Seeing the future in customer service
“Though some companies have done excellently on CX – notably Amazon, which has a very good tech stack across all departments – many companies have not been able to achieve it because they have multiple silos,” says Suvish Viswanathan, head of marketing for UK and Europe at Zoho. “There are different teams responsible for building the website, delivering the customer experience, sales calls, customer service – and there are finance and marketing teams involved.”
“Over time, the technology debt has grown,”
Viswanathan adds. “Each function has software important for its own purpose, and this software works in silos such as accounting, CRM and so on. How do you bring all this together? That is where the first challenge comes. “You need a single pane of glass through which to look at a customer profile, so the tools must work together and give multiple teams the same visibility. The integration required between internal systems from different vendors can add complexity.”
A path through the CX minefield The results of Gartner’s latest CX survey show that 63% of business leaders believe that to build customer loyalty, their CX teams must be primarily focused on creating new and innovative experiences for their customers. On the other hand, only 30% of CX leaders feel they strike a good balance between fixing current areas of customer dissatisfaction and exploring new ideas and projects. This ‘fix-first’ strategy has limited positive impact on customer loyalty. The survey further highlighted that 95% of business leaders believe CX teams must deliver a superior or world-class customer experience – but most CX leaders doubt their current project selection strategy can attain these goals. In fact, over 70% of CX leaders struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty and achieve results. There is a fundamental need to build flexibility into the CX technology stack, but much also depends on internal policies and shifts in the external regulatory environment.
“Companies must cope with policy problems, data privacy laws in different countries and a host of other local laws, so they need to know that technology vendors are compatible – and will stay compatible – with those,” says Viswanathan. “That process of adapting adds complexity and can give a broken experience to customers. It can also be a challenge for employees, as they have to draw data manually from different tools. It can be a hard gap to bridge.” Large enterprises often find themselves being reactive to changes, rather than taking a proactive approach to enhancing CX, but choosing the right technology environment to deliver top-class CX and deliver agility can turn that around. But the challenges of different models are not always clear
Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
from the start, so great care needs to be taken in the decision-making process.
“Combining best-of-breed solutions is not always a bad choice,” believes Viswanathan. “These solutions solve a point problem and there are integration services/APIs to bring products together on a dashboard. The problem is that APIs provide limited information and limited flexibility – they are not equivalent to native integration – so maintaining the integration between solutions can be a problem.” In this environment, someone needs to be constantly ensuring that the APIs are working, and managing the compatibility of different versions of each solution as they evolve. This can often be where the best-of-breed fails for non-tech companies, as it is hard to stay up-to-date with changes. “Choosing a single platform with native integration has obvious advantages, but all eggs are in one basket if the vendor’s service goes down, so the entire business could come to a standstill,” adds Viswanathan. “Also large enterprises cannot switch tools easily, as they may be locked into multi-year contracts. Cost, dependency, flexibility and upgrading are all key factors to consider.”
Questions are the key
A positive customer experience can help improve customer retention and loyalty, as well as converting customers into loyal brand advocates. It depends partly on understanding customer data, partly on making CX matter to business leaders within the organisation, and partly on having the right tools – for the right price – to enable improvements to be made. So what are the essential elements of a successful unified CX platform? What questions should an organisation ask before choosing a delivery model and selecting a vendor? Viswanathan believes that there are just a few fundamental considerations.
“You need the flexibility to integrate and exchange data with other systems, such as finance systems, so you have to look at integration beyond the CX and CRM tools themselves.”
Suvish Viswanathan, Zoho
“The first step is to look at this as one single problem to solve, though it does have many smaller components,” he remarks. “Look at it holistically, not as a sales problem, for example. Then you can find the right tools and define the right culture, which plays a big role. Tools are just enablers, but culture is the core of it as it defines what kind of CX you want to give. That depends on corporate vision, which needs to percolate down to different teams.”
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Suvish Viswanathan, head of marketing in the UK and Europe at Zoho.
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