Customer experience... the key differentiator of today's business..

Lot of times we have this answer available to us taught from the beginning of our technical product journey - 'customer experience should be great, customer is the key, and so on & so forth. Sometimes the words are so much imbibed in us that the essence of the focus drifts away.

Let's examine customer experience in today's world from a real world example to answer this simple question.

What's customer experience to me as a consumer? Let' take an example of company A & company B

I purchased some goods over internet - on a website, which allowed me to get it delivered to my address.

Is delivering as quickly  during holiday's a part of customer experience? Yeah - maybe, but unfortunately my package though delivered on time never reached me.

Now anyone would expect - if the package is having n number of ways to let a customer know that it was tracked from point of fulfilment to the point of delivery, it would be enough to give a good resultant experience to the user - yeah right but everyone does that today. What about the little things?

What are those little things? - package not delivered but tracked perfectly - is that a little thing? maybe - how to answer this question? ask - what would a customer do - if the package say's delivered but is still not there?  well, would they call the company, would they email, would they chat, would they talk to their voice assistant device - maybe? in fact - holiday season - i might not have the luxury of time, I might be moving, I might be just close to a shop from where I can get the stuff so how would I change this experience of a customer who ordered a product, that didn't get delivered, when the person was on the move and precisely calculated the delivery - now you are very close to completely spoiling the customer experience factor & your advanced tracking notification tools act in a way to go there quicker.

Aah - so not seeing my package but getting notification of delivery, I go to the site & try to give a feedback of delivery - typing in my issue - aaah again I think I am wasting my time here - who will see this?

But wait - this company already thought of something, which can turn my experience, what was it? any guesses? - 2 things - simple stuff -
a) attach a photo of the delivery with the packet
b) provide an educated choice list of response for feedback - instead of typing the details & yo - it knows the choice perfectly.

what did this do? - a) --> got me looking into the picture and say 'hey' that packet is delivered to the door infront of my house, so I got my package on time. (Delivery - on time - ticked).
b)  gave me a mechanism to let the company know what went wrong so that it can improve delivery as a result CSAT.

Well, this was the simple thing here - connecting it voice enabled device which told me I have a delivery pic or gave me easier way for feedback would be the plus on this but job well done.

Now - let's take another example of a company B, this company B is the company whose product I recieved in the package via company A's fulfilment services.

While using the product - I see company B launched a new feature on the device it sells, you can type  quicker by just moving your fingers on the keys - no need to press em, impressive - though so not so much as this was a copied idea from some other competitors but adopted late.

I like company B's products as they are elegant and secure so I think maybe this feature was done perfectly but gradually I realise swipe type is a different animal altogether as I see the magnification feature which would have helped me do the same quickly was removed from the companies features because of cost cutting and performance. Now as a customer & layman user - my experience is already a bit on the negative side for this company -

a) overlooked a key feature which was a differentiator
b) copied without any improvisation a feature which was already present in other brands.

completely loosing both the usability and experience factor.

This company can do all the tracking analytics or feature addition it wants but from a customer perspective - it's already lost it's charm and will keep loosing more if it now starts to provide explanation as to why the a) & b) were good decisions.

There is common sense and ingenuity which is only a matter of difference in thinking to preserve a brand's individuality - here the approach was blind automation and collection of data whereas in the other example of company A was insight based corrections to advance customer experience.

I think you have guessed by now but if you are still wondering & want to know the company names which is irrelevant to me - as the fact and learning of the differentiators here - company A was the top worldwide retail e-com giant, company B was worlds topmost technology company (in technology products market place - known for quality products)

Technical beats in the rhythm…

Let’s talk a little bit about the harmony of the IT system of the current era and the kind of beats which are in action to make the best rhythm’ positioning themselves for the future.

API’s: 

Almost all the established organizations which have been in business for a couple of years to couple of decades are focusing on providing access points for their service consumption and are using cloud based hosting’s to provide immediate and connectivity to any small to large business partner or end user aiming to use them. Opportunity & pricing vary based consumer but in the day of personized apps, the prize goes to the early adaptors and so do the returns for organizations providing a ‘better’ service (secure, scalable, extensible along with the parameters of best in class, elegant, transformational, transparent, extensible, reusable).

