ORM Discussion 5

Running head: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 1

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 5

Steps to improving customer experience

Student’s name:

Institution:

Date:

Steps to improving customer experience

Information technology has enabled people to access almost all services from their smartphones and over the internet anywhere and anytime. There is also an increase in the available social media platforms that enable consumers to share their experiences, compare and contrast their perceptions and feelings regarding various products over the internet. Therefore organizations are seeking means on how to differentiate themselves not only by developing unique products but also in the maintenance of superior customer experience (McKeen & Smith, 2011).

There is a disparity between recognizing a customer's need and delivering outstanding customer experience. Some of the steps that firms can implement to guarantee a continued improvement in customer experience include: the first step is taking a holistic approach towards customer experience improvement. Organizations should embrace and integrate development on customer experience as part of everything done in the firm. Rather than having fragmented and disorganized customer services, there is a need to have a leader to oversee and focus the activities and views in the firm towards a common goal of increasing customer’s satisfaction through a common belief. Secondly, the company should pay attention to the kind of value they desire to create through the customer experience mechanisms (McKeen & Smith, 2015). The management team should hold IT meetings to discuss the nature of the world that world like to create before delivering new products or services. Debating on the impacts of the technology on the customers' experiences, winning new customers and customer retainage is an essential aspect of the improvement of customer experience.

The third step includes the formulation of an integrated organizational and IT strategies, which will be significant in the development of a roadmap to the improvement of customer experience. This step involves procedures such as the establishment of cross-functional teams, mapping of the critical customer experiences from the customers perspective, and an assessment of the business capabilities and development of universal business policies (Schmitt, 2010). The fourth step is the identification and development of new capabilities that will deal with customers and not just business users. Organizations need people who are skilled in creating excellent customer rapport and in designing products that meet the specified customer needs. The fifth step is the development of a unified source of truth. IT firms need to embrace simplicity in their activities, which ensure there are smooth transactions and consumption of their services by the users to maintain a consistent level of customers satisfaction and loyalty leading to increase in profitability.

References

McKeen, J. D., & Smith, H. A. (2011). IT Strategy: Issues and Practices. Pearson Educacion.

McKeen, J. D., & Smith, H. A. (2015). IT Strategy: Issues and Practices, Global Edition. New York, NY: Pearson Higher Ed.

Schmitt, B. H. (2010). Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Need Replies:

1 hour ago

Venkatesh Kannedhara 

Discusion

COLLAPSE

Top of Form

Every company should prefer the needs and requirements of its customers first. the implementation of new technological tools such as social media platforms where an organization can communicate with the customers easily.  

The organizations need to focus on the following factors to improve the experiences of the customers

· Foremost the company has to implement new approaches to improve the customer experiences. Innovation and the IT infrastructure is very important to improve the skills and capabilities of the employees so they can connect with the customers easily and can address their issues and other requirements related to specific products or services. The company need to focus on making records of their existing customers, their previous experiences and queries (James D. McKeen, 2015)

·  To improve the experiences of the customers the employees have to understand the perception of their customers forms their products. It can be done by direct contact with the customers to outline their experiences by implementing different technological tools. They need to address all the feedback of the customers whether it is a good or bad one.

· Thirdly, the companies need to maintain consistency throughout their process. After addressing the feedback of the customers’ the employees need to make appropriate changes according to their needs for providing them better services in the future. 

· Customers always prefer those company websites, which can address their issues in no time. The more time it takes the more it will frustrate the customers. Therefore, it suggested to the employees to put their best in solving the problems of the customers to retain them associated with their company for a longer period (Bhatia, Sharma & Chethan, 2017).

· Data management is also very important in keeping the previous and present data of the customers. In association with innovative technologies the company can efficiently enhance their customer service quality and to improvise their relation with the customers.

Reference

Bhatia, A., Sharma, D., & Chethan, S. (2017). Parallelizing Pincer Search Using CUDA-A Conceptual Idea. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 12(12), 3098-3101.

James D. McKeen, H. A. (2015). IT Strategy Issues and Practices. Essex: Pearson Education Limited .

Bottom of Form

Week 5 Discussion - Improving customer experience

COLLAPSE

Top of Form

Industries across all possible business domains are focused to ensure customer satisfaction to sustain in market. With consistent influx of new technologies and services, customers these days have more choices more than before. So, ensuring brand loyalty through positive customer experience is even more challenging these days. Technology plays a significant role in enabling business to achieve better customer interactions through automation and other value-added offerings. In terms of capabilities from IT, envisioning ways to develop positive customer experience with customer centric approach, design and delivery methods in line with boosting customer interaction, are key elements. In order to improve customer experience, there are five broad steps suggested.

