How CIOs Can Take the Lead to Deliver a World-Class Digital Customer Experience

OutSystems is a Business Reporter client.

As more and more consumer transactions are carried out online, and as consumers’ expectations for digital experiences get higher and higher, digital customer experience (CX) is more important than ever. And this is now a critical responsibility for the CIO. But what does great CX really mean? And how can CIOs go about delivering it?

According to Gartner, more than two-thirds of companies compete mostly on the basis of customer experience. If a company offers its customers a mediocre experience, switching to the products or services of competitors is only a few clicks away.

While most CIOs were already acutely aware of this, 2020 put additional pressure on them to deliver on their companies’ digital CX ambitions. According to the 2020 Harvey Nash–KPMG CIO Survey, customer engagement ranks alongside operational efficiency at the top of the list of priorities, as was the case in 2019. But Covid-19 has changed the meaning and purpose of customer engagement, with development of new channels to market with and creation of more and better digital experiences for customers emerging as critical.

However, being able to fulfil their company’s need for innovation and their customers’ ever-increasing expectations means overcoming a number of hurdles confronting most CIOs intent on realizing their digital CX transformation mission.

The first challenge is resources. IT organizations were already buried under huge backlogs and struggling to hire qualified staff. IT still spends far too much time and energy just keeping the lights on (KTLO) with existing systems. In a recent survey of CIOs, IT leaders and financial decision makers, 77% indicated that this is a major hurdle for their organization.

These resource constraints exist at a time when the demand for businesses to launch new, innovative digital products to serve customers is greater than ever. In fact, many industry reports suggest that the majority of consumers who turned—some for the first time—to digital channels when stores and bank branches were closed and call centers were overwhelmed will continue to do so even after business as usual resumes.

This means that creating, maintaining, extending and even rebuilding customer-facing applications at speed is now critical for any company that wants to thrive in 2021 and beyond.

CIOs are under intense pressure to do more with less—and to do it more quickly—than ever before.

What does great digital CX mean?

It might be tempting to think that a great user experience is synonymous with a great customer experience, and while that might have been true in the first days of digital disruption, it is no longer the case. Irrefutably, a user-friendly UX/UI that is beautifully designed and boasts lightning-fast performance does have a very positive impact on customer satisfaction. But great digital CX goes far beyond that:

• Great CX is effortless: Customers are impatient and they expect everything to be easy and “right now.” Great customer experience is about how easy a company makes it to do business with them. For example, a recent study by thefinancialbrand.com shows that it can take anywhere from 21 to 120 clicks to open a new bank account. But it goes even beyond just clicks. Delivering an effortless experience also means
  
• Allowing customers to choose how they interact with a company rather than imposing a channel upon them; a good digital CX strategy means delivering applications on mobile, web, chat, voice and AR/VR so that customers can use whichever channel is most convenient to them. Using their phone’s camera to capture an image of an identification card means one-click data entry versus dozens of clicks and manually entering all the information.
  
• Automating and optimizing the processes that support customer journeys, so that outstanding customer outcomes can be delivered right now. Going back to the account-opening example, if after 24 clicks, a customer still needs to wait five days to get confirmation of their new account because a customer service rep needs to validate their information, customer frustration rather than satisfaction is the most likely outcome.
  
• Great CX is consistent: According to Forrester, 95% of customers use three or more channels to interact with a company in a single service interaction. Their experience is shaped not by how great their interaction is with a single channel, but rather by a cluster of interactions across multiple channels. This means that whichever digital experiences are delivered, they must not only be top-notch in and of themselves, but also truly omnichannel and unified so that customers can transition seamlessly between various channels without having to reenter information or repeat steps. This requires a deep level of data integration so that applications can harness data from multiple systems across the company—CRM systems, core systems and legacy applications. It also requires the creation of applications that allow customer service reps to access real-time customer data easily to service customers effectively when customer inquiries require human intervention.
  
• Great CX is personalized: Two top reasons why customers abandon digital user journeys are having to navigate a lot of information to find what they are looking for and having to deal with complex forms that require too much manual typing. Again, it is critical to leverage customer data in order to deliver personalized experiences and avoid asking customers to reenter information.
  
• Great CX generates delight: Customer expectations keep rising and customer needs keep changing. Ensuring that the business keeps pace and continues to find new ways to delight customers is critical. This means continuously collecting customer data from applications, iterating on them to remove friction and meet emerging customer needs, and uncovering new ways to delight customers by making their lives easier with new technologies like AI and IoT.

Great digital CX doesn’t live in a vacuum

As this list makes clear, great digital CX spans the entire breadth of enterprise development and does not simply refer to creating new customer applications that look and behave well.

To deliver great CX, multiple areas of digital transformation must be addressed. The communication and orchestration of workflows spanning multiple services and systems must be automated and optimized to create front-office and back-office applications that employees can use easily to respond to customer requests quickly. And aging systems, which might not be delivering the business functionality needed to deliver a great experience on customer applications, must be fully modernized.

The problem is that, typically, software vendors concentrate on only one of the four areas listed above. As a result, off-the-shelf software that approaches complex and interrelated problems on a standalone basis invariably requires complex integrations and extensive workarounds that hamper the delivery of good CX rather than enhance it—and do nothing to reduce the workload on the IT department. Traditional development, on the other hand, means companies take months or even years to build everything they need to achieve their ideal digital CX.

Becoming a truly customer-centric organization—the dream state envisaged by all CIOs—indeed requires the breaking down of technology silos and the dramatic acceleration of the speed of development, but these traditional approaches alone will not be the key drivers of a company’s digital CX transformation.

A new approach to digital CX

The time is right for a modern application platform that tackles the complex challenges of CX transformation at its root, rather than treating the symptoms individually—a platform that unifies and simplifies omnichannel development, so new customer apps for any channel can be created using a single platform and development team to move much faster than traditional development without compromising on flexibility and quality. A platform that delivers consistent, omnichannel customer journeys by easily allowing the reuse of application components across an enterprise’s entire application portfolio; that can streamline and automate the processes that support customer journeys; and that can connect to and extend any system, while allowing legacy systems to be modernized in months instead of years. All of this can enable rapid creation of enterprise-grade applications that are built for change.

Only then will CIOs be able to close—perhaps even eliminate—the gap between what the business is asking of them and what they are realistically able to deliver.

To learn more about key trends and strategies identified by Forrester Research for digital CX and customer self-service in 2021 and beyond, check out this webinar with OutSystems and guest speaker Nigel Fenwick, Forrester VP & Principal Analyst, as we discuss his research on digital business in the age of customer experience. 

_{This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credits: iStock 1150199866}