IoT is the secret behind great CX

Businesses are feeling the pressure to keep up in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing world. Empowered by new ideas and digital innovations, a wave of customer-centric start-ups are threatening established businesses across broad swathes of industry verticals.

While the challenges faced by individual organisations differ widely, there is a growing consensus that positive customer impact is inextricably tied to revenue growth and brand loyalty. To succeed, businesses must focus on this common denominator and position themselves to deliver unrivalled customer experience.

How can organisations pivot towards a customer-centric approach? The first prong is undoubtedly be a willingness to self-disruption, which is best described as changing the status quo on your own terms. Though a challenging step for established businesses to take, the alternative is to do nothing until the organisation is disrupted and rendered irrelevant by a nimbler competitor.

Self-disruption will require a willingness to rethink the entire business and why customers should come to you. After all, great companies don’t simply focus on the products or services that they provide, but look instead to the larger picture of what customers want to achieve with these products and services.

The second prong is more practical and entails breaking down data silos and critically evaluating the systems currently in use, as well as an examination of pre-existing orthodoxies about value creation and value capture. Specifically, they must be open to leverage new cloud-based or cloud-enabled capabilities that offer superior scalability, can be deployed at the drop of a hat, and don’t require costly upfront investments.

For instance, technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) can deliver new capabilities to learn more about your customers and give your customer service a boost. Examples range from supermarkets with time saving “walk through” self-checkout counters, to retail shops with access to real-time inventory data to secure more sales.

IoT can also be leveraged to improve the customer experience and brand loyalty for organisations that are not typically seen as customer-facing, such as a firm leasing industrial machinery or office appliances. Machinery faults could be wirelessly logged, and a service call scheduled automatically by the vendor – perhaps even before the customer is aware of a problem.

The ability to gather continuous streams of data from IoT-enabled products can help businesses better understand the needs of their customers. This treasure trove of data can be processed by advanced data analytic tools to improve business operations and service offerings for the strongest customer experience – and to boost revenue.

Networks of sensors powered by IoT technology can also create new opportunities to serve customers in fresh and unique ways, from asset tracking to fleet telematics, from smart logistics to utility metering. Indeed, IoT can create completely new business models and service opportunities.

Of course, IoT devices cannot exist by themselves but must be backed by the requisite core infrastructure - one that is highly flexible and agile with scalable, on-demand compute capacity. This is essential to deliver good customer experiences, in response to the fast changing, fluid demands. 

Cloud computing is highly ideal to drive this kind of infrastructural support when serving customers. With access to cloud resources, even enterprises with complex hybrid cloud or multi-cloud deployments can respond to sudden spikes in customer demand by rapidly scaling their storage, compute capacity, and bandwidth. 

The cloud makes this possible in a seamless customer engagement experience, without disruption or delay to the transaction and service. Mobile applications or web interfaces that lag or freeze is now a thing of the past - with private network routes that offer robust resilient connectivity even when network traffic is heavy.

One lesson to be gained from the endless barrage of headlines about cybersecurity incidents and data breaches is that digital security needs to be ratcheted up to avoid disruptions to customer service when systems are hacked, and to ensure that customer data remain safe.

It is no longer adequate to only protect endpoints or to focus one’s cyber defences around appliances such as the firewall. Good cybersecurity involves multiple defences to guard against business disruptions, including DDoS mitigation against denial of service (DoS) attacks, or intrusion prevention systems against insidious advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks, to name a few. Thankfully, these capabilities can be implemented through the cloud for versatility and cost efficiency.

Ultimately, the onus of building a customer-first business lies with every employee within the organisation. But with the right tools and capabilities, establishing a positive customer experience for greater brand loyalty and affinity is within reach.

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