The first step talks about adopting holistic approach to deliver better customer experience. Every organization has multiple departments with defined criteria to improve either the product or services. It is probably part of their key performance indicators (KPI) as well and they strive to meet those criteria. These individual criteria need to correlated so that combination of them delivers a unified customer experience. Any fragmented approach may apparently seem good from individual unit of an organization. However, at a broad organizational level, these individual components need to be synchronous with each other to arrive at a single goal. Assume a hypothetical example where a manufacturing team is trying to enhance a product quality by using superior component for an instrument. The respective marketing department at the same time is pitching for cost effective product and possible discounts to customers. There is nothing wrong apparently as both are trying to enhance customer experiences. However, both manufacturing and marketing need to integrate with each other to arrive at workable option to improve product quality by not increasing the cost. Without that integration they may end up in an unfavorable situation where cost of good will increase from manufacturing and sales price can not be increased proportionately. This will adversely impact the profitability. With appropriate integration, they may end up looking for option to perform negotiation with existing vendor to get better deal or even try for a competitive quote from an alternate vendor. Manufacturing process improvements can also be explored to save some cost as well. Although this is hypothetical scenario, but it is relevant for actual business process.

Secondly, it is important that an organization has a well-defined thought process on what they are envisioning to deliver to secure customer experience. Value can be generated through multiple ways. For a product and associated market segment, organizations need to have appropriate direction. That will secure market share through relevant value creation which suits that product and customer segment. Technology can definitely be the enabler of functionalities but not of absolute importance in this context. I would like to discuss a logistics example to elaborate my argument. In one of my professional assignment, there was a requirement to optimize the freight charged to customer by managing carrier charges. The intent was to reduce burden on customer by freight cost reduction. Freight used to get charged on a flat scale based on weight and distance and there was no option to negotiate or optimize the process. A new shipping software was selected that helped us to fetch actual freight from FedEx, UPS portals at the time of shipping. It was successful initiative although there were initial hiccups in terms of managing process changes. In this example the organization targeted positive customer experience by reducing freight cost through new technology implementation. However, if there was not much margin to curtail freight cost, only implementation of the new software would not have much significance. So, technology alone is not sufficient. Right area needs to be decided where appropriate technology needs to be applied. This is applicable for retention of existing customers along with expanding to new business opportunities. Hence, right blend of technology and proper areas of business should be selected judiciously for generating values for customers and that is the recipe for a positive customer experience.

Another important thing is to look from a customer point of view. Business and IT team members are expected put themselves into the shoes of a customer to understand what a customer expects from them. Once team can develop that perspective, an integrated approach across business and IT team can be developed. This is essential because in such situation, both business and IT will have same goal to achieve and hence will have synchronous approach to deliver required value to customers. I would like to discuss a typical situation that I came across in my professional career. We were tasked to replace an existing non-standard custom-made software with another standard software module for a medical device distribution company. After series of iterations, we almost met most of the process requirements through the standard solution. However, what was missed was to evaluate the impact on how in practice the physical process works. Precisely the time study comparison between existing and proposed design was missed. When it was done, we found out the proposed process is taking approximately ten extra minutes for one end to end cycle. It was loss in productivity for the customer and we had to withdraw the approach after spending lot of efforts. If we would have considered the point of view of customer, we probably would have performed time study for the proposed solution to understand possible impact. We failed to do so as we thought purely from technology point of view. Nevertheless, it was an eye-opener for me and a good lesson learned for future. 

The next step that I would like to talk about pertains to process simplification and convenience around customer interactions. I am digressing little bit from the context to make few generic statements as these are relevant here. Process can be mapped simplistically or in complex manner. It depends on the availability of information from business side and skill set of the person involved from technical. Complexity arises sometimes due to lack of business intelligence or technology acumen and it ends up being a complex design. Off-course there are true complex processes cutting across multiple business processes. The reason for bringing this up is to reiterate that any customer facing IT design needs to be simple and convenient to use. For example, if business is trying to get feedback from customers, the questionnaire may need to be brief and precise and not too elaborated. In the midst of busy schedule, business should not expect customers to spend significant time to provide very detailed responses. At least it is less likely with most of the customer representatives. Another example can be the case study of RR Communication (McKeen & Smith, 2015). We have seen that different departments had individual customer care helpdesks and customers had to call different numbers to receive services for the same company but different line of businesses. This is typical case where a unified helpdesk can give customers one single number to dial into to achieve all services and that will make the process simple and more efficient. Process integration to use similar or compatible applications and common source of data in customer facing functionalities are helpful to achieve convenient approach for the customers.

Lastly, I would like to talk about developing new capabilities in emerging technologies. This is crucial for the team members to be at par with new offerings. A process pain point that was hindering to provide flexibility to customer can be addressed by a new tool. Unless the team is constantly upgrading themselves with new technology offerings, they will not be able to cease the opportunity at right time. Another key element is not to be constrained to IT only. It is important to understand the business perspective as well. Unless the IT person has business acumen, it will be difficult to create value for customers. So, an optimum blend of both the skills will be very beneficial to deliver appropriate positive customer experience.

Reference

McKeen, J. D., & Smith, H. A. (2015). IT Strategy: Issues and Practices. Pearson.

Bottom of Form