C-CHANGE GROWTH DRIVERS

• Build a customer operations team that can consider technology investments and usage from a customer-led perspective, as opposed to an internal, functionally siloed one.
• Back-end technology and systems should be as simplified, unified and joined-up as possible to provide the slickest and most effective platform to underpin great Customer Experience (CX).
• Do not fall into widget traps. It is far better to invest in a robust, well-integrated platform that supports integrated, frictionless CX than it is to buy new technology features and functions without understanding the bigger customer picture.
• When it comes to providing great CX, data is the new oil. Most organisations already possess an abundance of data, they just need to be refined properly and used in a way that satisfies regulatory requirements.

Underpinning great CX, which is driven from an external, customer-journey-derived view of the organisation, is technology. Joined-up CX means ensuring the systems and processes at both the back-end (i.e. what goes on behind the scenes inside the organisation) and at the front-end (i.e. what the customer sees), or a mix of technologies covering both aspects, are as integrated, seamless and quick as possible, in the eyes of the customer. Without integrated systems and processes, in both B2C and B2B environments, customers quickly cotton on to the fact that doing business with the respective company can be laborious, inconsistent and even painful.

While the C-change growth engine encourages organisations to adopt an iterative step-by-step approach to customer-led transformation and growth (rather than a linear one), companies should map out their CX and customer journeys before choosing which technology and platforms to keep, remove and add. The ideal state CX should determine the choice of platforms, not the other way around.

A SIMPLIFIED, INTEGRATED BACK-END

In this chapter, we will consider some of the ways in which organisations can align their technology and platforms around CX. The challenge for many organisations in achieving this goal, however, can be immense. Almost without exception, every large- and medium-sized organisation, irrespective of industry sector, has built up layers of complex and interconnected infrastructure often over decades, including business and IT software applications, servers, routers, firewalls, databases, IT security systems and infrastructure management. Also, technical debt is a major issue – with more software applications, more (often redundant) lines of code are generated, meaning more processing time and therefore slower system speeds. Most organisations are desperately trying to simplify their technology estate while migrating large amounts of applications and data to the cloud. Providing joined-up, slicker and faster CX requires a lot of investment in people, and sometimes financial investment in a new technology to replace multiple old ones.

Making things simpler for the customer has not always been in the DNA of technology departments. No IT professional deliberately sets out to give either the internal or end customer a bad experience, but technological systems have traditionally (often with the best intentions) been delivered in siloes. This is either because individual business functions have in the past demanded their own technology systems, or because technology teams themselves have imposed their own (often isolated) views, based on perceived technological or business benefits. In either case, the systems delivered are unlikely to have factored in the impact on the end customer.

Delivering world-class, cross-functional processes and simplifying the technological complexity that underpins these processes are not always the popular choices for business, operations and technology teams. However, this is really the key to improving CX. It is too easy to think that introducing new fancy features, cool functions and latest widgets will solve a bigger issue. However, what the customer wants is a frictionless experience that is as quick and painless as possible.

Ed Thompson, Vice-President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, emphasises that companies should imitate best practice before trying to innovate. The best practice is about keeping things as simple and repeatable as possible. 86% of new efforts to delight the customer don't work! Also, they should consider rationalising their product and system portfolio, because this makes it easier to focus on efforts and deliver the right experience with technology. Finally, they should look to accelerate the delivery speed. Customers want things both fast and frictionless'.

We explore these ideas in this chapter.

PROLIFERATING TECHNOLOGY AND TOO MANY CHOICES

For example, to illustrate the issue of choice and complexity, let us consider Scott Brinker's ongoing work to map out the Marketing Technology (Martech) landscape (see Figure 4.1). He first launched his Marketing Technology Infographic in 2011. At the time, it contained around 150 vendors. The 2019 edition contains over 7000. Figure 4.1 shows a screenshot of the latest version. The choice of systems is bewildering. Imagine then how many more options there might be available to other business functions!

In theory, these systems present marketing departments with multiple ways of carrying out their day to day activities, such as driving more demand, improving project management, delivering effective advertising campaigns or running more successful events. They even purport to help teams deliver better customer and digital experiences, maintain healthier customer relationships and more successful client outcomes.

As mentioned, when it comes to providing great CX, it is more important to think about how to integrate and simplify technology before investing in new tools to deliver additional features and functions. That said, in some cases, certain applications can deliver a significant business advantage. Therefore, it should be considered as part of delivering better CX, a key component of the overall drive to customer-led growth. Later in this chapter, we will consider how to align technology around the client experience and provide some examples of best-of-breed applications.

