The Quadient commissioned report, The Customer Experience Tech Trends That Will Define 2020, noted that customer experience (CX) has risen to the fore of transformation initiatives. The study went so far as to predict that by 2020, product and price will play second fiddle when it comes to consumer buying preference.
Another report, Closing the CX Gap: Customer Experience Trends Report, validated the assertion of the aforementioned report when it revealed that three quarters of consumers will switch to a brand competitor after just one bad experience.
In the four years I’ve been talking to senior executives at famous and not-so-famous brands, the impression these discussions have left with me is that nurturing and creating customer experience initiatives is best left to the heads of marketing and sales.
But while I understand that this may be true, I was also made to believe that technology has played a crucial role in many of the most successful transformations. Hence, we’ve seen an increase in interest and adoption of technologies like behaviour analytics, chatbots, customer experience design, and augmented reality, in addition to the more traditional sales and marketing tools like CRM and call centres.
This has led me to ask the question: How important is the function of IT and the CIO towards fulfilling the customer experience aspirations of a business?
FutureCIO asked Barry Libenson, global chief information officer at Experian, to describe the changes, or lack of, to the role of CIO.
No scarcity of tech
Liveops lists 100 competing technologies that span the customer experience technology stack. The diversity suggests that any CIO looking to transform the company’s customer engagement strategy will face the dauting challenge which technologies best fit their business model.
According to Forrester, too many companies were saddled with technical and data debt, hampered by existing organizational silos, required to allocate more resources to the core tech stack, trying to understand a volatile competitive landscape, and struggling with the execution of customer obsession.
“Those struggles manifested in plateaued 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,” commented the analyst.
Libenson acknowledges the complexity and challenge this wealth of technology presents to the enterprise. He stresses the importance of understanding what strategy and solution will have the most impact – from a customer perspective.
“So, when we look at how we are going to leverage technology, we always do it from a customer standpoint. We don’t do technology for the sake of technology any longer; it’s all based on customer focus,” he commented.
He conceded that the digital transformation aspect is critical too.
“If you are moving from a traditional operating model to a digital model, there are certain technologies that will give you a much greater advantage than others, but again, it really needs to be focused on the customer,” elaborated Libenson.
Personalising while observing privacy
The more you shop on Amazon, the more you realize the convenience of shopping on the platform. This is partly thanks to the recommendation engine that the company uses. At the rudimentary level, it trolls through your online search habits to identify your interests, and from there covertly presents products the algorithm thinks you might likely buy.
However, with the increased concern over data privacy, you start to wonder to what extent can you personalise an experience before it becomes an invasion of privacy?
Libenson counters that customer design and regulations are not mutually exclusive.
“There are customer models and capabilities that are not necessarily in conflict with regulatory requirements (e.g. GDPR). While these regulations are about protecting customer information and maintaining compliance, they don’t limit your ability to provide customer-focused solutions. Experian uses agile development processes and minimum viable products, to ensure we are addressing specific customer requirements while adhering to regulations,” he explained.
Role of CIO in customer experience
Experian’s Libenson says old-school CIOs have the tendency to focus on operations and infrastructure.
“The role of today’s CIO has changed quite dramatically. It’s now more about driving innovation and helping the business succeed than just operating systems behind the scenes — that’s table stakes now. This is probably be the biggest flaw that most CIOs have either haven’t quite caught up with or often fall back on,” he commented.
He summed up the new role of the CIO as helping their businesses grow and helping them address customer concerns, instead of just operating behind-the-scenes.
CIO as CX change agent
Libenson believes that the CIO not only has to be current on technology but also constantly evaluate the environment the business is in.
“It comes down to being agile. It’s very difficult to have a crystal ball that’s even three years out today and so, we create these strategies that span a year — which is a reasonable time horizon — but beyond that, you have to constantly reassess and re-evaluate, based on shifts happening in technology,” he explained.
He conceded that no one could have predicted necessarily how pervasive and how popular the cloud has become, or what’s happening with machine learning today.
“We are finding ourselves constantly hiring new resources and looking at new ways to use that technology. It is really important to be watching and keeping an eye on the relevant technology shifts happening in the industry,” concluded Libenson.
Jerry Gregoire, chief information officer at Dell, put it this way: “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.”
Need I say more?
