To earn customer loyalty, keep your head in the cloud, Latest Views News - The New Paper
Views

To earn customer loyalty, keep your head in the cloud

This article is more than 12 months old

To keep customers, companies must tap on data from cloud applications to provide a personalised and seamless experience

Thanks to on-demand information and services available anytime, anywhere, customers are more empowered than ever before and have sky-high expectations.

If your customer is bored or impatient, confused or frustrated, for even just a second, there are a myriad of other choices they can turn to.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, poor customer experiences will destroy nearly a third of digital business projects. And PwC reports that 73 per cent of customers now point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decision.

In this context, providing a personalised, seamless, predictive customer experience is a core pillar of business success - and the only way to achieve that is by connecting every part of the enterprise and making sure customers are at the centre of all decision-making.

Connection and integration help businesses answer that all-important question - how do I maintain a single view of my customer?

The average consumer generates a huge amount of data every day, across a vast range of channels; and in fact, an estimated 90 per cent of the data that now exists was created in the past two years.

On social, mobile, desktop and connected TV, consumers are creating masses of data based on their interests, purchases, location and brand sentiment.

But when all that data remains isolated in business silos, the view of the customer becomes fragmented.

Uniquely, cloud applications enable a single point of view on customer data. Through cloud, businesses can tear down silos so that more customer data is collected and shared, in an open and usable way, with everyone in the organisation.

The integration extends from the frontlines of the business to help marketers create more personalised engagements, all the way to the back-office.

Finally, data can be quickly and effectively used to streamline interlocking enterprise resource planning processes across supply chain, manufacturing, logistics and more, as well as to inform broader strategic initiatives.

Customer-centricity isn't just about what customers can see - it's a way an entire organisation works that starts from the inside out.

When the existing business environment is integrated and inter-operable, without the perils of siloed technology and thinking, continual innovation is finally possible.

Bold organisations are setting an example of improving the customer experience at the front office and driving new innovation at the back office, to go above and beyond for customers in a competitive landscape.

Zalora, the largest e-commerce fashion company in South-east Asia, is an organisation that illustrates how the right back-end system can drive new levels of customer loyalty.

They moved from a batch and blast model to become an orchestrator of personalised conversations, where they are able to speak to customers in a relevant and tailored manner.

This has resulted in a multifold increase in revenue.

Pest control service Killem Pest is using the connective power of cloud to provide better customer experience.

They are able to collate requests from customers or potential new leads via a user-friendly portal, e-mail or on the phone.

This allows them to effectively manage resourcing across scheduled assignments and locations in real time and handle feedback in a proactive manner.

When businesses connect all the data and all the dots across the organisation, they can deliver rich internal insight and provide truly excellent experiences for customers.

The next wave of customer service is already here, bringing significantly enhanced experiences to customers and re-defining which companies will come out on top.

The writer is director, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Asean.

Technology