SALES AND MARKETING: STOP USING TECHNOLOGY TO GAZE DOWN FUNNELS AND ALONG PIPELINES!

In the Growth chapter, we discussed why looking at sales as the primary source of growth is short-sighted and why the ‘funnel-pipeline’ model is no longer fit-for-purpose in the Customer Economy. It is interesting to note that the marketing automation platforms (e.g. Marketo, Pardot and Eloqua) that underpin most programmatic marketing campaigns today purport to offer ‘better customer experiences’. In fact, in most cases, they merely provide more sophisticated ways of tracking individuals' (primarily digital) interactions with a vendor. Indeed, the leading analyst firm Gartner puts them in the ‘customer relationship CRM lead management’ category. This is a far more accurate description of such systems. In the worst-case day-to-day scenario, these systems merely offer a sophisticated form of e-mail delivery and web registrations. The net result? More siloed thinking and marketing further disconnected from CX – the opposite of what marketing, according to Levitt, originally set out to do!

Even customer relationship management (CRM) systems, once heralded as the vanguard of customer-led business strategies and customer-centric technology decisions, have been misused to the point of creating bad CX. Most organisations using systems such as salesforce.com are often faced with multiple and differently structured CRM instances, multiple customer sets and missing/outdated customer data. Often, this has been due to company acquisitions.

In a recent interview, Jeremy Cox, SAP Principal Analyst at Ovum, suggested that traditional CRM systems would simply not be able to address the biggest customer-facing challenges.

In fact, according to Ed Thompson, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner., ‘the vast majority of CRM projects have no benefit to the customer’.

A CRM with no benefit to the customer? Yes, you heard it correctly. That is almost always the case in most organisations. This is almost unbelievable when one thinks that Gartner itself defines CRM as: ‘The practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions in order to meet or exceed customer expectations and so increase customer satisfaction, advocacy and loyalty’.

The ITSMA survey 2015 mentioned in the VoC chapter and their subsequent research would indicate that investment is moving away from traditional brand and demand-generation activities into more customer-centric programmes. When it comes to technology, we believe that marketing teams should shift their entire thinking to more customer-aligned systems.

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL, CUSTOMER-LED PROCESSES TO DRIVE TECHNOLOGY DECISIONS

Investing in new technology systems does not, on its own, ensure seamlessly integrated CX. To deliver on this project, a significant investment must be made in integrating existing systems into the new applications and reducing underlying technological complexity. Organisations must recognise that, to achieve this, they will have to make significant investments in cross-functional alignment as well as technological simplification and integration.

Mashreq Bank is a leading Middle Eastern bank. Nitin Bhargava, its Chief Technology Officer and Head of Business Technology, has overseen the integration of multiple applications and data systems to provide a 360-degree customer view (see Figure 4.2). This allows both internal teams and, ultimately, customers to see an entire financial portfolio in one view. This includes current accounts, pensions, insurance, stocks and loans. Even today, banks struggle to simplify the experience in this way for either the internal or external customer. By making this experience as frictionless as possible, it also becomes easier for customers to consider new products and from the bank. This leads to new revenue opportunities for the bank – a win-win! It is important to note that this project represents a significant time and financial investment in defining cross-functional processes and to integrate back-end and customer databases systems accordingly.

WHEN IT COMES TO SEAMLESS CX, DATA IS UNQUESTIONABLY THE NEW OIL

When Clive Humby coined the phrase ‘data is the new oil’ over a decade ago, his main point was that data, like oil, is a valuable commodity as a raw material, but even more valuable when refined. Also, Clive meant that those who procure, control, manage and effectively use data are those that will win in their respective industries. As technology has proliferated, organisations have generally acquired more data. This does not automatically mean that, by having more customer data, companies have better insight about their customers or end-consumers. Clive points out that the CRM revolution 20 years ago made great inroads into understanding and serving customers better. However, he believes that CRM has now moved away from its core purpose and become more of an internal system to manage the business, or best case, make certain interactions (e.g. call centres) operate more efficiently. In fact, CRM systems have, in many ways, only exacerbated the problem of silo-based thinking. Also, they are rarely used to codify the emotional interactions between customer and vendor. For example, in B2B, CRM systems are used primarily to store numerical data about customers with minimal contextual or relationship-oriented information about them.

