Gain a CX advantage with composable, democratized IT

Attracting, satisfying, and retaining customers has always been a complex undertaking. And it’s only getting more difficult. Consumer demands change and grow, and it’s easier than ever for a disruptive newcomer or established rival to convince customers to switch their loyalty with the right offers and experiences.

So, many businesses are looking for ways to transform their experiences and provide the smooth, rewarding journeys their customers are looking for. But legacy systems and traditional processes represent major roadblocks that prevent organizations transforming with the speed, scale and success they need.

In our new whitepaper, The composable enterprise and IT democratization—the competitive advantage CX and IT leaders need, we break down some of the broader changes that are driving organizations to rethink their customer experiences, and some of the ways they can achieve their main goals.

This blog summarises three challenges businesses commonly face—and a quick six-step guide outlining how a composable, democratized approach to IT can help solve them.

Challenge one: Building disconnected journeys

Customer experience is no longer just the domain of marketing, UX teams, or service agents. Truly compelling experiences require more teams and departments than ever to share resources and data, creating a cohesive journey that doesn’t add friction and frustration for customers.

If you’re adding new channels or customer service features to your journey—especially if they’re self-service routes—they need to form a seamless experience from end to end. For example, if a customer switches channel or escalates to a live agent interaction, they shouldn’t need to repeat their query; with a connected back-end, all that context will be maintained, whether the contact continues a minute later or in a month.

Challenge two: Optimizing the wrong tasks

Challenge three: Reinforcing silos

Digital transformation is the time to break down walls between different functions and departments within an organization. But all too often, leaders maintain a hard separation between front-and back-office systems, making it more difficult for teams to work together to improve customer experiences.

This is extremely common in organizations where leaders are used to operating in silos, even more so in large or long-running businesses. Though it might require an attitude shift to get everyone collaborating, it’s far easier to deliver consistent customer experiences when there are clear lines of communication across the business—and easier still when teams are all using the same systems and connected technologies.

Without the right approach, challenges become mistakes

The three challenges outlined above are far from insurmountable. But without careful consideration and meaningful changes to the way functions operate within the business, they can quickly turn into mistakes.

Improving collaboration between business and IT is the only way to get ahead and get maximum value from your customer experience investments. There are two key changes we believe organizations should make to achieve not only a more successful CX ecosystem, but broader benefits for every business unit:

• Become a composable enterprise

  Using packaged business capabilities, a composable enterprise takes advantage of modular technologies and solutions to quickly assemble and customize internal systems and customer offerings.

• Democratize IT across the business

  Democratizing IT using low-and no-code tools enables IT to offer teams greater freedom and technologies that meet their needs while maintaining overall availability, security, and resilience.

Preparing your organization for transformation

These two approaches combine to create a significant shift in the way an organization operates—which can be daunting, particularly in situations where business and IT don’t often work together much beyond basic systems maintenance. To make this transition easier, we’ve broken the journey down into six recommendations.

1. Take an ecosystem perspective: Treat this as a holistic transition, considering your whole IT estate and how it interacts with every business unit.

2. Drive transformation with a core team: Involve stakeholders from across the business, and treat the process as a cultural change as much as a technological one.

3. Embrace technology democratization: Take advantage of people’s technology skills outside the IT team, and find ways to involve non-technical users in defining and refining their ideal solutions.

4. Invest in people and technology upskilling: Bring new technology-savvy talent into your business and give your existing workforce opportunities to train in new digital skills.

5. Create a digital-native environment: Ensure high technology skills across the business and prepare for more as-a-Service approaches to deploying new solutions.

6. Prioritize low-code solutions: Use low-code techniques to streamline these tasks, and other workflows where possible

Interested in the full checklist?

Get your copy of the whitepaper to help guide your own plans and discussions as you explore how your business can benefit from a more agile way of working.

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