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Customer experience is an essential part of customer service, and digital transformation initiatives across the board must be firmly anchored in customer-led considerations. Customers expect to be served in an anytime-anyplace world, and on devices of their choice, compelling enterprises to upgrade their infrastructure in tandem with service levels.
There is also a need for enterprises to offer omni-channel services to customers, unifying experiences in the physical and the virtual worlds. IDC expects that by 2020, 40% of leading brands will offer their customers continuous digital customer experiences that span both in-store and out-of-store; the brands will enhance their physical products and locations with augmented digital properties that are visible to mobile technology users.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), for example, bet that successful banking is predicated on trust, with meaningful customer interactions at its core. It sought to provide these interactions in a relevant, timely, and consistent manner across 18 connected channels, including call centre, branch, online banking, mobile, email, SMS, chat, ATM, and direct mail. The bank integrated learning through every interaction with customers from across the organisation, to make intelligent, coordinated decisions in real-time and in a channel-agnostic fashion.
A truly transformative customer experience (CX) requires attention to specific elements in the customer service spectrum to undergo significant changes.
Such access to services requires the cloud, and presupposes that the single greatest concern with the cloud has been addressed: security. Large volumes of customer data today are stored — or at least processed — in the cloud, and ensuring security as well as the privacy of this data is essential in guaranteeing long-term business.
Not surprisingly, IT teams are often in the dark about what cloud services are being used by business functional teams. It is essential that IT has cloud usage visibility, ensuring compliance by revealing how data is being moved to and from the cloud, by whom, and where it is being stored. Armed with an appropriate security solution, they can enforce several types of security controls, including encryption, device profiling and credential mapping when single sign-on is not available.
Compliance is another aspect of CX that is vital to keeping the business operation accessible to consumers. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and PDPA encourages data to be easily accessible on one platform to enable companies to support data requests, deletion, anonymisation, and reporting on data. These privacy standards give the businesses an increased marketing leverage to focus spend on compliance that also delivers an opportunity to truly transform the customer experience.
Complete confidence in the way customer data is handled and having the right security technologies and protocols in place is a platform on which future innovation can be built.
Latency and speed of transactions can affect the bottom line as well as brand reputation. A fundamental way of ensuring that lag and bandwidth issues do not hog services is making sure that data centres deliver security, collaboration solutions, and the seamless integration of traditional and emerging technologies such as cloud and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).
This data centre modernisation ensures quick deployment of products and applications needs modern, responsive and digitally-ready data centres that allow scaling of services and elasticity of traffic to cater to the demanding consumers.
As enterprises roll out multiple products with shorter life cycles, DevOps has become a leading model in software development and deployment. Data centres need to keep up with the needs of the rest of the IT infrastructure stack, and ensure that operational efficiencies are constantly improved. This will directly impact customers as they are final consumers of services that need to be reliably delivered at breakneck speeds.
E-commerce, gaming, and other traditional desktop-centred engagements have gone mobile over the past decade. Interactive and rich mobile apps place high demands on processing and network resources — especially those related to transaction-heavy activities. An agile, software-defined network (SDN) paradigm can help in mitigating many of the problems surrounding traditional networks, and plugs well into a cutting-edge ecosystem of technology services that are also central to mobile experiences and digital transformation initiatives.
The flexibility and deep insights offered by SDN and its associated monitoring services allow for quick remediation of network faults, keeping consumer services largely unaffected by infrastructure-related complications.
What this implies for enterprises is that they need to get their cloud strategies, network infrastructure, and data centre resources working together seamlessly to support customer experience management. The end user needs consistent, predictable, and uninterrupted access to services, and a robust IT infrastructure stack is the cornerstone of delivering such experiences.
Digital transformation initiatives that seek to take customer experience to the next level are built atop a solid digital platform that is able to grow with the business and its customer base. Every interaction and consumer touchpoint is data-driven, enabled by a core of infrastructure, development, integration, and orchestration solutions at the enterprise’s back-end.
Contact us to take customer experience to the next level.
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