Microsoft’s Andrew Wilson says, “I often think of the CIO role as the chief experience officer powering experiences both internally for employees but also the customer experience for the overall organization.” This is a big responsibility in a world where customer experience is becoming the key differentiator.
“People today want more than just products and services,” says Adobe CIO Cynthia Stoddard. “They want total experiences, and that’s why so many organizations, regardless of whatever industry they’re in, are really reorganizing and strategizing around the customer experience mandate.”
“This means building a new muscle,” she adds, “focusing on one-to-one relationships, and then having that deep personalization to build really great customer loyalty.”
Beatriz Copelli of British American Tobacco agrees. “The new way for us to connect with the customer is basically now through technology,” she says. “If the CIO is not lined up in their thinking and not someone who can understand how to do it, you’re never going to get there.”
So, how can the CIO start? When Manish Patel began as CIO for MG Motor India, he faced the task of building a digital-first customer experience strategy from scratch. “I had to take off my CIO hat and put on my customer hat,” he explains, “and picture myself buying a vehicle.
Given the fact that I’d spent most of my time in India, I obviously knew what other OEMs lacked. What is not given to a customer right now? A hassle-free experience. That’s what we put into place.”
Patel and his team created a digital-first customer experience strategy based around Adobe Experience Cloud, driven by applications and data analytics, and with digital channels as the primary connection.
Here, advanced analytics enabled the business to, as Patel puts it, “know the behavior of the customer.”
Building stronger customer experiences means that CIOs must work particularly closely with the CMO. As we cover elsewhere in The Living Enterprise, CIOs are shifting attention to the technology platforms used in marketing, and how these can enhance the customer experience.
What’s more, by working in concert with the CMO, the CIO is better positioned to align the available technology with the company’s strategic goals, using data to drive engagement.
“The enterprise’s persona in the world is going to be powered, in many cases, by digital capabilities across marketing and across communication efforts,” says Microsoft’s Andrew Wilson. He suggests that “being a practitioner in modern marketing capabilities, being able to help the CMO change and drive the brand of the enterprise” is of the utmost strategic importance. What’s more, by combining data with AI, businesses can ensure that customer interactions are relevant, in context, and rewarding, looking back to past interactions to anticipate what the customer is hoping to achieve.
Adobe’s Cynthia Stoddard believes this potential is only just being explored. “I think that AI is still in the early days,” she says, “but I think it can have a super impact on what we do and how we think about interacting through the customer journey.”
From automated business processes through to experiments with natural language processing, AI can remove layers of friction and build stronger relationships between customer and brand.
The PGA Tour is on a mission to put the fans at the center of everything, with Travis Trembarth, VP of Fan Engagement, working to connect with a new generation of digital-native golf fans. Discover how, using Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics, his team builds stronger, one-on-one relationships with each and every fan.
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Listen to episode 3 of The Living Enterprise podcast series to learn how CIOs should be working with CMOs and other business peers on modernizing the customer experience.
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