How to sustainably grow your business

Customer experience is inherently an external customer-facing process, and consequently we need an entirely new approach to systems. Existing systems are not built to deliver consistent experience. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), CRM, Supply Chain Management all focus on internal company process automation. More attention is spent on managing clunky databases rather than on how information flows from the customer into the business and vice versa. However, the more advanced software vendors are moving beyond just internal process management, to deliver Customer Experience Management – where the focus is on serving the customer and applications are built with the customer experience in mind. In essence it’s about helping businesses adapt to customer needs rather than ‘managing’ customers to fit with internal CRM processes.

By focusing on knowledge rather than data and using applications that have been built, from the ground up, with the customer experience in mind, the scales are beginning to balance out in favour of serving both the customers and the shareholders. In actual fact, this balancing out of the scales is more about the changing enterprise software market and how companies now want to engage with their application vendors.

The fast paced, ever changing market place demands that companies don’t miss a beat, the decision you make today is the success or failure you see tomorrow. So companies must look for the business advantage and benefits from day one of their investment. This starts with eliminating unnecessary costs such as infrastructure, databases, only buying what software is really needed and paying for it in a way that suits the business. Furthermore, smaller, trial implementations help define the goals and test the expected results, all before a significant investment has been made. This sets the results baseline for rollout on a wider scale and ensures vendor accountability throughout the relationship.

Ultimately, organisations have to recognise that customer empowerment is a disruptive force in business, either to be embraced or ignored. Those that embrace it will have understood the nuances of what it takes to deliver a great experience that will attract customers, and they will be leading their market on that basis. Those that don’t, will still be deploying process-led software designed to force customers to fit with their own internal systems and will most likely be out of business in the not too distant future.

*Alison Higgins-Miller is Vice President Asia Pacific of RightNow Technologies.