Businesses are still lagging in providing a unified customer experience because they don’t understand each customer as an individual. In this competitive business environment, they need to understand and think of measures to transform their customer experience ecosystem, that include customers, employees, partners, and its overall IT infrastructure of the company.
Recognizing the importance of a unified customer experience, businesses have started rethinking what it means to be customer-centric. This means they must present themselves as a unified experience from the customer’s viewpoint, including the unification of the front-end and the back-end software application as well.
Companies often make the mistake of thinking that a uniform experience is equivalent to a unified experience. This confusion leads them to take decisions which alienate the customers from their perceived goals. Currently thinking IT Infrastructure as a postscript for customer experience will be like digging a grave, instead by proactively managing it, one can leverage it as a differentiator.
A uniform experience consists of the same visual design, representation, upgrading the IT infrastructure to latest technology and messaging across all channels. It uses the same content across all the touchpoints and ensures all the features or functionalities are available in all touchpoints. But at the same time, it restricts the customers from leveraging the channel and device capabilities.
A unified customer experience, on the other hand, allows business to express their brand image through right visuals and messaging. It automatically optimizes the content accordingly to the channel specific requirements while targeting the features and functionalities of the channel. Customers can leverage the unique channel capabilities to provide a relevant experience.
Organizations can lead their unified CX initiatives through:
Provide a single sign-on process to achieve CX
Single sign-on is a powerful process that links all your applications and websites with a single login credential. It acts as a layer between the customer and your business, as it creates a single centralized profile of a customer that is more just a synopsis of the information of your different applications and websites.
Single sign-on facilitates a single view of the customer to analyze and deduce the contextual information that your customer is looking out for. Businesses can help their customers get things done across different touchpoints, without thinking about the device or platform when the customer can pick it up from where they left off across any device or platform.
Employ omnichannel approach across organization
Customers have become more self-aware about their unique requirements and the multiple channels available to fulfill those necessitates. They expect their interactions across the multiple channels to be personalized and tailored rather than accept one solution for all.
The goal of an omnichannel approach is to enable customers to choose where and how they want to interact and provides consistency of information across the various touchpoints including laptops, mobiles, tabs etc. They want continuity and access to relevant information when transitioning across them while maintaining the brand image of the company.
CX professionals are important
CX professionals are leading the way through their expertise in delivering a unified CX by establishing a standard set of processes and designs that align with the customer’s end goals, overall strategy, and brand attributes. They help in tracking and using metrics that measure the overall customer experiences across various channels. CX professionals help maintain a reusable repository of library content and assets, thus meet the internal standards and usability best practices that can be easily repurposed to fit the needs of other groups.
Facilitate cross-silo connections
Organizations must oversee that the different projects across various departments, business units, channels, and touchpoints, have a central team of CX professionals, who can understand the processes and approaches that different teams take and provide guidance when they move away from the customer goals and strategies. They facilitate cross-silo connections that may not happen otherwise.
Have a CX strategy plan in place
A clear digital CX strategy reflects the company strategy, its brand image and how it meets the customer’s needs. It spells out how the CX professionals provide guidance in its implementation and execution. It translates the company’s customer promises into key factors that direct the activities that matter most to the customers.
Shifting from CX to IT infrastructure, it is a pertinent call that customer experience cannot be neglected.
Every application entails the right blend of high performing IT infrastructure elements for exceeding end user expectations. IT Infrastructure drives performance of a customer service without any hesitation.
Several customers conveyed signals of improvement in their experience as the time spent (using in managing monitoring tools) decreases with implementation of a unified approach. A flexible IT infrastructure architecture and high end approach towards customer centric as well as supporting new technologies with designated agile yet unified approach deliver a superb credible customer experience.
Adopting a unified customer experience strategy across the organization is a challenging process that involves strong backing from the leaders, process maturity, appropriate tools, and technologies to succeed.