Digital technologies are transforming every aspect of our lives and human experiences. Innovation is booming and businesses are moving faster than ever trying to keep up with customer and employee expectations.
Technology has empowered customers as never before. They are now dictating the rules of purchasing and expect from all players the same level of efficiency, performance, personalisation and convenience as from industry leaders such as Google and Amazon.
If a company fails to deliver on these expectations, customers simply walk away.
Customer experiences
According to a recent study by Gartner, when making a purchase 64% of people find customer experience more important than price. At the same time, research conducted by American Express reveals that millennials are willing to spend up to 21% more to get great customer service.
Furthermore, a report released by Accenture shows that companies that get customer experience right outperform their competitors and generate higher revenues by 11%.
Under these circumstances, organisations have no choice but to make CX a critical business priority and invest significant resources in order to deliver on customers’ expectations and demands.
As a result, a significant number of companies rushed to acquire the latest technology and tools that promised to deliver best in class customer experience. However, many now realise that they can’t offer stellar customer experience without also considering the employee experience.
Employee experiences
The old adage, happy employees make happy customers has never been more relevant than in today’s ultra competitive business landscape where even a small mistake can derail a company’s progression and growth.
Many businesses currently operate in sectors where attracting and retaining talent is increasingly challenging. Offering superior employee experience is a significant competitive advantage that many companies are trying to use nowadays in order to increase staff loyalty and engagement.
In order to provide high quality customer, and employee experience senior business leaders are deploying complex and sophisticated strategies, investing millions of pounds in state of the art technology, platforms and tools.
But despite the invested resources and capital many organisations still fail at providing a seamless, engaging and consistent experience to both customers and employees.
Many CEOs, CIOs, CTOs and other senior executives are struggling to find the faulty elements in their strategy or technology that render their effort moot.
The answer lies with human experiences
Many companies do not deliver the expected and promised customer and employee experiences because they fail to identify and understand their journeys.
In order to garner customers’ and employees’ loyalty and engagement the C-suite needs to focus on the complete, end-to-end experience individuals have with the company. Too many companies focus on individual interaction touch points or tech specs forgetting that the user journey spans a progression of touch points.
In this day and age, companies need to excel across the board, both internally and externally.
Offering a good product but a poor customer experience, or good working environment but underperforming working tools, is no longer enough if a company wants to survive and thrive in a highly complex and competitive business climate.
Complex digital eco systems
However, considering the sophisticated and intricate digital ecosystems companies manage, finding the faulty elements that prevent them from increasing efficiency and offer a high quality customer experience is almost impossible.
Making things even more complicated is the fact most of an organisation’s digital platforms, tools and networks are outsourced to third party providers where business leaders have no visibility and lack the ability to control the full extent of their infrastructure. Even if they ask for a performance report, they will only receive data and metrics that focus on engineering performance of a specific piece of technology.
In order to elevate the user experience, both internally and externally, companies need to focus on how all elements of the digital ecosystem – IT, third party networks, data centres, applications, tools, digital systems and platforms – fit together and affect how humans interact with the business at various and numerous touch points.
Human experiences analytics
Thankfully, nowadays senior executives can use analytics tools that focus on the human experiences and deliver razor sharp insights regarding each technical roadblock that hampers efficiency, productivity and organisational performance.
Armed with an analytics tool that can perform millions of calculations per minute and uncover the cause of any technical bad behaviour in real time, business leaders can cut through the complexity of the digital ecosystem and analyse the whole infrastructure through the human experience lens.
In this way, they eliminate guesswork, save time and address any potential issues in the shortest time.
By constantly monitoring the digital ecosystem and how it affects human interaction with the business, senior executives can deliver flawless services to both internal and external customers.
While new technology is exciting and many organisations want to ensure they explore new trends to gain a competitive edge, if the digital ecosystem is not calibrated to make customers’ and employees’ lives easier by removing friction, delays and inefficiencies, the company might find that it has wasted critical resources and assets, and still can’t deliver the desired business outcomes.