I recently need to make changes to some mobile phone contracts for family members.  Our contracts were with two different mobile phone providers and one performed far better than the other.   The positive experience was with O2.  The website was clear and easy to use, the “instant messaging chat to advisor” service was quick and convenient, the human looking after me was engaging, efficient and extremely helpful.  A truly positive customer experience.  The other provider who I think should remain nameless provided an experience that had none of those attributes.  Customer experience in the digital age is often characterised as our demanding ever more flexibility in how we engage, ever more efficient and enjoyable transactions,  ever more rapid delivery and the truism of everything being immediately available at all times.   I held my engagement with O2 late on a Sunday night so I think I ticked a few of those characteristics!

The view of the consumer has arguably never been more important or more easily shared.  Over recent years the value of a referral or positive review has become increasingly important with access to many different sources at our fingertips.

I realised recently that I now automatically use reviews on sites like Booking.com prior to booking any accommodation, sorting the available options by customer review scores.   Many market analysts assert that 75% of all purchase decisions are now preceded by a review, even if the review is online but the purchase is made in-store.   Of course in this context the trust in the review source and it offering the collation at sufficient scale for the scores to be meaningful is critical to creating trust in the data integrity.

At the heart of these enhanced customer experiences is the dynamic combination of mobile devices and cloud computing.  It is clear that the pace of change is stressing the capability and indeed budget of many IT organisations.   Someone recently pointed me at some excellent Forrester material on this challenge.  They use the term “Business Technology” and argue that successful CIOs need to lead their organisations from traditional style operating models to managing business technology outcomes and not IT assets.  Given a deal of this useful information is behind the Forrester paywall this Computer Weekly article is an excellent articulation of their argument, “Forrester – Manage Business Technology Outcomes Not IT Assets“.    At the same time I also recently came across an excellent article entitled 5 Metrics for Digital Success by Aaron Rudger.  I particularly liked his suggested five key metrics for the digital age: responsiveness, latency, third party app impact, load testing metrics and finally competitor benchmarking.  I will not do justice to the article here but it is well worth a read.

Regardless of what you measure the challenges and the opportunities for IT teams is going to continue to evolve at pace.   A common message from analyst articles is that over the next five years the combination of the Internet of Things, pervasive cloud computing and big data will enable organizations to offer services which are able to learn and evolve, are contextually aware and able to react in real time to change.  So your strategy needs to ensure that the design is user-centric, that it provides for a high degree of personalisation and contextualisation and that you are able to rapid iterate to innovate.

Customer experience is fundamentally about the quality of the interaction between the consumer and the company offering the service.  The intent is to build a relationship of trust and value with the consumer so they are both a repeat buyer but more important an advocate for you.  There is as deal of research you can find that explores what transforms a buyer into a brand advocate.  The quality of the product or service is clearly key but is it sufficient?  Are there other factors being assessed by your customers when they decide whether to post that glowing review on your service?   I would argue that there are a range of criteria explicitly and implicitly being assessed every time someone experiences your service.  It would seem to me that the value judgements being made are becoming more sophisticated and perhaps based on some interesting research I recently read far more holistic that we might expect?

This post was previously published on the Business Value Exchange.
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