What is the CX tech ecosystem?
A CX Tech Ecosystem is created from various technologies. It’s designed to integrate, automate, and operate customer interactions across the end-to-end customer lifecycle to enable amazing experiences at scale.
What are the 5 steps for creating a CX Tech Ecosystem?
1. Design to differentiate
Look for the biggest unsolved problems in your customers’ lives related to the product or service that you provide. Getting the basics right is a given; being a follower is no longer an option. To find out what these unsolved problems are, you need to ask your customers about them.
Accordingly, the company let consumers create a digital vault to store electronic copies of purchase receipts, along with photos and other supporting material for their most valuable possessions. This digital documentation helps the insurance company make the claims process faster, easier, and less stressful for the customer.
2. Gain a deeper understanding of customer needs
The best way to satisfy customers is to understand what they want, where they want it, and when. To calibrate offerings to individual customers, companies must possess robust data collection and analysis capabilities. For example, when Amazon realized that customers wanted an even faster and easier way to transact, it produced a new device—Echo. Today, millions of people place orders via Echo simply by talking to Alexa, Amazon’s virtual agent.
3. Design for the future
Technology constantly advances. As you design the CX for your digital ecosystem, bake in the flexibility you’ll need for future upgrades. For instance, a large European telecommunications systems provider recently held a workshop to evaluate changes in CX over the past 100 years. By studying the drivers of past change, the company hopes to predict future change.
4. Include a community network
Consumers trust the recommendations of friends and family more than any other source. Two-thirds said they trusted the opinions of other consumers posted online.
5. Choose the right partners
The strength of any ecosystem—and the quality of its CX—relies on its participants. Look for partners that are leaders in their field, or startups with promising technological, operational, or strategic innovations. Work closely with your digital ecosystem partners so you can learn from one another and ensure your ecosystem contains no subpar experiences in the customer’s purchase journey
Who are the members of the CX Tech Ecosystem?
These various elements impact CX in the following ways:
Customers
Customers should be ranked as the highest priority regarding needs within the CX environment due to being the source of funding that propels the entire ecosystem through their purchases. The expectations of customers should influence the way an ecosystem operates, rather than a company attempting to force customers to adapt to their ecosystem. For example, a business that completely overhauls its website to suit its own preferences rather than the preferences and expectations of customers. In doing so, customers can become frustrated and leave for competitors who are more willing to listen to and shape their CX around the needs they have expressed.
Employees
While customers are the funding that propels CX, employees are the people that respond to customer demands. When evaluating the ecosystem, consider how well-educated employees are regarding the tools and information at their disposal and how they use these elements to better serve your target audience. By supporting your workforce in serving customer needs and educating them regarding the many aspects of your company’s unique customer experience ecosystem, they can be prepared for a wide array of customer journeys.
Partners
In the CX ecosystem, partners can play a crucial role as they often extend the ecosystem further than the touchpoints created by a business in order to reach more potential customers. While this can broaden your target market, it also means that the audience’s perception of your company is influenced by how it is presented by others. Closer partner relationships, well-crafted marketing efforts, and systems that integrate with partner data and experiences can help prevent poor communication and negative impressions from influencing the ecosystem.
Operating Environment
The software environment in which your users, including customers, employees and partners, run their applications will invariably impact the CX ecosystem, as this influences not only how your systems run, but how different tools and data interact with one another. Should incompatible technology be operating within the same ecosystem, it may result in inaccessible data and difficult transitions within the customer journey
Whether these elements are deliberately connected by companies or have simply been brought together due to the preferences of customers, they form an ecosystem that encompasses a business’ online presence.
What are the upcoming technologies to add to your CX Tech Ecosystem?
Voice of the Customer
VoC Tools perform a valuable role in that they can both measure the customer in a quantitative and qualitative manner. They can have a cost-effective, consistent and programmatic approach that can be used over time for statistically valid research. They still require work as most are executed at the end of an interaction set. Most don’t articulate the lifecycle that journey tools do but they can be readily dash boarded and also pulled into Journey Maps through both verbatim and emotion as well as scores.
Journey Strategy, Mapping & Management tools
These tools help create, deploy, and manage journey maps to understand, align around, and improve CX. They support a top-down or deductive approach for defining the journey and managing related insights and action plans. They focus primarily on enterprise, strategic level insights, and actions. They can inform Macro CX and Micro CX/UX.
Journey Analytics
Journey Analytics help analyze customer-level data from multiple systems to see patterns and draw conclusions about the customer journey (e.g., common paths, volume and friction points). They support a bottom-up or inductive approach to defining the journey and uncovering related insights. They focus primarily on insights derived from individual-level data. They still require qualitative and ethnographic research to understand WHY these behaviors are happening.
Journey Orchestration
Journey Orchestration help apply customer-level data from multiple systems to drive real-time interventions and optimizations in the CX (e.g., next best offer). They focus on individual-level CX delivery rather than on defining and understanding the journey.
CRM tools
CX and customer engagement are now standard to the thinking of “CRM” companies. Eighty percent of all submissions for a recent ZD net report focused their efforts on proving customer experience and customer engagement, not CRM. It permeated everything they wrote and all that they offered. From the marketing, service, and sales the pre-eminent theme was the improvement of the customer’s experience. In addition, the actual technology portfolio, the platforms were being rejiggered or evolved or developed around engagement.
