Lean into cloud to transform the customer experience

Offering an excellent customer experience can make the difference between leading your market and being a market also-ran. Market-leading companies such as Apple in tech, Ritz-Carlton in hospitality and Ikea in retail are all well-known for providing their clients with a superior customer experience (CX). The CX these companies offer transforms the way customers consider their brands. They know these organizations offer a CX that’s quick, easy, even fun.

If your organization’s CX isn’t up to that level, you’re far from alone. In fact, many organizations offer a CX that can only be described as suboptimal.

Measured approach to cloud-based CX solutions

The good news is that a new approach, known as composable business, can help. It’s a way to enable large organizations to make the transition from on-premises legacy systems to modernization in the cloud. That’s important because cloud-based CX solutions can drive greater flexibility and agility, making it easier for organizations to quickly adapt to the changing demands of their customers.

Organizations using this approach move only selected business capabilities to the cloud, rather than lifting and shifting their entire estate. In this way, the organization can gain the cloud’s benefits at a speed unique to its needs and capabilities. Those benefits include easier budgeting and ROI monitoring, and lowered risk.

With this approach, improving your company’s CX doesn’t have to be a big bang systems overhaul. Instead, you can make incremental improvements via discrete business functions. Even relatively small changes can deliver big value to your customers, whether in the physical world or online.

These changes can also deliver benefits to your organization. An improved CX contributes to a business’ ability to lower costs, improve customer-conversion rates, achieve higher rates of cross-selling and up-selling, and increase revenue.

Start with high-value CX projects

What’s different about the composable business approach to CX is that instead of taking on every CX your organization handles, you cherry-pick those customer relations with the highest value. Then you work on those first.

You make a case for your approach, gain internal support and momentum and identify the quantifiable gains. It’s even possible for the gains from one small project to fund the next.

DXC customers who have taken the composable business approach have seen impressive results. One of our customers, a major global retailer, used a composable business approach to create “frictionless” self-service transactions. As a result, the retailer has improved revenue by 30%, quickened time-to-market by 75% and reduced customer-complaint response times by 25%.

Before the engagement, this retailer was burdened with older legacy systems and out-of-date processes. The market was changing, but their systems hadn’t. Part of the work involved identifying systems that needed modernizing and processes that needed transforming.

Again, this wasn’t a big-bang project. Instead, the retailer made relatively small, step-by-step changes, starting with the processes most likely to make the biggest CX improvements.

Bonus benefits from the composable business approach

Improving your CX can also deliver another, often unexpected benefit: a deep understanding of how to improve other areas of the business. These can include supply chain, HR and finance.

For example, if a manufacturer’s supply chain is backed up, its customers will be forced to endure long waits for their purchases to be delivered. No one likes that. If the company can improve its supply chain to deliver purchases faster, it can also reduce or even eliminate that customer frustration.

A wide range of industries can benefit by adopting a composable business approach to the customer experience. They include the public sector, nonprofits, manufacturing, retail and distribution.  

Where are you on your customer experience journey?

To help you answer that question, DXC has developed a CX Competency and Maturity Assessment. Complete this self-assessment, and you’ll receive a personalized report that benchmarks your organization’s customer-experience strengths and weaknesses across 20 best practices.

That’s valuable information you can use to ultimately outperform the competition.

Learn more about DXC Applications and DXC Cloud.