Improving customer experience: a business imperative and a potential business opportunity for today’s enterprises

Customers want smooth interactions with businesses, but a good, frictionless experience is a goal that is not easily achieved. As businesses continue to use new technologies and features to make the customer experience smoother, easier, and more enjoyable, customer expectations are constantly changing.

The average number of digital touchpoints between customers and businesses is 10, so creating a seamless customer experience is a huge challenge. It not only requires a lot of resources such as mobile apps, AI chatbots, websites, but also requires specialized software, technical support and personnel.

The continuous innovation in the B2C field will continue to redefine the way and experience of individuals and enterprises to easily interact digitally. However, the customer experience in the B2B field does not seem to have attracted much attention. One potential reason is that enterprises have different expectations for customer experience than individual consumers. 

In a global enterprise survey by Forrester, 80% of respondents said that improving customer experience is one of their most important business priorities. According to NTT's 2020 Customer Experience Benchmark Report, 82% of companies believe that improving customer experience can bring competitive advantages; 58% of companies even believe that customer experience is the main differentiating factor. However, only 29% of companies claim that their customer experience optimization efforts have achieved their expected goals, and 71% of companies are still developing customer experience strategies.

In conclusion, customer experience is very important in the digital age. Although most companies are planning to improve their customer experience, only a few actually implement it.

Companies that are ahead of their competitors in terms of customer experience will have a huge opportunity. Nearly half of the companies surveyed said that improvements in customer experience have had a visible impact on the group's business: 41% of them have increased revenue; 33% have reduced costs and received a return on investment.

Digitalization of all processes 

In fact, for enterprises, every process affects the customer experience. The numerous problems in the B2C consumer supply chain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are a good example. For consumers, they only experience simple interactive interfaces and processes when making purchases, but in fact, a large number of B2B manufacturers and digital infrastructure scheduling are involved. Once the global supply chain is interrupted, it will affect manufacturing, distribution, transportation, collection, storage and delivery.

According to a recent survey of supply chain professionals, only 5% of respondents believe that their order operations are "highly automated." And 45% of respondents said that their companies still rely mainly or completely on manual processes. With out-of-stocks and significantly longer waiting times for many products, the negative impact of inefficient back-end processes on customers is gradually becoming apparent.

The first step for enterprises to optimize customer experience is to digitize all processes, and in addition to digitization, they can also be improved and updated as needed. According to IDC's forecast, "driven by escalating cyber threats and new functional requirements, 65% of enterprises will invest in new technology platforms on a large scale by 2023 to achieve the purpose of modernizing old systems." 

A fully digital enterprise will be able to respond to changing market demands flexibly, in real time, and at scale, keeping itself far ahead of its competitors.

Digital transformation of the entire business is essential and is the first step in creating a digital ecosystem. While this may seem like a giant leap forward by upgrading the way customers interact with the business, a digital ecosystem is still customer-centric in nature.

Whether a company is in a digital ecosystem can be determined based on whether core business functional elements rely on partners, whether the system is connected to third-party platforms through APIs, and whether the IT department outsources legacy software updates.

According to McKinsey, digital ecosystems drive seven of the world’s 12 most valuable companies. Digital giants like Apple, Amazon, and Google dominate the market. Competing with these giants is not just difficult, it’s impossible.

Don’t be discouraged. Creating a digital ecosystem is not just for large companies. Companies of any size in any industry can turn to this business model and achieve substantial growth.

Wisdom is better than hard work

The reasons for creating a digital ecosystem may be more obvious than the hows. Digitizing just a few dozen manual processes is a massive undertaking, as is improving and modernizing customer-facing applications and digital assets. Updating legacy systems is a well-known nightmare. To create a flexible, customer-centric digital ecosystem, much more needs to be done.

Digital ecosystems can create a customized technology environment that fits the current business of an enterprise by intelligently applying and combining existing tools and technologies. Low-code has proven to be a tool that can accelerate digital transformation. Systems and applications built using low-code platforms have inherent flexibility, so they can be iterated quickly and at scale. Adaptable companies are able to respond to large-scale changes in the market, while efficient companies are more likely to trigger market changes.

Gartner predicts: "By 2024, more than 65% of application development will be completed using low-code." Low-code platforms such as Siemens Low-Code are reliable embedded tools that companies can use to improve adaptability and evolve their business models.

Gartner pointed out in its "Strategic Roadmap for Future Application Portfolios, 2021": "By 2023, 30% of new applications will be packaged into business function packages for delivery, pricing and sales, compared to less than 5% in 2020." In just three years, this figure has increased by 25%. From this, it is not difficult for us to imagine the scene five years later.

Low-code application examples

PostNL is the national postal operator of the Netherlands. The company sends an average of 8.1 million letters and 1.1 million parcels every day. Due to architectural problems, its old system can only provide services for a maximum of 600,000 parcels per day, which is difficult to meet the express delivery "blowout" caused by the massive growth of e-commerce, and it cannot evolve into a system with the potential for the next stage of development.

The company worked with Cape Groep, a Siemens low-code partner, to build a new order management system using low-code. PostNL and Cape Groep completed two years of order backlog processing in just six months and delivered a new system that meets current needs while being able to scale as business increases.

The new system runs on 64 microservices and can be customized according to the changing needs of each sorting center and its customers. Previously, it took the company several months to complete the transformation and testing of the system. Now, they can quickly meet new customer needs, such as changing delivery times and giving special treatment to medical packages.

Customer experience has become the new trend

The value of investing in improving the customer experience is clear to all. Companies are doing everything they can to improve the customer experience problem, but few are succeeding. Building a digital ecosystem for the enterprise not only provides the adaptability needed to improve competitiveness, but also sets achievable goal criteria for a truly digital enterprise.

"Born in adversity" has been the wisdom of mankind for thousands of years, and in modern times, countless business development cases have confirmed the great lesson of "dying in comfort". Successful climbers will never just stay at the top of the mountain and be proud of the height for a while, and the same should be true for enterprises. 

In addition to influencing customers' views of brands, the customer experience brought by products and digital environments, as well as the way of interacting with customers, will have a positive chain reaction. In order to continuously improve and iterate customer experience, companies need to make thorough and profound organizational changes. Reform and innovation are not only the general trend of the wheel of history, but also for companies, they can create great potential profits and differences in today's homogeneous world.