When it comes to Customer Experience (CX), silos are your organisation’s greatest weakness and your competitors’ greatest opportunity.
Creating a unified CX across multiple channels and multiple touchpoints is no easy feat for an enterprise, but it’s becoming necessary to sustain a competitive advantage in this consumer-centric age. Customers have access to an unprecedented range of information and choice, meaning that a fragmented customer journey can interrupt a sale or even lose you a loyal customer.
The rise of digital
The number of customer touchpoints has increased substantially as the Internet has matured. New digital channels such as websites, email, social media and mobile applications have presented new opportunities to enterprises, but also challenges. Access to devices such as smartphones and tablets has also changed the ways customers view information. As the big names create fully responsive and mobile-optimized experiences, customers are coming to expect a unified journey across touchpoints when engaging with brands.
Breaking down barriers
All this means that the siloed organisational approach, where data sharing between departments isn’t ingrained into every day operations, is completely outdated. Leaving each communication channel to its own department makes it impossible to consistently and effectively communicate with each individual customer. To be effective, CX needs to break down barriers across your organisation, between the likes of marketing, sales and IT.
Achieving CX consistency can be particularly difficult for an enterprise that has different departments in multiple locations. Integration becomes more complex as the company becomes bigger, and a solid, integrated software infrastructure is the only answer.
The CX stack
The software solution underpinning your enterprise and the way it fits together to provide your customers with a consistent CX is absolutely instrumental to the operations of a modern organisation. You need to invest in systems that empower your employees, enabling them to see exactly how, when and why each customer has interacted with the company in the past. You need a set of tools that promotes knowledge sharing internally and the technology to unite all of these systems. Your CX stack should bring together the tools you need to acquire and retain customers, as well as making communication of ideas and processes more efficient.
To find out more about the tools that go into a complete Customer Experience stack, download our ebook.