The total estimated return on API’s alone is at 1$ trillion economic profit globally, the estimated API’s availability tripling within the next 12 months.

Adoption stands at 55% as of today.

Security:

Starting from manufacturing separate chips for security to providing security over the cloud via a dedicated installation, every effort currently is towards keeping security as the key driver for any commodity available on the digital space.

With a 35 times rate of growth in 13 years, total spend on security by 2021 will surpass $1 trillion with a net 46 – 50 billion$ growth in next 3 years.

With that kind of projection launch of products like Nitro is without doubt a step in the right direction.

Cloud:

Everyone has been talking about cloud from a long time now, transitions start with analyzing the company assets which can be ported over, trends suggest the right security, compliance & adoption models help form the backbone of a well-defined cloud stack for a company.

Almost each substantial firm has a virtual private cloud stack with governance in place.

17.5 percent growth, $214.3 billion, paced at around 3 times the growth of the overall IT services.

More companies will move over to the cloud by 2022 with a $331B towards profitability from cloud adoption alone according to the latest reports by Gartner, et al.

Plans are in place to move mainframe/legacy application stacks are moving over to the cloud gradually.

Database:

400 Zettabytes of data for IOT alone in an year, this is just a speck of what can be a visualization of the amount of data involved in future – that’s the data to be stored and retrieved and operated on – the function access should be quick with lightening fast retrieval for computational needs.

The current popularity and consumption of the SQL/Non-SQL database stands as below - SQL – 60%

NoSQL – 39.5%

MySQL, PostgreSQL & MongoDB together holding 60-70% of the popularity share. 

With Redis, Cassandra & Oracle coming next – redis being the highest, close to 8%

Sequential databases with vendor lock in are a no no and most optimal combinations are those with SQL + NoSQL databases contributing to 60-70% of architectures which are leading the future trends.

OS - Windows to Linux – 80% - transition to a stable & more optimum model with less volatility on licensing modifications.

Strange but true, transition is happening around this space as well. Most of the readily available small chips are using the OS of choice – linux and more platforms and services offline and on the cloud are using operating systems which are based on linux.

SAAS: 

SAAS providers (most of the software providers are using one brand of the services – includes giants like salesforce, splunk… etc)

With elaborate dashboards and the capability to establish scenarios and capability to dealing with scenarios forms the backbone of the Saas enabled forecasting providers.

The software as a service revenue is almost expected to double by 2022 from what it was in 4 years back, hitting a forecast of 145.7 billion $ worldwide.      

System Integrators:

System integrators specialize on integration of the key areas Banking, Transportation, Telecommunication, Healthcare, Retail, etc. 

These set of providers are expected to increase 3.2% in spending totaling to 3.8 billion $ in 2019 – 2020.

Data lakes:

With the advent of big data and the need to large amount of data to be stored and retrieved there is an upcoming trend towards the presence of a data lake – which is more like a lake of data with streams of data coming in from various incoming data sources, storing all the data which is easily accessible and available for insights. This can be compared to a data mart which is a subset of data like a packaged bottle of water from the lake.

Nearly all established organization’s have taken a step towards establishing a data lake which holds the data at the leaf level in untransformed or nearly transformed state.

Again, expected at 35% growth rate annually, the total cost of the data lake market in US alone is expected to reach 37901.32 $ million in spending, so investing in the same at this point makes it a beneficial factor over long term – ‘start early’.

Analytics:

Another key area of adaptation is the analytics wherein each firm is focusing on gaining more insights by diversifying their analytical capabilities by pushing more information available to derive a key insight.

Expected business analytics forecasted revenue to reach around $260 billion by 2022 with an annual 11 -13% increase over year. This means better revenues with optimal forecasts for companies – retail at 13.5% CAGR & banking at 13.2% CAGR are projected by business data analytics alone.

So again, some good sense to invest in data analytics.

This is just a glimpse – it doesn’t cover the other key buzzwords like machine learning, AI or blockchain currently but the above can be the drivers leading to those areas which expect to be major revenue generators over the next few years.