In the digital age, customers expect seamless experiences from the brands they do Business with, regardless of where or how they buy goods and services. Customers gravitate to personalized interactions and show a preference for companies that anticipate and cater to their unmet needs.
PwC research found that customers are willing to pay a 16% price premium on products and services associated with great experiences – but one in three customers say they’ll walk away from a beloved brand after just one bad encounter. What constitutes a great experience? For some customers, it’s inputting payment information once upon sign-up and then being able to make a purchase with a single swipe or click. For others, it’s receiving product recommendations based on previous purchases, being notified of localized offers when they are in or near a physical store, or simply receiving personalized communications.
Business leaders, recognizing the importance of elevated Customer experiences, are looking to the CIO and their IT teams to help harness the power of data, predictive analytics, and cloud resources to create more engaging, seamless experiences for customers. Those needs are influencing IT investment priorities and elevating the CIO’s role in Customer experience initiatives. More than three-quarters (77%) of IT leaders surveyed in the 2022 State of the CIO study said their direct interactions with customers increased last year, and 57% expect their involvement in customer experience will grow further in the coming year. Business leaders in the survey said improving customer experience (CX) was their CEO’s top priority for IT in the year ahead.
“Line of business owns the customer experience, but IT is a critical partner to the business,” says Miriam McLemore, Director of Enterprise Strategy and Evangelism with AWS. “Having technology and business walking hand in hand to deliver a capability is absolutely critical, and business leaders that understand this get a lot more done.”
As a result, IT and business leaders are working together on data-driven initiatives, buttressed through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to create more value for customers, which in turn creates more value for the business.
“Data has become the currency of so many organizations in understanding and delivering value for their customers,” says McLemore, who before joining AWS served as corporate CIO at Coca-Cola Co. “CIOs need to partner much more closely with line of business to deliver data insights and tools that provide visibility into the customer journey and help create interesting value propositions that excite their customers.”
3 ways CIOs can help the business raise the bar on CX
Most business and IT leaders understand the value of getting closer to customers. But how can they actually build a CX mindset into broader digital transformation efforts? Consider three key areas of focus:
1. Embed CX into your data strategy. To tap insights that can help elevate the customer experience, CIOs first need to modernize their approach to managing, accessing, analyzing, and acting on data. This transformation includes cloud-based data infrastructure, unifying silos of data sources across the organization, and applying analytics and AI/ML to find new and improved ways to engage customers and reduce friction in their interactions.
Philips, a leading health technology company, built a new platform on AWS called the Philips HealthSuite Platform that unifies data from devices in clinics, hospitals, and patients’ homes to improve patient experiences and outcomes, in compliance with data security protocols and industry privacy regulations. Philips teams across the company use Healthsuite to build ML models that help the company’s healthcare customers unlock data insights, including clinical predictions and operational forecasts.
