Customer Experience or CX is the foundation of any digital transformation program. In digital transformation, there are applications, and mobile and web interfaces designed to let customers interact with organizations. The CX part of the program enables customers to go beyond the user interface and access the very personalized products and services offering that are driven by the organization's operational decisions.

Customer Behavior Has Changed

Customers have different journeys and will have different touchpoints with companies, in different stages of their engagements. They have different needs and expectations. For example, new customers will look for different information than a renewal or returning customer. And on top of these, they are constantly comparing the value they get from organizations and comparing products and services with alternatives. And they are always on top of what is happening in the market.

These customers' characteristics and behaviors make it difficult for organizations to provide a mass personalization that provides a significant impact on every individual interacting with them. Building hand-crafted custom solutions for mass is not impossible as it is very expensive and time-consuming, and at some point becomes infeasible; out of budget and time which requires highly skilled resources.

Traditional Approach

On top of these, things are changing outside of the organizations' control. Companies need to provide the mass personalization in a dynamic and competitive marketplace within a framework that is set by internal and external policies as well as changing regulations. Therefore, keeping the hand-crafted solutions and ensuring they are updated with changing conditions and adapting to required changes across all the internal and external information systems for mass personalization is impossible.

Customer experience - CX and traditional approach

The goal of Customer Experience or CX is to create a more engaging journey for customers ensuring they are not stuck along the way and they enjoy their experience. In short, the goal of CX is to improve the customer relationship by providing highly personalized advice, recommendation, offers and services to customers at the same time enabling the company to reduce the service and offering costs for mass personalization.

The required mass personalization for a successful CX provides guided plans for individuals and it closes the gap between companies' capabilities and the customers' outcome.

To get the most from a Customer Experience and provide real values to customers, CX should be designed based on customer's outcome, having the customer-level decision in mind and then enabling companies to switch from product-centric view to customer-centric view. This, in turn, requires companies to be able to do the transformation between capabilities and outcomes at a much faster pace than hand-crafting a digital solution.

Conclusion

In the current landscape of organizations, there are data and information, applications and processes, department, teams, groups, etc.- all working together aiming to deliver the customer outcomes for the masses of individuals. This will put too much pressure on, and expectations from, IT and technology leaders to build and deliver hand-crafted solutions to fill the gap between current capabilities and customers' expectations. Rather in an ideal world, a platform enables operations (i.e. DigitalOps) to maximize the leverage of current organization's capabilities and deliver highly personalized products and services at the right time (situation-ware) for the right customer (customer-centric) without putting all the pressure on IT in adapting to changing requirements of mass personalization.

Last updated July 31st, 2020 at 03:33 pm, Published February 19th, 2020 at 03:33 pm