For much of 2019, businesses continued to be enamoured by the glamour and glitz of technology, fuelled in part by the attention showered upon tech-focused start-ups. Researcher Forrester cautioned that technology alone will not be sufficient to realise customer experience (CX) goals. The analyst even goes to comment that technology may hamper an organisation’s CX customer.
While it is true that technology is already a table stake in a company’s CX strategy, it should not the centre of any CX strategy – rather just one of the enabling tools of the trade.
Forrester cited the confluence of several factors including the saddling of organisations with technical and data debt, organisational silos, the allocation of more resources to the core tech stack, pressures to understand a volatile competitive landscape, and struggles with the execution of customer obsession as hampering many organisations in their CX journey.
The result is a plateauing of CX performance, digital transformations that did not deliver the expected returns, and early efforts to capitalize on new technologies and models that took a technical, rather than operational, viability path, according to Forrester.
FutureCIO spoke to Tony Bates, chief executive officer at Genesys, to get his perspective on how organisations can right their strategies. He also shares his thoughts on the role of IT and the CIO in helping the organisation better master their CX strategies.
The right approach to CX
Companies with the strong omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, compared with 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies, according to Aberdeen.
Bates acknowledged that enterprises will have a mix of voice and digital channels as part of their CX strategy. He cautioned, however, that it should not be pitting one channel against another but offering the right type of experience in the right channel – that should be the goal for most organisations.
“It’s having a seamless experience and engaging and creating great outcomes for end customers across all of those channels so when we talk to customers, we’re really building strategies that encompass all of these technologies,” he elaborated.
However “what is even more important that they start to think about how do they personalize right so in one context on deliver one experience in another context I want to deliver a different experience so having this holistic view is really top of mind I think for every customer out there when they think about better personalized customer experiences,” he opined.
Role of CIO in CX
In a 2015 CEO survey on customer experience management, Gartner revealed that CIOs [and the IT team] play an important role in CX initiatives. It countered that CX leaders say half the projects they are working on involve technology, and IT plays a strong role in those projects.
“The IT department is perceived to be highly, or extremely, involved in the customer experience initiative in 80% of the cases, according to the heads of customer experience initiatives,” said Ed Thompson, research vice president at Gartner.
Bates added that the CIO’s close working relationship with the executive leadership team is what will drive organisations to move to the next level – creating what he referred to as an experience-as-a-service mechanism “that we really believe is the next wave. The CIO has to be in the room has to understand the technology has to make sure they can help deploy but they really have to also partner with the business leaders within those companies,” he concluded.
CX agenda in 2020
How do you create the defining customer experience value for your organisation in 2020? Bates believes it is creating a strategy that leverages emerging technologies to optimise people and process.
He commented that organisations will be looking at taking advantage of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud will be important in their quest to carve out a differentiation uniquely theirs.
How do they leverage all of the different channels, all the different interactions, to deliver a consistent but unique and special experience, opined Bates. He believed that two technology agendas will persist in 2020.
“I think Asia’s going through this massive revolution of digitization. To me it’s really the agenda is how do you bring all of these technologies together how do you optimise using AI and automate processes to be efficient? Also how do you start to optimise the employee experiences right within those companies for example we offer great analytics and workforce engagement management tools,” he quipped.
“It is also about correcting those great experiences across all channels using AI to give you much better engagement no matter what context you come on as well as optimizing the employee experience,” he concluded.
Forrester predicts that for 2020 leaders’ attention will move to one of adaptability: the ability to understand and anticipate market dynamics — and adapt and rapidly exploit opportunities, both big and small.
