With eCommerce and self service chatbots making up a growing percentage of customer touchpoints, today’s customer experience (CX) is primarily a digital endeavor, bringing its distinct challenges, says Lakshmanan Chidambaram, president of Americas strategic verticals at Tech Mahindra,
For starters, on premises, legacy systems that once served as the backbone of customer interactions no longer have the necessary power or flexibility to meet customer demand. As a result, cloud technologies have become the only available solutions today that can handle the billions of data points that underpin a brand’s marketing and CX offerings. Although many companies have already begun their transitions into the cloud ecosystem, few have established cloud infrastructures that maximize efficiency and security while reducing operational costs.
As CIOs and CXOs plan for 2024, aligning CX and cloud strategies should top the list of priorities. Accelerating the adoption and deployment of public cloud platforms and cloud native tools will allow companies to optimize the customer journey and overall operational efficiency. Enterprises looking to deepen customer loyalty, increase sales, and enhance the bottom line through the cloud should consider these factors.
Finding Flexibility
In today’s experience economy, brands deal with an over abundance of dataflows that threaten to drown CX teams. These peaks can be debilitating for businesses dealing with seasonal spikes in demand. One reason cloud infrastructure has become standard for larger brands is the elasticity inherent to the technology. The cloud provides flexibility by allowing users to access information regardless of where they are and empowers them to scale up and down when needed. With the cloud, companies can scale services to fit their needs, as cloud based software as a service solutions generally allow organizations to control usage depending on bandwidth and fluctuating workflows.
The cloud’s flexibility is even more salient considering the ever shifting digital landscape that constantly sees new channels and platforms rise and fall. As consumers flock to a new social media app or eCommerce platform, brands require the flexibility to connect to those channels at a moment’s notice, which is impossible without cloud based tools that are open and interoperable. Ultimately, the ability to turn services on and off whenever and wherever is one of cloud platforms’ greatest value propositions.
Supplying a Seamless Journey
Most, if not all, brands today have some baseline omnichannel capabilities – customers can choose to call customer service, send a direct message on social, or converse with a chatbot depending on their issues and preferences. Channel choice has undoubtedly transformed what it means for a business to be customer centric, but it has not necessarily ushered in a new era of seamless consumer experiences.
Brands seeking modern CX must think beyond channel choice and envision a seamless omnichannel experience. A customer can request support over Twitter and continue that dialogue on the phone with a live agent without having to repeat themselves or retread old information. Only the cloud can connect these fragmented processes and systems so that every customer engagement can help plan the next one.
The cloud can often feel like some nebulous entity that ingests and spits customer data randomly from different data sources. A well architected cloud infrastructure unites disparate data sources so businesses can overcome data chaos and complexities to derive insights about their audiences. As more enterprises unlock the value of data in the cloud in this way, the playing field will be more level between competitors.