Ultimately, data should be used to give organisations a far better insight into their customer base, to make smarter decisions about how to serve them better and, therefore, ultimately to drive more sustainable growth. Clive reiterates the point that the digitisation of every industry is changing the dynamics of every business, and the smart use of customer data has become the single biggest source of competitive advantage in this area. ‘If you're a retailer or a bank, you should be scared of Amazon. If you're a bank, you should be scared of open banking. And if you're a private health provider, you should be scared of Fitbit’, notes Clive.

Clive concurs with the idea that the brand of any organisation is now defined by the experience and perception of the company by its customers. Moreover, understanding a customer base means better customer segmentation. And all of this is driven by better data insights. In addition, different customer groups perceive and interact with a company in different ways. The only way to establish a clear view of your customer segments, their wants and their needs is through joined-up data. Therefore, in the same way that it is necessary for organisations to integrate systems, it is essential to do the same with data, too. The winners of tomorrow will be those who can get as close to their target customer groups as possible by using their own data, and data they can procure outside of their organisation to better understand and serve their customers.

Clive Humby quotes numerous examples in his career where a customer-aligned data view can be monetised. By way of a simple yet effective example, he conducted a project at a specialist UK off-licence chain (Ashe & Nephew). On this assignment, his data analysts could substantially increase sales of both beer and wines but putting the staff who liked beer more than wine in the shops where beer was a more popular consumer choice. Similarly, they put staff who liked wine more than beer in the shops where wine was the more popular choice. By understanding the customer segmentation and journeys better, management could provide better CX because the staff was simply more enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the products they were selling.

What is the benefit of a joined-up, data-driven customer view? In B2C, Clive Humby expects a 25% sales uplift; and in B2B even more. Furthermore, it's it is not just about driving sales; it is also about increasing efficiency and lowering the cost to serve. Retail organisations can typically improve the efficiency of their supply chain by up to 8%. In short, all this is a key contributor to customer-led growth.

THE IMPACT OF REGULATION ON A DATA-DRIVEN, JOINED-UP CUSTOMER VIEW

Having up-to-date, joined-up client data is the right goal for any organisation, as is data that allows companies to get even more sophisticated in their analysis, segmentation and service to customers. Interestingly, in the Health chapter, we explore ways in which such data can be leveraged to get more predictive.

One of the biggest considerations, if not challenges, in achieving a robust, data-driven customer view is regulation. In every industry, companies must adhere to strict privacy and compliance regulations that govern the collection and use of customer and consumer data. Clive Humby notes, ‘A fundamental consideration in the way we acquire and manage data concerns the permissions companies need to use it. Ultimately, the customer has to be in control’.

By way of example, let us take the EU-driven data directive, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This regulation came into effect in May 2018 and applies to all EU citizens. It aims to guarantee every EU individual with the right to:

• Be informed about a company's products and services
• Be completely erased from any company's records
• Self-select the type of information it wishes to receive from the company
• Choose whether their digital/online behaviour is tracked (e.g. through company or third-party cookies).

Philosophically speaking, this presents quite a different perspective on data as compared to that in the world of Google, Amazon and Facebook. Such organisations are truly leveraging data, often in extraordinary ways, to provide more personalised CX and drive company growth. These organisations believe that data is the new oil. Marketing automation platforms generally aim to apply similar thinking, even if their goal is primarily to drive campaign leads, not to improve CX.

The news is littered with examples of companies who are fined for the misuse of customer data. The fines themselves often represent a mere fraction of the commercial benefit that such companies have achieved or were looking to achieve. A recent story concerned Bounty, a UK-based pregnancy and parent advice service. For decades, UK mothers have received a ‘bounty-pack’ (containing nappies, vitamins, baby wipes, etc.), (sometimes only hours) after giving birth in National Health Service hospitals up and down the country. Bounty encourages mothers to join the ‘Bounty Club’, which offers free guidance and help to new mothers. Very recently, Bounty received a fairly hefty fine for selling their data to third-party companies without explicit customer consent.

Smart companies are those that are not only able to use data to establish a more intelligent customer view and ultimately drive better decisions, but also those that can navigate and satisfy regulatory constraints. Clive Humby believes that, over time, ‘the commercial benefit of a joined-up data-driven customer view will outweigh the regulatory demands, and companies will be willing to pay customers and consumers for the right to use their data’.

