Leveraging Next-Gen Operating Models To Enhance Customer Experience

As technology continues to emerge, digital transformation is no more just a popular buzz phrase. It is the most robust trend that is transforming the whole digital ecosystem by gently stirring the technologies, business strategies, culture and the process to drive digital innovation. As per Gartner’s survey report, CEOs consider digital transformation as their top priorities and already 56% of them state that it has increased their business revenue and efficiency.

Being digital necessitates enterprises to reinvent and align their customer experience by creating innovative upshot that can meet customer’s demands. Besides driving revenue, technologies have also changed the customer engagement models as a whole. To stay competitive in the evolving digital world, meeting customer expectations has become a focal point for every organization. Gartner’s 2017 research says, “the next-gen operating models will furnish massive opportunities for digital business to meet customer’s new demands. Along with a lot of advancement in the technologies, it is also going to cause a huge disruption in the most of the business process.” It also said enterprises which can transform rapidly to meet customer’s demand, deliver the experience and bring out disruptions will not only win the digital race but also apprehend the new sources of value.

Technologies have touched everyone. Being accessible to everyone (customers and employees), technology has amplified the level of expectation for every interaction between an enterprise and people. For an enterprise to outperform it is essential for them to focus on customer experience as well as on employee experience to sustain. As technologies have empowered users, they demand more and share far more about their experiences at home and in office. Therefore, every business leader should consider making the customer experience the top priority in their strategic planning. The strategic planning should include two major points, understanding the customer’s value and the challenge to put it into the business process for the improvements. While keeping the experience at the center of the plan, CX leaders also need to understand the ‘Post-Millennials’ and the impact they are going to make for the future organization.

“By 2025, the number of consumer goods items (SKUs) that consumers can choose from will increase by 30%” –Gartner

Next-Gen Operating Models

Strategizing company’s future is not simple as it sounds, designing and digitizing customer journeys also create challenges for an enterprise. They have to manage operations, keep a track of omnichannel performance and thus coordination becomes a big task. The conventional operating models had a downside of focusing only on the internal capabilities whereas, next-gen operating models are designed to focus more on customer’s need. Of course, there are challenges, but next-gen operation models can usher huge opportunities for an organization to increase the speed and develop agility in the business process.

-Gartner

As customer experience remains on the priority list of the business leaders, Gartner’s 2017 research report has two different perspectives for the future organization.

• How enterprises will execute technology to enhance CX in the future: Customer analytics, web content management, business process management and master data management are going to increase technology investments in the next 12 months. Technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) 3D printing, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and wearables are set to entirely restyle many sectors over the following five years. It is predicted that the connectivity is likely to change enterprise’s view of customers. In the long term, the use of scenario planning reveals that a trend to use algorithms, in contrast to experts as a means of value creation, when mapped against a trend toward subscription access rather than ownership will create new business models based on differing CX types.
• How the customer experience will change with the use of technology in specific industries: The retail, consumer goods, high-tech, and telecommunications sectors have long invested in technology to improve the customer and brand experience. Their focus is on Generation Z. Although media and market research companies have labeled them as “screen addicts” with short attention spans, in reality, they are a financially conservative and research-oriented group, and keen to maximize their impact on a global scale. Insurers, universities, utilities, government departments, and healthcare companies are now also facing similar challenges, but each industry faces unique technical and organizational challenges.

This research result will help all the C-suite to comprehend the importance of customers and how to use technology to pull customer experience into their operations. Once the C-suites are able to comprehend all these, implementing it into the process to satisfy all the customers is not going to be a cake walk. Remember! Even though you have satisfied your customer at multiple touch points but in the end, it’s not enough to ‘wow’ them. To create a significant customer journey, customer’s needs and their preferences should become the company’s objectives.

-Customer journey at the individual touchpoints by McKinsey & Company.

It’s no more a secret that technology has created a huge impact on all the business models. We saw a drastic change in customer’s behaviors as the digital world continues to evolve, which is where we have seen enterprises changing their focal point in order to understand their customer’s need. With these adoptions, monitoring, and examination of new technologies, digital leaders recognize how these new technologies can be used on the CX of the future and how it can improve the CX for their organization.

Digitization has brought so much value and opportunities for the enterprises to gain the experience from. It has helped them to create a great customer journey and delight their customer’s experience. Already 41% of enterprises are expecting to increase their investments in customer analytics in 2017, which is higher than any other technology type as per Gartner research. Understand your customer’s need and build a customer journey map by keeping the customer experience at the top on your strategy list. Your business performance depends on the how well you can retain your customers by using new technologies like bots, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and so many more and create a ‘wow’ moment in every interaction with your organization.