Why silos can stymie a great customer experience
As CXO, you’re all about the experience. It’s up to you to ensure that your customers (and employees) experience such positive feelings about your brand that it results in long-term loyalty.
But when your data is in segregated silos, that can be a challenge.
Let’s imagine that you're not across your service incidents – through no fault of your own. You simply have zero transparency of what’s happening in your service centre. But in the meantime, the business has a product ready to push out to market despite not really knowing how effective it is and how customers will respond to it.
To give a simple example: You’re a manufacturer who has decided to make a branded power bank. Everyone needs one, so theoretically, success is assured. You’re just making one version which supports a USB 2.0 plug. However, as you don’t have access to customer feedback and can’t see what other devices they’ve purchased, so you’re unaware that they want power banks with USB Type-C. Subsequently you invest time, materials and effort into a product that virtually no-one wants. And to boot, your customers question your relevance in the market.
If you don’t have your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, feedback, and purchasing history, you’re operating in a dangerous vacuum. From a CXO perspective, you need to make sure you can track if your (new, established, and upcoming) products are relevant, uncover where and why they're not doing well, and what the real-time customer service experience is when there’s a problem.
Irrelevant or ill-conceived products, disgruntled customers who are waiting too long for a response to their service issue and have no way to escalate a problem outside of normal business hours, are all signs that you’re not providing an experience that will have people clambering for more. Your service centre agents are probably none too happy either.
If you don’t have visibility of these issues because the data that reports on customer interactions and history aren’t available to you, you’re stymied. Well and truly. And your customers will remain less than impressed with the overall experience.
With technologies like Microsoft’s Dynamics 365, you can not only exit a world of silo pain, but champion the customer (and employee) experience:
- Step up your customer service. By going omni-channel you give your customers round-the-clock access to your business through the channels they want to use when they want to use them. Not the channels you dictate and only during your business hours.
- Give power to your people. By investing in sustainable transformation and bringing your data silos together on one intelligent low-code application platform, your marketing, sales, and service departments can leverage and share information for greater impact. So, you can ensure that the new service, solution or product you introduce is relevant and resonates with your customers’ needs, identify and market to prospective buyers based on their interests and purchasing history, and rapidly pick up on and resolve solution or product issues ensuring no nasty surprises.
And as CXO, it’s going to be easier to deliver on the experiences that make a tangible difference to your business.
