It takes months to find a customer and only seconds to lose one, or so the saying goes. These days, however, it might be more like milliseconds.
Thanks to on-demand information and services available anytime, anywhere, customers are more empowered than ever before and have sky-high expectations. If your customer is bored or impatient, confused or frustrated, for even just a second, there are a myriad of other choices they can turn to. Gartner predicts by 2020, poor customer experiences will destroy nearly a third of digital business projects, and PwC reports that 73% of customers now point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decision.
In this context, providing a personalized, seamless, predictive customer experience is a core pillar of business success ? and the only way to achieve that is by connecting every part of the enterprise and making sure customers are at the center of all decision-making.
Connection and integration help businesses answer that all-important question — how do I maintain a single view of my customer? The average consumer generates a huge amount of data every day, across a vast range of channels; and in fact, an estimated 90% of the data that now exists was created in the past two years. On social, mobile, desktop and connected TV, consumers are creating masses of data based on their interests, purchases, location and brand sentiment. But when all that data remained isolated in business silos, the view of the customer becomes fragmented.
Uniquely, cloud applications enable a single point of view on customer data. Through the cloud, businesses can tear down silos so that more customer data is collected and shared, in an open and usable way, with everyone in the organization. The integration extends from the frontlines of the business to help marketers create more personalized engagements, all the way to the back-office. Finally, data can be quickly and effectively used to streamline interlocking ERP processes across the supply chain, manufacturing, logistics and more, as well as to inform broader strategic initiatives.
Customer-centricity isn’t just about what customers can see — it’s a way an entire organization works that starts from the inside out. When the existing business environment is integrated and interoperable, without the perils of siloed technology and thinking, continual innovation is finally possible.
Bold organizations are setting an example of improving the customer experience at the front office and driving new innovation at the back office, to go above and beyond for customers in a competitive landscape. They’re doing this with investments in the cloud so that they can use data in a more robust and connected way.
Zalora, the largest e-commerce fashion company in Southeast Asia, is an organization that illustrates how the right back-end system can drive new levels of customer loyalty. It was important for Zalora to have a tool that helps them listen and respond in real-time to each personalized interaction with the customer, extracting the data that matters in customer interactions.
Zalora has moved from a batch and blast model to become an orchestrator of personalized conversations, where they are able to speak to customers in a relevant and tailored manner. Some of the benefits achieved by Zalora include the halving of time needed for a lead conversation to capture a large customer base, resulting in a multifold increase in revenue.
Eco-friendly pest control service, Killem Pest is another fantastic example of a company that is using the connective power of the cloud to provide the best customer experience. Through the cloud, Killem Pest is able to collate requests from customers or potential new leads via a user-friendly portal, email or on the phone. This allows them to effectively manage to resource across scheduled assignments and locations in real time and handle feedback in a proactive manner.
It’s a similar story for Australian airline Jetstar, which is currently leveraging the cloud to enact a company-wide transformation aimed at better engagement with customers on their own terms. A cloud data management platform is helping to provide a more robust, single view on customers so that the business can speak to them as individuals; in the right place and at the right time. Recently, teams were able to unite an email activity with display advertising in order to reach a disengaged customer segment. The result? A growth of up to 70 percent on incremental revenue.
Connected information is the fuel that drives customer-centricity. When businesses connect all the data and all the dots across the organization, they can deliver rich internal insight and provide truly excellent experiences for customers. The next wave of customer service is already here, bringing significantly enhanced experiences to customers and re-defining which companies will come out on top.
The author is the head of apps at Oracle Philippines
