — yes, it’s different from CX.
Some e-commerce businesses give exclusive mobile app features to encourage downloads. But as they scale, it’s always advisable to adopt design thinking and work toward an omnichannel experience. The ease of use, consistency of information, contextual data and uncomplicated, secured transactions will place you ahead in the race. If you thought millennials were impossible to please, wait for Gen Zers. Recent surveys suggest that customers of the 21st century simply don’t tolerate digital latency. They don’t mind paying extra for a better experience and don’t take long to walk away when they don’t get it. UX is only one of many pieces of the CX puzzle. It improves the chances of making the customer happy but doesn’t ensure top-class CX.
Revisit your technology.
Legacy technology is often listed as the No. 1 reason for digital failure. It probably is, but there are many other drawbacks even in digital natives. Lack of data literacy, inept cloud maturity, irrelevant metrics, delayed monitoring — the list goes on. Not everything can be fixed by introducing a new piece of technology but fortunately, some issues can be. It’s time to revisit the tech stack, circle business challenges, innovate sustainable solutions and fuel them with new tools. As technologies around AI and ML are getting better day by day, there’s a lot a CIO can do in terms of predictive analytics, hyper-targeted programmatic marketing, extreme personalization, automation, self-service tools and so on.
Wherever you need external tools, many platforms offer free trials and open-sources solutions. Start with them and present the results to the board. It’s tough for anyone to say no to results. A small IT budget has been the biggest excuse for many digital laggards, but trust me, most of these actions only take re-aligning priorities, re-training workforces, approaching fellow leaders and showing genuine interest in offering customers the experience they deserve.
Article Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/08/06/how-cios-can-enable-their-workforce-to-provide-a-best-in-class-cx/?sh=154181a512aa
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