A related example is TSB Bank. In 2019, the bank launched the UK's first refund system to cover all types of transaction fraud. According to the online publication RegTech Analyst: ‘As part of this new service, customers will be protected from unauthorised transactions on their accounts or customers being tricked into authorising payments to fraudsters. Customers are also covered for third-party fraud loss which occurs on their TSB account. Currently, consumers are only refunded for fraud losses in limited circumstances. However, TSB customers will now be refunded any loss they've suffered from their account as a result of third-party fraud’.

This is a great example of a company that has not only embraced the regulation that protects consumers but has also gone a stage further to improve CX by protecting them from something that could have hit them financially.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER: A CUSTOMER OPERATIONS TEAM

Most organisations have a dedicated sales operations team. These teams tend, worse case, to focus solely on how CRM systems such as salesforce.com can provide more accurate sales performance information, or, best case, on how such systems can be better integrated with other (primarily pre-sales focused) systems such as marketing automation platforms. The role of the sales operations team is important – but since companies incorrectly place disproportionate emphasis on sales to drive growth, there a very few individuals looking at systems and data from an end-to-end customer perspective. This job should certainly not be left to IT departments, who are often too many steps removed from the end-customer.

Indeed, the larger the organisation, the greater the likelihood that each of its business functions will have its own operations leader or staff. Clearly, every function needs systems, processes and data to support its own activities. For example, HR needs systems and processes to pay employees and track their performance, finance needs to pay invoices and monitor departmental budgets, sales need to measure pipeline, support needs to track cases, etc.

However, in this scenario, who is tracking the 360-degree cross-functional view of the customer? In a recent blog post, Customer Success leader Jason Noble argued for the need to establish a customer operations team to do just that. A customer operations team could be the team responsible for any cross-functional combination of systems, tools or processes that allows for a customer-led view of the business. Some examples include:

• Customer segmentation data analyses and recommendations
• Customer data consistency across multiple data repositories
• Management of a Customer Success system and other customer-centric tools
• Development, ongoing maintenance and reporting of a Customer Health index (CHI)
• Customer risk scorecards and reporting
• Voice of the Customer system creation and reporting.

Jason concludes his suggestion by stating that ‘your customer operations function allows you to access and view all of this data in a customer-focused way. It allows you to shift your Customer Success management from being reactive to proactive to predictive (using the data to feed into trigger points that you've defined as part of your customer journey)’.

The ‘knowledge management’ discipline has existed for decades, but is even more relevant than ever in the Customer Economy. According to the leading academic institution Henley Business School, ‘Effective knowledge management improves individual and organisational performance by creating channels for knowledge to flow across organisational boundaries’. Having valid, up-to-date, insightful knowledge about customers is essential – and much of that is held in the minds of customer-facing employees and back-office staff alike.

The customer operations team should effectively become the nerve centre for all knowledge about customers, to help the business make the necessary plans and actions to become truly customer-led.

USING JOURNEY-ALIGNED SYSTEMS TO PROVIDE A 360-DEGREE CUSTOMER VIEW

While it is generally acknowledged that the CRM movement has not delivered on the promise of technology-powered, joined-up, cross-functional CX, it has nevertheless helped some organisations join the dots better between functions and given them a more customer-centric view into their business. In the Health chapter, we will consider how Finastra, one of the world's largest fintechs, has used its CRM system as the central platform underpinning a 30-point, real-time Customer Health Index (CHI) – taking information from other applications and sending it back into the central CRM system.

Indeed, CRM systems such as salesforce.com have a phenomenal ecosystem of partner systems that, when integrated into the main CRM system, can help companies build a richer, end-to-end, customer-journey-aligned view of the customer. Table 4.1 considers business software applications that can be utilised at different stages of the customer journey. All the data captured by the individual applications can be sent back to salesforce.com to create this 360-degree customer view.

Advanced reaps a plentiful customer harvest from essential CRM groundwork

‘We will continue to drive our success by further investing in our products and continuing to provide excellence in innovative technology and customer support, leading us to our goal of becoming a world-class organisation’, Gordon Wilson, CEO of Advanced.

Advanced provides enterprise and market-focused software systems that simplify the complex and make a difference, improving the lives of millions of people in the UK. Advanced is recognised as a British business success story, having grown to a £750 million company in just 8 years. Following its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in March 2015, the business has undergone significant transformation and investment in its people and solutions, creating a solid platform for further impressive growth.

