Seeing business through the eyes of the customer means a lot for technology organizations. But, most of them do not think outside-in. The result is unstable customer experience.
Market studies show that reducing the technical gap between CX and CIO team can help to improve an organisation’s customer experience.
For that matter, the technology and CX functions need to be combined, tech professionals should be co-located, and need to create APIs to more easily access technology systems.
Such measures are expected to reduce the physical, mental, and technical gaps between CX and the CIO’s team.
Market research firm Forrester says that tech organizations need to embrace an outside-in perspective and better understand customer language and experiences to help the CX team in their efforts to improve customer experiences.
At the same time, CIOs should base their teams’ key performance indicators on customer outcomes.
Companies typically measure tech organizations on traditional IT metrics — availability, uptime, on-time delivery, and automation of manual processes — not revenue, profit, customer outcomes, or improved productivity.
Conversely, CX teams often don’t naturally think of the tech organization at all — and don’t understand what it’s capable of or its relevance to CX initiatives.
For better collaboration to achieve common goal, Forrester recommends CIOs to –
Train their team on customer metrics and language, opening all possible learning windows for them.
Think beyond a slow and steady delivery approach to align to CX expectations. Ensure that CX team is involved regularly in delivering strategy.
Brief CX teams on future technology projects. If you regularly brief the CX team on upcoming technology projects even before they kick off, then CX can design changes knowing what future technology iterations and capabilities may affect customer experiences and outcomes.
The last recommendation is most important. It says to put the customer at the center of the technology strategy.
Most tech strategies list the business priorities and how the tech organization will help the business meet these priorities. But without a customer lens, they can just feel like a series of technology projects.
Source: Forrester
