Mastering Customer Centricity
If analysts' assessments of the past year are correct, the events of the past year have accelerated business transformation initiatives with most organizations focusing enterprise technology investments on two interrelated trends: cloud adoption and customer centricity.
80% of enterprises have embraced cloud-centric infrastructures and applications at twice the pace set prior to the pandemic.
Beyond improving operational effectiveness and efficiencies, leaders have made customer centricity a top priority. As a result, targeted investments to improve customer experiences are forecast to reach $641 billion in 2022.
If analysts' assessments of the past year are correct, the events of the past year have accelerated business transformation initiatives with most organizations focusing enterprise technology investments on two interrelated trends: cloud adoption and customer-centricity.
According to the good folks at IDC, the lessons learned through the COVID 19 have prompted 80% of enterprises to embrace cloud-centric infrastructures and applications at twice the pace set prior to the pandemic. Beyond improving operational effectiveness and efficiencies, leaders have made customer-centricity a top priority. As a result, targeted investments to improve customer experiences are forecast to reach $641 billion in 2022.
Among the objectives of this massive spending is the development of skills, competencies and capabilities that enhance empathy, empowerment, and innovation. This will be accomplished by implementing platform strategies that provide a comprehensive perspective on all information that has a bearing on customer/enterprise relationships.
To explore the strategic, operational, financial, and technological issues that must be addressed to establish effective customer-centric operations, BizTechReports caught up with Monica Hovespian and Simon Masterman of OpenText.
Here is what they had to say:
Executives represent a wide range of business sectors including banking, hospitality, legal, software development, and healthcare. While the number of vertical industries may be quite varied, there is an immediate consensus around the notion that business transformation initiatives were pushing organizations to make customers the central organizing principle for investments in technologies and new operational processes.
The good news is that there appears to be a growing sense of agreement across corporate disciplines -- IT, lines of business, finance, HR, etc. -- that more efforts should be made to collect more and better information about customers throughout their relationships with organizations. The challenge, however, is that it is difficult to capture a unified view of customers because of the fragmented nature of existing processes and technologies that are both siloed and disconnected from one another.
This particular problem statement extends all the way to how the various categories of data are captured, stored, and made available to key constituencies with customer management responsibilities. Executives are struggling with the paradox of silos. It has been a challenge to figure out how to integrate structured data, unstructured data, and telemetry data across on-premises and cloud environments.”
Despite the unified objective of moving toward a customer-centric future state, different parts of the organization are finding it difficult to establish common ground on how to meet the needs of enterprise data and analytics groups, while also making data available to front-line workers who actually touch customers. Organizations have lots of data, from various places. It has simply been difficult to figure out what parts are relevant to our business and how we can monetize it.
While these challenges present a compelling intellectual conundrum, it also represents a very practical issue that threatens to derail transformation initiatives. At the top of the list of urgent issues are consumer -- and prosumer -- attitudes. B2B and B2C customers have come to expect the kind of proactive attention and competence they receive from digital native cloud players (the Amazon Prime experience emerged more than once) from all other service providers.
In many cases, organizations are coming to the realization that we don’t really have solid first-hand information about our customers. Adding to this complexity is the fact that different parts of the organization spend significant amounts of money purchasing information from outside corporate boundaries. Organizations need to figure out how to integrate and derive better insights from social media interactions and consumption data and then connect them with our own systems of record to build a 360-degree view of our customers.
Another important nuance discussed was that the movement to new platforms (specifically cloud environments) has raised questions about how to appropriately and securely collect useful data to generate constructive insights in a compliant manner. Partners have been extremely careful about protecting client privilege and privacy while mining data in some anonymized fashion. And since we have a global presence, we have to take into consideration GDPR and many other emerging regulations.
The importance of carefully managing the “identity” of both employees and customers also emerged as a core issue. Identity is so important when it comes to building a customer-centric organization. This is especially true in highly regulated industries like healthcare. We have to understand patient and staff identity in the context of multiple devices, networks, and roles.
Monica from OpenText concurred, noting the close correlation -- which is only getting tighter -- between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. “We have to learn from those organizations that have figured out how to put the right information in the hands of the right associates to provide the best service in an empathetic manner to customers.”
While there is no silver bullet available to seamlessly establish the optimal lines of communications in an appropriate and compliant manner, Simon from OpenText stated that organizations with the highest level of achievement in customer-centric strategies have mastered customer information life-cycle management. “In the end, customer-centricity is a journey. New information and new systems will continue to emerge creating more information that comes from different sources. These will have an impact on the customer information lifecycle.”
For more information on BizTechReport podcast interviews, please contact Melissa Fisher at MFisher@BizTechReports.com.