Customer experience (CX) or customer satisfaction is a critical driver in today’s business success and is directly proportional to product or service quality. CX is so important that many companies focus more on this than on their products and services. Leading organizations are constantly fine-tuning and enriching their customer journeys. Some have already begun leveraging data they’ve collected over the years to build customer journeys driven by experiences.
Sometimes businesses with good customer satisfaction and retention rates prefer to continue using traditional methods to deliver customer experiences. But when these businesses scale up and try to meet increasing demand, providing a good customer experience through conventional methods will be a hard lift. Since traditional methods cannot adapt fast enough to meet new-age customer needs, businesses should be flexible to meet the expectations of modern customers in this digital-first world.
Providing quick and fulfilling customer service across the customer life cycle requires omnichannel engagement. This rapid transformation cannot be made possible without the help of the cloud.
A good business understands that data drives customer experience. When information is in silos, it prevents innovation in customer service. Delivering new products and services is nearly impossible without sharing data within a business’s different units. There’s an urgent need to predict customer service demands and act accordingly, and that cannot be done without data.
Role of Cloud Computing
Integrations
A well-designed and structured cloud ecosystem empower businesses to cater continuously to evolving customer expectations. Additionally, it enables the seamless integration of software tools into a company’s existing technology. Such integration is valuable as it eliminates the challenges due to data silos and disconnected applications.
Agile resources
Cloud computing enables agility of resources, speeds up innovation, and is economical. Instead of maintaining a big infrastructure in their premises, businesses can leverage the agile resources from cloud providers, mix and match to create an ecosystem, and pay only for what they use.
Data analytics
All of the customers’ data is stored on the cloud. Businesses can leverage this massive amount of data with various data analysis tools to make informed decisions in real-time.
Seamless omnichannel
There are multiple ways customers can interact with businesses like email, websites, phone calls, and chatbots. Cloud can bridge the communication gaps between these various channels and provide access from a single platform without switching between apps. Thus customer service representatives can focus better and be more productive.
Customer experience management
With the help of decision and recommendation engines, employees can take appropriate actions to improve the customer journey. Operational data can be used to tailor experiences directly to customers’ preferences.
Customer focus
Constantly monitoring customer needs and following up with customers is crucial to understanding customer demands. Cloud-based support helps to cater to this and offers quick services according to the demands.
Software development life cycle
Traditionally software development is done on local machines and then deployed to QA, staging, and production environments. This approach has chances of deployment failures due to compatibility issues, and rectification is time-consuming and costly. Whereas in the case of cloud-based applications, the development, testing, and deployment all happen in the cloud environment. Cloud-based application development unloads the burden of infrastructure maintenance of servers and environments, including their backups and disaster recovery schedules.
Benefits of leveraging cloud services
In cloud-based application development, cloud service providers are responsible for hosting and managing your hardware, data, and everything you use in the cloud environment. As a business, you have to pay for the resources you use, and you can quickly scale up and down on these resources based on your need. This ensures cost effectiveness, better availability, and faster release cycles of your applications. A speedier release cycle means including experience improvement features faster and improving customer experience.
Every business needs to focus on providing the best customer experience quotient to survive and grow in a competitive market. For an enterprise of the future, the cloud is an essential foundation for delivering exceptional customer experiences.
