According to a recent survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 58% of executives named improving the customer experience as a top-five priority. Improving your customer experience may be a strategic priority. But that means it also has to be a technological and operational priority.
As customers evolve, your business must evolve too. The key to this continuous evolution is implementing the right technology to meet both your short- and long-term goals. Read on to find out how to transform and future-proof your business with the right business technology solution.
The importance of technology selection
Meeting strategic business goals requires a robust technology infrastructure that supports, optimizes, and drives the buyer’s journey. Technology – and the data it provides – will help shape your path and support your customer journey, allowing you to deliver personalized customer experiences that resonate.
To build and maintain a strong customer relationship, businesses need data, including:
- A complete 360-degree view of customer that provides real-time insights into who the customer is, what they want, and how they behave
- A single source of truth across all channels, teams, and systems that can support the customer journey by offering value and personalization at each step
- A customer relationship management (CRM) system that tracks customer interactions and improves engagement
But a wealth of data isn’t useful on its own. It must be actionable, turning insights into improvements for both internal processes and customer experiences. With the right technology in place, it’s possible to shift from blind data capture to driving optimized customer interactions. This leads to greater marketing return on investment (ROI) and long-term process optimization.
The right technology also ensures your business can remain agile, even in the midst of changing customer expectations, market conditions, and internal organizational factors. This level of business agility drives long-term success — the essence of future-proofing!
What is the impact of technology on organizational productivity?
Technology has the power to transform a business’s productivity, allowing for it to evolve and scale. The right technology improves efficiency – both for internal teams and for customers – by centralizing, simplifying, automating, and standardizing information. It enables multiple disparate systems to work together to scale effectively while meeting shifting customer behaviors.
For example, a product information management (PIM) system can enrich your content, automate workflows, validate and cleanse data, and manage digital assets. The impact of that is significant: It offers incredible value to customers by providing relevant, accurate product information. This increases customer confidence and long-term loyalty.
To make efficiency possible, businesses need to have a commitment not only to integrating technology systems, but also aligning internal processes and teams. Because the customer experience involves so many areas of an organization, today’s leaders need to collaborate to increase adoption, engagement, and operational efficiency.
How leaders can future-proof their business
Innovation has to be rooted in strategy, not change for the sake of change. Setting up your technology for productivity and growth requires thoughtful selection, planning, and implementation. It requires strategic actions like establishing short- and long-term goals, creating cross-departmental alignment, using data and analytics for customer-centricity, and driving a culture of innovation.
Executive leaders who are committed to digital agility and innovation — with a data-driven, customer-centric vision — are key to driving long-term business success. They can future-proof their business by taking important strategic steps as they choose a tech stack:
- Business Process Design: Define tech-enabled content management processes to ensure optimal efficiency, scalability and adoption of platform capabilities.
- Change Management: Promote awareness of the changes and benefits of the implementation so that teams are prepared and motivated.
- Training: Provide role-based platform and process training for content authors and digital marketers.
- Governance: Define and implement a framework for reviewing and prioritizing new requests that impact the new technology to ensure teams remain strategically focused.
What are the driving factors for technology selection?
In the process of evaluating technology options, the best choice isn’t always clear. You have to take into account a range of technology evaluation criteria: what technology is best suited for your business’ current and future needs, scalability, organization-wide adoption, customer adoption, budget, and other technology integrations.
Not sure how to select a technology stack? Here are some steps to get you started with your technology stack selection:
- Complete a current state assessment: Look at all the tools you have and gauge their maturity. Do you have legacy technology debt? Do you need to integrate disparate tools? Figure out where the gaps are.
- Gather requirements: It’s important to know what your technology needs to do and how it will ladder up to your business goals. Prioritize the most important requirements.
- Select your vendors: Give potential vendors your requirements and see if they can meet your needs. Narrow it down to a couple different vendors. Thoroughly review the tools, the vendors’ roadmap for upcoming features, the health of the companies, and whether they are within your budget limits.
Choosing the right technology partner
Know that you don’t have to do this alone. A dedicated technology partner can help you sunset an old platform and think about how to onboard new customers. Internally, they can also train your team on the new tool, set up governance and rules, and align your organization to work cohesively.
The right technology partner goes hand-in-hand with the right technology systems.
To future-proof your business with the right technology, contact an Avionos digital transformation team member or download our “Continuous Evolution: The New Normal” white paper.
