Evolving the convergence of CX and CS digital workflows
Let me start with a proposed formula for success in the digital software industry world :
Σ Cx + δ Cs ∝ SX
in other words, the sum of our customer experiences (Cx) plus the delta of our customer support (Cs) results are directly proportional to the ‘Successful Experiences’ (SX) we can gain as digital businesses in this new era of transformations.
Are you serious about changing the way of thinking or culture of success in your software business? Then think of the business architecture first.
Customer Success should be a principle, a behavior and normal way of living in digital businesses dealing with SaaS and XaaS (everything as a service) products. Ideally every employee of the company should be a customer success person to enable delightful and wonderful experiences. From sales to product management to architects and customer reps should all be thinking of successful experiences. But it all starts with Customer Empathy!
If one thinks only about their product’s success and not ‘Customer First’, you end up building stacks and architectures that seem to end in a swamp of solutions with a very confused user journey. Every step we take in this sinking sand, seems to pivot us away from our true purpose of serving customers with something of greater value and competitive advantage. We need to put ourselves in our end-customer’s shoes and observe (Gemba) how they react (emotionally) to the current workflow and the manual steps involved in completing any kind of transactions or data processing.
When you build the capability of your organization or its inherent operators, do you consider CX or CS in your DNA? Think about it: Do you want to improve your products’ Customer Experience or depend on other company’s like Gainsight, Medallia/Strikedeck, etc. to help you in your next generation / evolution of your XaaS digital business? Can we look at the big picture and separate the forest from the trees?
When we look at defining enterprise architecture, do we look at the business aspects and the impacts it makes to our digital product experiences? It’s worth considering the human pain-points, cultural roadblocks and BAU policies to keep the lights on while retaining talent and building out new digital workflows.
Some of the new cloud companies (digital natives perhaps too) seem to focus on product related OKRs and KPIs because they are a “Technology First” company. I firmly believe that we need to put on the hat of ‘Customer First’ and think about how data and automation can help enable better customer support and enhanced customer experiences for ‘People First’ when we create or generate new digital workflows for new ‘software as a service’ or ‘platform as a service’ businesses.
In the next article I will write about digital workers (human and AI) working together collaboratively to achieve “More with less” ! — VirooPax Mirji