Advanced employs 2000 people and has a loyal customer base of more than 20,000 organisations. Led by Gordon Wilson, Advanced has undertaken what is arguably the largest transformation of any UK company, helping the £220 million turnover business leap from 135th position in the Sunday Times Top Track 250 to the 97th place.

Since joining the company nearly 2 years ago, CEO Gordon Wilson has exemplified industry excellence, driving the creation of a new, consolidated leadership team, investing in the development of a dynamic and driven workforce as well as revolutionising Advanced's structure to reinvent every aspect of the business.

When Vista Equity Partners acquired Advanced in 2015, the company effectively comprised 13 separate sub-organisations (born primarily out of previous acquisitions). Working closely with Vista, Advanced's leadership team soon initiated a number of strategic change programmes across the organisation, including rationalisation and unification of systems, processes and functions.

By mid-2016, after (just) 6 months of hard graft, the multitude of CRM installations had been consolidated into a single instance of salesforce.com. This entailed cleaning and importing 13 sets of customer data against a common data format set (e.g. customer names, site locations, job titles and job roles), removing duplicate entries and even ensuring a consistent product naming convention.

Such a project may not appear as groundbreaking, innovative or stimulating as, for example, deploying a robot or delivering a cutting-edge virtual reality project. However, its strategic and operational importance, as an integral part of delivering enhanced CX, is immense. Very few organisations today apply this level of hygiene to their back-end systems (because it is often too big a problem to fix!), and the rest, therefore, sadly have far less chance of delivering frictionless, joined-up CX.

Once the essential groundwork had been carried out, Advanced was able to reap massive rewards. Peter Sadler, Director of Customer and (interestingly) Product Marketing at Advanced, led many of these transformation programmes (see Figure 4.3). Sadler points out: ‘We can now communicate with our customers in a way that is far more meaningful and relevant’. Many B2B organisations today, in a race to deliver campaigns to market, resign themselves to using marketing automation platforms to bombard their clients with uncoordinated and poorly targeted e-mails. Thanks to this approach, Advanced software can now deliver far more timely and relevant communications to its customers. ‘We now send monthly targeted e-newsletters to our clients, only about the things they're interested in’, remarks Sadler. Blisteringly simple, brilliantly effective.

But the fruits of their labour did not stop there. When GDPR came into effect in 2018, Advanced was already well prepared. ‘It really wasn't that painful for us. Our customer data sets were relatively clean. Our contact permissions and opt-ins were in good order’, adds Sadler. Compare this to most organisations, where GDPR has been nothing short of a nightmare! Advanced could also use this exercise to grow the quantity of opted-in relevant decision-maker contacts in their customer database from 200 to over 7000 contacts – in just 2 years.

‘The excellent working relationship between our Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Sales Officer has been a critical success factor throughout this journey’, notes Sadler. How many times do we see a disconnect between these functions? Very often, it is because marketing is not aligning its efforts around customers, and sales is not seeing the value that marketing brings, thus creating a vicious circle of mistrust and misalignment. In this refreshingly simple yet effective example of co-operation, there is one thing that has truly united the functions: The customer! Cast your mind back to Levitt's quote in Marketing Myopia: The entire organisation should be focused on generating and satisfying the customer. Advanced provides a great case in point. The customer, once again, is the ultimate rallying call – not just as a visionary statement, but as an operational reality.

Yet more fruits have since been harvested: The CRM system is also the central platform from which all customers access their support portal. The portal allows customers to log helpdesk issues, search the knowledge base, download hints/tips and video tutorials, etc. But that is still not all! Advanced has built a CHI, and implemented a predictive analytics tool and a sales engagement tool on top of its CRM system. In short, the CRM system is not only being used as it was originally intended – to manage customer relationships – but also a whole lot more.

In the Health chapter, we will consider the power of CHIs. Suffice to say that Advanced's CHI has allowed it to both understand the customers that need the most support and to identify and predict at-risk customers where cross-functional action plans and executive support are applied to ensure that risks are mitigated ahead of time. The predictive analytics tool (Sidetrade) helps the company identify the next best sales actions for clients (e.g. delivering important communications about products and solutions, or training and support). Also the sales engagement tool (SalesLoft) helps provide more consistent CX during the pre-sales phase. In other words, sales is able to offer more accurate and relevant information about product and solution capability in order to set the right expectations with customers. This ultimately leads to better delivery, as well as happier and more referenceable clients.

