The COVID-19 crisis has changed the customer needs and expectations a whole heap. Meeting new consumer requirements has become vital to post-COVID-19 business success. Therefore, business authorities have focused on customer-experience transformation. But, sometimes, companies are facing challenges to achieve the required changes.
To become a customer-centric organization, it is essential to focus first on what is your customer’s requirement and how they want to interact with your business — not your products or their features or revenue model.
The good news is that there is a proven formula to help you in executing customer-experience transformations. The concept is based on three core building blocks:
- a clearly defined aspiration
- an agile transformation approaches
- the thoughtful deployment of new capabilities
Based on these three pillars, companies can create a competitive advantage in their industry. To make your transformation smooth and successful, it is good to have a trusted managed service provider (MSP) by your side.
Build aspiration and purpose
When organizations set out to define their customer-experience aspiration, it is essential to be well-defined, including all details and aligned tightly to the company’s purpose. Otherwise, it will be unclear how the aspiration creates value. A good customer-experience aspiration delivers on business purpose and brand promise. Then, you work to translate aspirations into expected business value by defining the specific changes in customer behavior. Many companies prefer to use statistical analysis and quantitative research to make their decisions about what customers value so they can prioritize the requirements that matter most.
An MSP can help you to analyze the changed requirements of your consumers and develop a customer-centric vision and aspiration. They also help you align your aspiration to business goals and translate the requirements into an achievable roadmap.
Many of the forward-looking organizations have created integrated data lakes with their MSP and utilized advanced analytics and machine learning to enhance the experiences of every consumer. An efficient MSP can deploy a customized analytics engine that enables leadership to identify customer interventions and investment strategies. This helps you to plan customer-centric strategy planning.
Transform the business
Successful development of a comprehensive customer-centric transformation road map is not enough. It is essential to implement the same flawlessly. There might be some miscommunication, ownership issues, and accountability problems as you incorporate changes in several day-to-day operations.
For a successful transformation, companies need to create agile, cross-functional teams who are able to take ownership of their projects, have deep technology expertise, and have a culture of design thinking and continuous improvement. For the best result, you first implement Agile methodology in your company and invest a significant amount in recruiting and nurturing agile teams with profound expertise in experience design, developing front-line omnichannel platforms and technology, and reimagining the experiences, products, and services that best deliver on the brand promise.
Your managed IT service provider can help you to incorporate Agile methodology in your company and also provide tech support to upgrade your existing infrastructure to bring the required changes for business transformation.
Enable the transformation
To incorporate the required changes into your business, you can follow the four basic strategies—these are most critical for success.
1. Customer-centric mindsets
For effective transformation, your employees must feel confident that they have the necessary skillsets, tools, and technological support to deliver the best possible experience for consumers. You can consider you managed IT support partners to upskill employees — they use digital courses, live workshops, online or offline training, and regular refresher training to support the development of new capabilities.
It is essential to develop skills around redesigning customer experiences and deploy cross-functional teams. Even MSPs also provide tips to executives on how to support, accelerate, and celebrate customer-centricity within the organization, such as integration of design thinking into the early stages of the strategic planning process.
2. Integrated technology stack
All with a customer-centric mindset, proper technology support is also essential to fuel your transformation. In order to provide excellent omnichannel customer experiences, organizations need to opt for cutting-edge technologies that help expand the services. Your MSP can help you build a digital platform around microservices and APIs to provide multiple fast and flexible services to your customers. They also help to establish an omnichannel contact-center platform with call recognition, video chat, text chat, and email management facilities, and a single system that integrates all these platforms with each other.
3. Change in operating model and governance structure
For customer-centric transformation, you may need to upgrade your operation models in different ways, including change in marketing strategy, incorporation of Cloud GTM and business operations, improve service strategies, and so on. Your MSP can help you to build a better cloud-based go-to-market program and incorporate digital marketing technologies, customer experience lens, and customer engagement model and architecture.
4. Use of predictive analytics and machine learning to build a performance-management system
Multiple organizations are now using predictive analytics, big data, and machine learning to deal with commonly found limitations of customer feedback, which often provides an incomplete and erroneous view of real customer experiences. In most cases, organizations need to incorporate management systems with sophisticated feedback loops that can educate employees about which behaviors should be considered to yield the best results. This also helps the innovation teams to identify where to focus their efforts.
Cutting-edge analytical tools allow organizations to accurately predict the criteria of customer satisfaction and trend of their future spend based on their feedbacks, service requirements, experiences, and so on.
Conclusion:
Customer experience is a competitive advantage in the post-pandemic situation. Based on the three building blocks of customer-centric transformation, you can expect to emerge from the current vulnerable situation with a sustainable advantage over your competitors. To make your transformation fast, smooth, and effective, you can consider a trusted MSP as a partner. Nowadays, a managed IT services partner moves beyond just business process outsourcing — they offer core domain expertise and tech support to make your key functions more efficient and effective.
