People, process, and technology: How to deliver effective customer experience

Whether employees or customers, ‘making people happy’ is a now the single most important catalyst for experience platform investments across Europe. Indeed, the two feed into each other – it is impossible to have happy customers without a happy workforce.

This was one of the main takeaways from CIO roundtable event hosted by Accenture and Adobe. The roundtable was attended by Digital Transformation Leaders from some of Europe’s biggest brands.

How can customer experience (CX) investments create happier customers? Integration is key. Most organisations have the data, technology, and people they need, but often these are neither connected nor orchestrated around business objectives. Business functions can find themselves competing for funding and skills, slowing down benefits realisation for the enterprise.

Participants agreed that a key challenge is around how best to unify and operationalise their datasets. Doing so requires the removal of process barriers, aligning people to common goals and creating collaborative ways of working. Technology needs to enable organisations to prioritise decisions, highlight blockers, and automate critical workflows. In tandem, enterprises should look to change the organisational mindset to work as a collective, adopt agile practices, and balance achieving business- and customer-centric objectives.

Here, cloud technologies, such as the Adobe Experience Cloud, will empower employees with powerful tools and real-time data and analytics to provide better customer experiences. Meanwhile, automation at scale will free employees of transactional tasks so they focus on more complex customer engagements, or on the creative side of marketing. Together, the cloud and human ingenuity will drive a new range of ever better customer experiences that will in turn improve business outcomes.

Moving to the cloud can still be a daunting challenge, particularly for large organisations with significant amounts of legacy technology in play. Accenture and Adobe’s experts outlined how best companies can migrate their martech stack to the cloud, including key lessons learned from individual leaders at the roundtable

The key is for organisations to streamline and optimise business-as-usual activities through automation while in parallel creating a big picture, value-centric roadmap that focuses time, priorities, and outputs. Importantly, not all use cases will be cloud appropriate. Part of the journey is identifying which marketing processes can best be optimised in the cloud, and which are better served on-premises.

However, participants at the discussion were keen to reiterate that, while important, technology is not the only consideration when it comes to creating winning customer experiences. The most important factor for organisations was a focus on their people. That means building a culture in which employees are free to work in ways that suit them best, while also training them in how to work in agile, digital-first structures, all the while being inspired to see the bigger picture and the overarching goals of the organisation.

All of this is easier said than done, which is why key partnerships play a pivotal role in helping organisations achieve their vision.

The roundtable discussion ended as it started, with a reminder that customer experience excellence, while enabled by data and technology, is still essentially all about people: how do organisations drive adoption and change hearts and minds to embrace technology and make people more accountable for part they play in driving value?