Three Steps CIOs Can Take In Leading The Customer Experience Change For The Modern Business
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Senior Vice President, Strategy & Business Development, responsible for leading Softchoice’s go to market strategy.
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For business leaders today, success in navigating waves of the global pandemic calls on many skills. Not least of which is the ability to anticipate and exceed rapidly changing customer expectations. Working closely with their colleagues across the organization, chief information officers can co-create with the business so that innovation is designed, scaled, deployed and measured in ways that enhance customer experience and drive the organization forward.
Here are three steps CIOs can take in leading CX in their organizations:
1. Innovate customer journey across departments.
Some organizations began their digital transformations before Covid-19 hit, so they were well down that road when the lockdown came. Others, though, had to quickly accelerate their transformations just to stay in business. Either way, organizations need to constantly innovate in order to attract, serve and retain customers looking for a simple, fast, secure and personalized experience. New applications, dynamic online ordering options and same-day pickup quickly became table stakes as customers grew accustomed to getting things almost instantly.
To enable features like these, organizations cannot just innovate their customer-facing applications and systems. Technology and business leaders must understand the entire customer journey, from front end to back end, and make sure that it is completely connected.
Clothier Zara is a great example of this as they recently announced that they would be closing 1,200 stores but investing $3 billion in developing an integrated omnichannel journey. It seems obvious that a project like this requires changes to systems like e-commerce, supply chain and inventory and store operations so nobody would think about launching an effort like this without understanding the full journey. But, too often, on smaller initiatives that thinking gets skipped.
CIOs need to help find the biggest opportunities along that journey to excite customers or to solve their biggest pain points. Fostering an internal culture of innovation is central to this proactive approach to problem and opportunity identification and resolution. And it’s one that calls on partnerships between CIOs and their colleagues across the organization.
2. Design the right data strategy and avoid digital sameness.
In collaborating across the business, CIOs must determine how to harvest, leverage and secure customer data across an integrated CX platform to create a more personalized experience and avoid the digital sameness that is becoming prevalent in many industries. In my experience, such platforms provide better visibility, accessibility and transparency into customer (and operational) data, while also being secure to help mitigate against any number of risks. Being able to generate and interpret real-time data highlights successes and weaknesses, informing and directing specific actions to further enhance the experience of that individual.
Customer trust is front and center in this picture. A study done by McKinsey & Company found that customers will often give up their information if there’s a clear benefit to them, but not if they think their data will be used to manipulate them and/or to constantly push more products and services on them. That reluctance skyrockets in the cases of data breaches and the unfortunate fact is that data breaches are on the rise.
As stewards of data integrity, CIOs know that data security and trust go hand in hand, and they know they can’t violate that trust. Finding a balance between CX innovation and risk mitigation is essential because trust built up over time can vanish in a single click and brand loyalty goes out the window. Once a customer is gone, will they ever return? Maybe, but likely not to the same extent.
Having secure data is not where the job ends, though. Artificial intelligence and related applications are increasingly integral to responsive and responsible CX-related data strategies. But maximum benefit here comes when customer-facing employees have the skills to use these data tools in tandem with their own insights. Therefore, the responsibility is on their employer to provide training. CIOs share in that responsibility. So, when putting new technology in the hands of colleagues, they should inject themselves more into the business and find out how that customer-facing teammate feels in using the tools.
3. Measure together.
Long gone are the days when CIOs and their IT teams blindly built dashboards, handed them over to marketing or sales and then moved on to the next IT upgrade. Today, as business leaders, CIOs should be at the table with colleagues across the organization and play a key role in designing and deploying innovative ways to measure and enhance CX at all points along the customer journey.
Many CIOs I meet with are crucial in determining core CX measurements, which need to comprise much more than simply customer satisfaction scores. They focus, for instance, on client retention, average revenue per customer, share of wallet, customer acquisition cost and many other factors. Building off their agile platforms, CIOs are measuring their own teams against these key metrics and helping ensure the entire organization is enhancing CX. By extension, the best CIOs think of themselves as revenue generators and have done away with any talk of “internal customers,” because everyone on the team recognizes that serving the end customer is what matters.
CIOs taking this approach understand that there is no better time than now to highlight the expanding value of their teams and their IT strategies. CIOs can get ongoing investments from their C-suite colleagues and the board of directors by clearly articulating the impacts of CX-focused IT strategies as measured by the metrics they help their colleagues in the business co-create and co-monitor.
Embrace innovation to boost CX.
Organizations embracing innovation these days are successfully navigating the many challenges of profound digital transformations. Within them, CIOs are essential players in shaping and driving innovation at all levels and in taking their customer experience to new heights.
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