Despite all the talk about customer experience being a top priority for enterprises, fact is, customers continue to be a frustrated lot. I can tell, based on my ongoing conversations with CIOs from across the globe, that there’s genuine intent (and investment) behind this talk. However, the fact of the matter is, outcomes remain elusive for most enterprises and unhappy customers are a reality.
This leads us to the obvious question – how are enterprises planning to crack this customer experience conundrum? Well, the clear and straightforward answer is, investment in new technologies. This is confirmed by a recent Greyhound Research study titled, Global CEO Priorities 2018, over 87% cited investment in new technology as their priority for next 12 months.
However, therein lies the paradox. Enterprises have to realize that customer experience is not a function of technology. An increased focus and investment in technologies such as machine learning, or AI, or IoT, or analytics will not help if the underlying foundations are broken. On the contrary, it muddles the problem even further.
We at Greyhound Research believe, enterprises unable to solve customer pain points despite having the latest technology, are typically faced with 5 critical gap areas namely Data, Process, Skills, Training and Governance.
Enterprises continue to have inaccessible or disorganized data structures that do not supplement requirements of holistic customer experience. Some of the core underlying processes that ought to complete the customer experience cycle are broken and fraught with siloed systems and functions. Also, the current intense breakneck speed of technology adoption doesn’t leave enterprises with time and energy required to focus on skills and training, leaving them with a workforce that is not equipped to make the most of their technological capability.
Also, what happens is that in absence of a concrete governance structure – by which I mean a mechanism for tracking the ROI for these investments and a structure to support these goals – organizations keep hurtling down the blind alleys, hoping for the light at the end of the tunnel.
Do you really want to see your customers happy? It’s about time you took a hard look the fundamentals of Data, Process, Skills, Training and Governance. Or, same technology in other fundamentally stronger hands will kill your business!
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Analyst:
Sanchit Vir Gogia: Sanchit is the Chief Analyst, Founder & CEO of Greyhound Research, an award-winning global research & advisory firm. To read more about him, click here.
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