From the front office and HR to R&D, sales, marketing and the supply chain, experience excellence must ascend to a company-wide goal to generate competitive advantage. The essence of a human-centric, high-quality experience is everybody’s mission, and this priority must apply to all types of “customers,” including coworkers, partners and, of course, end users of products and services. An exceptional experience might even prove to be a greater differentiator than price and product.
Terming the trend “total experience,” Gartner has cited experience as a key technology trend for 2021. And as demonstrated by research we commissioned with Forrester, experience assessment has become a key performance metric.
Based on extensive work with technology organizations, we offer a fourfold path for building a world-class experience ecosystem:
- Adopt a horizontal model for experience. Assign customer experience leads within each function and define KPIs that tag experiential variables, such as feature adoption.
- Make experience insight-driven. Already rich with data, technology organizations must use it to improve user experiences, enable self-service and reduce churn.
- Re-architect for the future. This encompasses many efforts, such as unifying apps and portals onto a single platform, core-modernizing with cloud technology, deploying agile tools and leveraging automation with AI and machine learning.
- Deepen engagement through positive onboarding. Onboarding sets the tone with customers and partners, and deserves ongoing revision and iteration.
Following these key tenets will enable technology companies to drive an ecosystem in which customer-focused initiatives can be realized organically and continually.
