CIO role: The X-factor in customer experience
CIOs play a critical role in delivering the kind of customer experiences that drive loyalty and business growth.
When it comes to building better customer experiences, there are a lot of areas brand leaders can focus on.
Companies commonly prioritize forward-facing teams like sales, marketing, and customer success because they play an integral role at every stage of a customer’s journey – and these are certainly smart areas to invest in.
There’s an important group of people behind the scenes, however, who are equally vital for CX success: your development team. These skilled coders are constantly designing and fixing the systems that provide customers with seamless and frustration-free experiences.
As we look toward the future of CX—when customers receive ultra-personalized experiences that blend seamlessly online and offline and use artificial intelligence to its fullest potential—developers will play a major part in its success and innovation.
But considering the many competing priorities developers face (like building your company product), it’s important to start in areas where they can drive a significant change with relatively low effort. Here are two suggestions inspired by SAP TechEd, an online event that explored the latest in app development tools, generative AI, and more.
Development team: Customer feedback made easy
Customer reviews are a direct way for brands to understand what they’re doing well, how they can improve, and how their customers feel about the product or service.
Customer experience teams should always be on the lookout for customer reviews and feedback. It’s even a best practice in some industries to respond to all reviews within 24 hours. But it’s challenging considering there are countless places for customers to leave reviews, and they can leave one at any time. Should someone on your team spend their entire day monitoring for reviews?
Developers can make this easier by building systems that search the web for brand reviews and then notify the team of those reviews. Ideally, the alert system leverages AI to “read” the review and understand if it’s positive, neutral, or negative. This alert empowers teams to act quickly and ensures all customer feedback is taken into account.
At the event, the SAP team demoed its tool for developers to enable this alert system effortlessly. SAP has a GitHub repository with code that you can plug and play to scour the web for reviews and automatically alert your team when a new review is posted.
Staying ahead of customer feedback and making necessary changes quickly shows you care and goes a long way in nurturing your customer trust and loyalty.
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Taking the pain out of invoicing
It isn’t the most exciting part of a customer’s journey, but receiving invoices and sending payments should be as stress-free as possible for them—and your team, too.
When businesses manage a large volume of customer invoices, it can become overwhelming to transfer the data and ensure its accuracy, all while providing prompt and reliable service to customers.
AI can free your team from repetitive data entry and help ensure the accuracy of what you send to customers. And customer invoicing is a perfect place to do this.
Using solutions like SAP Ariba Invoice Management, developer teams can quickly build a process for team members to upload a PDF to automatically extract key information and generate a customer invoice. As seen in the TechEd demo, SAP’s system ranks how confident it is in the accuracy of each detail and flags what is missing. Think about the time you can save and mistakes you can avoid.
Receiving an incorrect invoice can easily upset a customer (how would you feel if you were charged incorrectly?!). Enlist your developers to make invoicing—and any other seemingly small interaction—as streamlined and accurate as possible.
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Developers & great CX: Getting started
By investing in your development team and empowering them with tools that make their jobs much easier, we can achieve new levels of personalization and greater customer experiences—as well as more productive and fulfilled employees.
To kickstart your efforts and create your priority list, gather representatives from your customer-facing teams and development team. Ask the following questions:
- What customer experience tasks require a significant amount of manual data entry?
- Are there customer experience activities that typically take a significant amount of time?
- Is there a developer solution that can alleviate your challenges?
- What are some of the biggest pain points in your customer journey today?
- Are you automating specific experiences? Can you automate more?
- How can you use technology to remove hurdles for your customers?
Staying ahead of customer feedback and making every interaction a breeze (even invoicing) are just two areas you might explore first, but the possibilities are endless. Keep an open dialogue with your team to find new ways to bring developers in to solve CX challenges.
