The Top 8 Strategic Technologies for the Customer Experience

For a business to stay ahead of the competition these days, it should continuously look for ways to meet the ever evolving requirements of the customers. The top strategic technologies for the customer experience help a business to thrive in the tough competition these days.
 

Customer experience heads and chief customer officers believe that only fifty percent of the projects that they oversee involve technology. On the other hand, IT leaders and CIOs believe it’s nearer to eighty percent. Both agree that the wide array of technologies that could be brought to bear to face the challenge is huge. Some technologies provide more impact than others, some more tactical in how they are used. The list of technologies that help boost and support the customer experience is a growing and long one.

Emerging technologies are set to break out and disrupt business models this year. The unprecedented connectivity between the plethora of devices that tap intelligence from smart devices would drive a dramatic transformation. The results include business advances and dazzling user experiences. Consider the top eight strategic technologies for the customer experience below.

 

1. Business process management or BPM. Is a systematic approach to make the workflow of an organization more efficient and effective, as well as more capable of adapting to the ever-evolving environment. A business process is an activity or a set of activities that accomplish the certain goal of an organization. The BPM’s goal is to minimize human error, miscommunication and to focus stakeholders on their roles’ requirements. It is furthermore a subset of infrastructure management, which is an administrative area that deals with the maintenance and optimization of the equipment of a business and the core operations.

2. Voice of the customer. Is a process that is used in capturing the feedback and/or requirements from the customer to provide them with the best in class product quality and service. This is all about being constantly innovative and proactive in capturing the changing needs of the customers. The term voice of the customer is used to describe stated and unstated requirements of the clientele. It could be capture in several ways, including surveys, direct discussion or interviews, customer specifications, focus groups, warranty data, observation, complaint logs, field reports and more. The data is used to identify the needed quality attributes for a supplied material or component to integrate a product’s process.

3. Customer analytics. Often, customer analytics is managed by an interdisciplinary group composed of business owners from various departments within an organization. The group includes sales, marketing, customer service, business analysts and IT. To be effective, the group must agree first on which business metrics they need to be able to achieve a single view of the customer experience. Several instances of CRM or customer relationship management applications, poor customer data integration or CDI and disparate enterprise resource planning or ERP could leave the members of the group with a fragmented view of a customer. The customer analytics’ goal is to build one, accurate view of the customer for the group to work with and decide on how best to acquire and keep customers. Furthermore, it also helps to identify high-value customers and interact with them proactively.

4. Master data management or MDM. It is an extensive method of enabling a company to link all of its vital data to a single file, which is called the master file. Them file provides a common point of reference. When done properly, MDM simplifies sharing of data among personnel and departments. Additionally, it could also facilitate computing in numerous system platform, architectures and applications.

5. Personalization. Sometimes known as customization, personalization consists of tailoring a product or a service to accommodate certain persons, at times tied to segments of individuals or groups. Numerous organizations use personalization to boost customer satisfaction, marketing results, branding, digital sales conversion and enhanced website metrics for advertising as well. It is a key element in recommender systems and social media.

6. Multichannel customer service. Its aim is to provide the clientele with options on how they like to communicate with a brand, for instance, if they have a query or want to make a complaint. Moreover, it’s also about providing a seamless experience to the customer, whatever the channel they want to use. Behind the scenes, a lot of enterprises may not have joined up customer service channels, but when it comes to the customers, they deal with one company, whether by telephone, online or in a local store.

7. Communication privacy management. Is a systematic research theory that is designed to develop an evidence-base comprehension of the way people decide about revealing and concealing private information. The theory suggests that individuals coordinate and maintain privacy boundaries with different communication partners, depending on the perceived costs of information disclosure and benefits.

8. Loyalty management. Is a business model used in the strategic management wherein the company resources are employed to boost customers’ loyalty as well as other stakeholders in the expectation that the business objectives would be met or surpassed. One example of this kind of model is quality of service or product that leads to customer satisfaction, which could lead to customer loyalty and of course leads to profitability