How to be a Customer-Centric Organization

In a previous post, we shared that organizations today need to live and breathe customer-centric values, where Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and IT collaborate to give customers the best, most seamless experience. Today’s customers have endless options, which means they will not hesitate to move on to a competitor after suffering through a bad experience with a company. Creating a seamless and exceptional experience is the only way to build truly loyal customers who can grow into brand advocates.

At ConvergeOne, WAVES is our proprietary Methodology that guides each and every one of our collaboration engagements. WAVES is an acronym, with each letter representing a specific phase of the methodology. Each phase provides a specific contribution to the final outcome, which is a recommended solution that is tailored to the customer’s business and technology needs. The WAVES phases, which must be executed in order, are:

Just recently, one of my customers—a large K-12 School District—was hit by a major ransomware breach. Just how major was it? The breach was so major that the whole (and I really mean the WHOLE) data center was inoperable. Primary data and backup data was encrypted beyond usability.  Management systems of production devices and the backup application systems were compromised beyond recoverability. Active Directory and authentication capabilities were locked out. The result was that the data center became a bunch of bare-metal hardware with blinking lights.

I’ll start by answering a question that immediately comes to mind: What, exactly, does multi-cloud mean? When we reference a multi-cloud environment, we’re talking about an organization that utilizes some combination of one or more public and/or private clouds to power their critical applications and workloads. For example, an organization may utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its mainstream applications, Google Cloud for machine learning (ML)-centric workloads, and a private on-premises cloud for compliance-governed applications. Sound complicated? It is. 

What is a Connector? By definition, it is “a thing that links two or more things together.” In the telecommunications sector, that can mean a multitude of things. For the purposes of this blog post, I will be talking about ConvergeOne Advanced Services (C1AS) and the benefits of integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms with Telephony platforms.

Do you have omnichannel projects that just aren’t moving along as fast as you think they should? What are the hurdles getting in your way? I’ve yet to find a scenario where it’s the technology that’s slowing things down. Don’t get me wrong, omnichannel isn’t easy. It’s a very different approach to customer contact than traditional call centers or even multichannel contact centers. Omnichannel is all about customizing the journey of the person (or thing) trying to interact with your business. First we need to understand what the customer journey actually looks like. This is often a lot harder than it sounds. Most people in a company know their little piece of the customer journey, but very few can articulate the details of the full, beginning-to-end journey. This often requires a lot of exploration, business-level interviews, multi-disciplinary teams, and documentation.

Who owns the customer relationship in your company or organization: Marketing, Customer Service, or IT? Fifteen years ago, the answer was clear: Customer Service, period. Over time, the answer has become murkier. Once customers began researching a product or service prior to purchase—a phenomenon Google coined the “Zero Moment of Truth”—a shift occurred. Marketing began to lay claim to the customer relationship. This was due, in large part, to the bevy of channels available to customers—such as browsers, apps, and social media—prior to communicating with a company. Fast forward to the present day and customers are empowered with even more resources to answer their own questions and conduct their own due diligence before contacting a company.

Every morning when I get up, there are a series of apps that I fire up to gather my daily dose of information that fuels my personal, financial, and work life. In this day and age, I need to access the data on my mobile device/smartphone or PC anywhere and at any time. For all practical purposes, I really don’t care how that information is processed behind the scenes.

Isn’t that typical of how we consume information in today’s digital transformation age? Being a technical person, I do understand how this information is produced and delivered, but most of us just want the information when we demand it – we don’t care about how it gets to us. That is, until our business is the one that must provide the data to consumers, who demand convenient access to it at all times. So, how does data get delivered to consumers’ devices of choice?

Digital transformation is a never-ending journey that requires organizations to continually update their technology to keep pace with innovation. This lends a sense of urgency to any technology upgrade, which means that organizations will oftentimes partner with solution providers who offer a quick fix and grandiose promises. The problem? The solutions are out-of-the-box rather than tailored to the specific needs of the organization. It’s a fact: Every organization is different and has its own specific requirements, so how could the same solution possibly be optimized to fit every organization’s needs?

When you think of any one of these technologies – Internet of Things (IoT), Web Services, or WebRTC – by itself, each is a bright and shiny object that catches our attention. The capabilities of each of these technologies stand on their own and are very cool.