In the future, further innovation will be driven on the back of the renewed CRM platform. Enhancements to the customer portal will help Advanced to further enrich its customers' experience. Like the concept of the Customer-Powered Enterprise from Influitive, Advanced hopes to further facilitate intra-customer interaction for the purposes of training, sales and support. ‘Moving forward, we'll also be looking at ways to proactively recommend new products, solutions and features to our customers, based on the behaviours and actions they display’, adds Sadler.

Sadler's top three tips for customer-led technology transformation:

‘First, there is no alternative to rolling your sleeves up and getting into the detail of your customer database. Second, you can achieve a lot, quickly, but you have to actively work together across functions as the impacts of each decision have to be understood. Third, you have to think about things from the customer point of view, really from their point of view and challenge yourself consistently’.

Sadler's top three lessons learnt during this transformation:

‘First, as our tech stack has evolved, we have had to revisit elements of the CRM platform such as our product hierarchies, again you have to take the lid off and get back into the detail. Second, we had to revisit the integration we did between the CRM and our marketing automation platform; it didn't track and report communications as we needed. It was painful to start again but has been very much worth the effort. Third, we got the balance of people who actually had the ability to issue customer communications wrong at first. The system and the process were tight, and it was hard as there were some groups of people who were used to communicating who suddenly couldn't, and we had to make sure we had additional people in place through which the business could communicate’.

In summary, none of these positive changes, of course, happened by the technology itself. It is a great testament to both the executive leadership and operational leaders at Advanced, such as Sadler. It really smacks of a well-run company that is committed to continuous improvement. Most importantly, Advanced is a company that recognises the supreme value of its customer base to the growth of its organisation.

THE RISE OF CUSTOMER SUCCESS PLATFORMS, BRANCHING OUT ACROSS THE C-CHANGE GROWTH ENGINE

Customer Success platform vendors such as Gainsight have created unparalleled market awareness for their brand and systems, and experienced impressive growth in the last 5 years. In the Customer Success chapter, we will consider Customer Success as a business discipline and examine the reasons for its significant growth in popularity over this period.

The Gainsight Customer Success platform is branching out across all areas of the C-change growth engine and seeks to cover the entire customer lifecycle. It is helping its customers to build a 360-degree view of their customers, drive better CX, improve the business outcomes of their clients and drive adoption of their systems by their clients. Figure 4.4 considers many components of Customer Success which the Gainsight platform is addressing.

Where CRM has failed to deliver on the CX that companies are looking to create, platform vendors such as Gainsight are offering a new way of achieving this. It is possible that Gainsight could be the platform of the future for customer-centric growth.

Clearly, any new technology requires investment and a business case. Companies such as Mainstay have produced detailed assessments of the ROI associated with investments in Customer Success platforms. In their recent white paper titled ‘Measuring the ROI of Customer Success Management Systems’, Mainstay reported the following key insights:

• Every company that adopted Customer Success management programmes reported a significant boost in sales revenue as it retained more customers and sold more products and services to existing customers. Revenue was on track to increase by more than US$11 million over a 3-year period.
• On average, companies in the study reduced churn to about 2–3%, a 5–10-times reduction from before Gainsight.
• On average, companies said they significantly boosted engagements with customers, reaching 250% more customers with some form of outreach activity – from 900 to 2800 outreaches per week on average.
• While greater customer retention rates drove revenue gains, companies also reported improvement in selling more products and services to existing customers.
• Beyond revenue enhancement, companies reported significant cost-cutting benefits from adopting automated CSM systems, averaging US$1–5 million per year in operational savings when compared to manual CSM programmes.

TECHNOLOGY TO SUPPORT THE CUSTOMER VIEW

When it comes to choosing the right technology for a business, there are countless possibilities, strategies and approaches. When it comes to creating an outside-in, customer-centric view of a business, the same logic applies.

As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the C-change growth engine encourages organisations to adopt a piecemeal, step-by-step approach to customer-led transformation and growth. However, wherever possible, it makes sense to understand ideal state CX first, before deciding on the ideal platform strategy.

By building a dedicated customer operations team, companies can begin their journey to develop an outside-in, integrated and customer-led view of their technology platforms and customer data. This view will also help organisations become more sophisticated and predictive in customer-led decision-making.

And a final note of caution by Ed Thompson, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner: ‘Customers often know more about all things digital than employees. Part of the challenge for business and technology leaders is delivering systems and digital experiences that make it easier for employees to serve their customers and to train them on new ways of working’. In other words, choose technology platforms that underpin great CX, but also one that employees can get behind.