Adopting technology is a good strategy to make your customer experience management program more efficient, both in speed and reliability. So much of innovation has gone in this area in past few years that there is no end to new products being launched every day be it for gathering 360 degree customer view, managing and analyzing customer data or servicing customers. You name it and we have a solution to manage using latest technologies like Machine learning, Artificial intelligence, Big data, IoT.
Quite obviously there is a lot of excitement in business fraternity to be at the top by using the latest and greatest and in lot of cases it leads to a decision of building their own solution rather buying from market. One should be very careful and deal with lot of patience before finalizing on a decision. Some of the points to keep in mind are:
Spend a lot of time in understanding your need as in defining the problem statement, its impact on business objectives.
What is a budget to drive an initiative?
Detailed comparative study of products from third party that fit in the requirement
Investment to develop or maintain the product in the long run vs. cost to request customization of the product from vendor?
Cost to retain the required technical talent in the system in case of build?
It won’t hurt to run a couple of pilots to make the right judgment
And before we delve into Build vs. buy decision, a word of caution for all decision makers. Technology is meant to ease how we do our business and however great the ROI results are, it could be a biggest overhead if not applied to our business plan in a right way at the right time. Use the techniques available like customer journey mapping or consumer research to draw a thorough understanding of where we stand as provider in meeting customer expectations and if the technology we are aiming at serves the purpose. Most importantly does it integrate well with our existing systems and processes?
Simply put consider the choice of technology as last step in your overall program and not the first if you have a business running for few years!
#customerjourneymapping #customerexperiencemanagement #customerinsights