In the next two years, 89% of companies expect to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience rather than on price point or product differentiation, says research firm Gartner. In order to become leaders in their field, businesses will need to focus their entire business model on the experience that customers have with their brand, product, or service—from the awareness stage through support after the sale.
Thomas Kurian, Oracle's president of product development, says technological advances are helping change the equation with regards to customer experience. Companies such as Trulia, Airbnb, and OpenTable have upended their respective industries by using innovative technologies such as big data, mobility, and the cloud to better reach and serve customers.
In this era of disruption, Kurian says companies must shift their approach to customer service and in turn, adjust their operations and strategies to center on the customer. He offers five tenets for success in a CX-driven world:
1. Be a partner, not just a provider. Customers have more information at their fingertips and more control over their decisions than ever before. As a result, companies need to work with them in a completely different way. “Customers know far more about how they want to transform their business model and what kind of technology they need to enable that,” says Kurian. “Our goal is always to look ahead and have a vision for what kind of technology they’ll need so that we’re right there to help them co-innovate and partner with us in order to change their business model and win.”
3. Design applications around users instead of business functions. Applications should be designed around users and their roles rather than around business functions “because that’s what engages your user base,” says Kurian. For example, sales and marketing automation applications should deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience across all channels and in all communications, regardless of whether the customer is interacting with the marketing, sales, commerce, service, social, or back-office functions of your business.
4. Use customer data to create more value. The trail of data that people leave about themselves as they interact with the digital world—“digital breadcrumbs,” as MIT professor Sandy Pentland calls them—provides valuable information about customers’ behaviors and needs. Kurian says knowing how to use this data to increase customer value can set companies apart from their competitors. Data “is a fundamental differentiator for how you actually…get value from the applications” over time, says Kurian. “We believe that all apps over time can become vastly better if they’re enriched with data.”
5. Make your systems easy to use. Ease of use is the proverbial icing on the cake when it comes to what end users want. “We believe that a sales system, a service system, a social application, a marketing system should be as easy to use as your iPhone. When was the last time you read documentation about your iPhone? Never,” says Kurian. “And you can only do that if you fundamentally change the application to make it so easy to use on these devices that anybody in the world can use them without having to read tons of documentation or user assistance. Every piece of our user experience has been redesigned based on our understanding of what [the user] wants.”
