Supporting a Successful Customer Experience

Now that you have a road map for creating a strategy, take a step back and think about how a hybrid approach to cloud computing can transform the customer experience. Everything that you do with this new approach to linking IT and business through the cloud should focus on expanding opportunities. So, think about how you can expand the ability to innovate, satisfy customers, and optimize your environment to efficiently deliver those services. In this section, we focus on the elements that lead to an effective customer experience.

Supporting innovation

Most of the exciting innovations in industries come from creating change that transforms the customer experience. In the days before the Internet became the backbone of business services, companies might have innovated by simply calling customers more frequently or packaging products differently. But in the age where business is conducted online and where communities collaborate and online commerce are the norm, companies are discovering that they must use Internet-driven technologies to support innovation.

Cloud computing offers a much richer set of options to companies. For example, a retailer wanting to provide real-time access to images and videos of products anywhere in the world can select a different public cloud provider in each market it serves, thus reducing latency and improving the customer experience. Likewise, another company may combine these public services with new private, service-oriented clouds that allow intellectual property and highly secure data to be managed in the data center. Other companies are discovering that the private cloud can become an engine to support rapid change.

Each new initiative will be supported by a private cloud environment that allows developers to create new, radical applications that might fail quickly or provide a new model to support a business partnership.

Defining the optimal customer experience

Although most companies will first think about the technology and business model options offered by cloud computing vendors, it’s important to put the customer first. The greatest benefit of the hybrid cloud strategy is the way it helps to transform and optimize the customer experience. More and more companies are interacting with their customers online. Customers will judge your company by how well your entire cloud environment performs. Abundant statistics demonstrate that customers who have a poor online experience rarely come back for a second try. Therefore, a hybrid cloud implemented with a strong strategic foundation can help enhance the customer experience.

Optimizing for workloads

Thinking about the depth and breadth of cloud computing offerings can be overwhelming. There are different business models, different platforms, and many different types of services. But at the end of the day, one of the most important considerations is how you handle and manage workloads across your various computing environments. Remember, a workload is a unit of work that you execute to complete a task.

So, from a business-strategy perspective, think about every business activity being supported by a computing workload. Using this perspective helps you get a firmer handle on the right cloud service to support each problem. For example, if you’re managing a workload that has stringent security requirements, a private cloud environment may be more appropriate. There are also some public clouds that will offer security warranties that you will be able to consider to support security requirements. On the other hand, a temporary workload such as extra storage capacity needed for a day or a month can be supported by a commodity public service. By focusing on the nature of workloads, you’re in a better position to create a strategy that matches business requirements.