Evolving Customer Service Into Customer Experience

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Customer experience is the digital equivalent of customer service. Discover how you can take the excellent service you offer your customers and put it online through application modernization.

Customer experience (CX) design is about offering a fantastic service to consumers to make them want to buy from your organization instead of your competitors. In a digital world, CX is the competitive edge that earns you higher revenue without spending more on your products.

Yet, you can't offer innovative customer experiences like artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, augmented reality (AR) viewpoints, and superfast service without having the back-end technology to support it. This means you need to undergo an application modernization initiative in order to give your company the capabilities it needs to offer fantastic CX.

Drive your app modernization work forward with detailed analysis of your application portfolio and IT landscape using SAP LeanIX. To find out more, book a demo:

What Is Customer Experience?

Customer experience (CX) is an evolution of user experience (UX) design. It's simply the commercial use of the methodology that drives success in web design.

UX principles state that websites should be built around giving their users the best experience in using them. It attempts to leverage psychological principles in order to make the experience of using websites as easy and enjoyable as possible.

When those websites are engaging in ecommerce, then UX becomes CX, adapting to optimize the buying experience and repeat business. This should be completely familiar to any enterprise.

Since the very first traders began to operate hundreds of years ago, retailers have discovered that their business thrives by offering the very best experience to consumers. Service with a smile brings consumers back to your establishment over and over again.

In the modern age, stores carefully select the right colors, layout, and music to ensure their customers look forward to shopping and are comfortable spending their money with them. Now, as commerce evolves into ecommerce, it's time to apply similar efforts to your websites.

Providing a functional, beautiful website that leverages bleeding-edge technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) is simply the way that you offer customer service through the internet. This is why an exceptional online customer experience through a website or application is absolutely paramount, whether you're selling fashion accessories or financial services.

An AI chatbot in this light is really no different from investing in new cash registers for your store, or hiring financial consultants to support your customers in your banking branch. With the right technology, you can unlock a revolution for your organization.

Customer Experience On The Bleeding Edge

Customer experience (CX) technology can empower incredible sales power for your organization. Here are a few case studies of cutting-edge customer experience that's seen real success:

In 2020, Samsung launched its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, which served to increase its Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 45%
Walmart recently partnered with AI startup Zeekit to create Choose My Model, a tool that shows customers clothes on a model that looks like them
Bollé went one step further and allowed customers to try on their sunglasses through Instagram, and even see how the world looks through them
Last year, online insurer, Lemonade, set a world record for time to pay out on an insurance claim: three seconds
French department store, Printemps, meanwhile, has opened a clothing shop in the Metaverse that can be explored in virtual reality

These incredible innovations and many more are achievable for your organization. Unfortunately, running cutting-edge website technology or leveraging a high-tech mobile app with a clunky, outdated back-end system to support it won't get you very far.

Customer Experience Means App Modernization

Customer experience (CX) optimization requires the right starting point. Just as your staff empower your customer service, you need to invest in your technology in order to enhance your CX.

Indeed, Salesforce found that 81% of customers expect faster service as technology advances, and 73% expect better personalization. Yet, powering that kind of speed and personalization requires a high-tech back end.

Running an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot on a Windows 7 operating system isn't going to offer the experience your customers are looking for, if it's even possible. To offer an exceptional CX, you need your IT landscape to be best-of-breed across your entire estate.

Of course, having the latest tech from end-to-end across your organization is extremely expensive, and not always necessary. Older, less-expensive technology may still be the best option to power your CX, or at least no better than the latest versions.

This means that optimizing your IT landscape to offer the best customer experience involves getting the best technology for the job at the lowest expense. This serves to maximize your return on investment, even as it increases your sales.

You'll likely find that eliminating the legacy applications that you no longer need will save enough money to re-invest into upgrading the rest of your technology. So, where do you get started?

Application Modernization Begins With Oversight

Customer experience (CX) optimization requires modernizing your application portfolio and IT landscape with the right technology. To do that, however, you must begin by gaining an oversight of your current estate.

Only then can you determine what parts of your IT landscape are already good enough to support your ambitions, and which need to be replaced. Not to mention, what legacy technology you're still paying for that you don't need to be.

To hunt down wastage, strengthen your application portfolio, and untangle unnecessary complexity, you need to have a map of your IT landscape. Once you have oversight of what works in your landscape and what doesn't, you can then start to fill in the gaps with best-of-breed technology.

Here it's essential to know what innovative tech is compatible with other tech and the rest of your IT landscape. It could be catastrophic to contract an application for five years only to find out that you can't use it.

Once you've designed the connections of your new tech landscape and have a complete map of your current stack, it's a simple process to plan out a path to move between the two states. This road map will then become a project plan for optimizing your CX and moving your organization into the modern era.

Creating these three maps of your current and future states, and the path between the two, however, requires dealing with vast amounts of information in a collaborative way. To succeed here, you need SAP LeanIX to manage all of that data for you.

SAP LeanIX: Putting Customer Experience First

Customer experience (CX) optimization is a complex process and sharing all of that data between all your collaborating stakeholders requires a platform that can store and manage it. That's why SAP LeanIX is an essential tool for powering CX innovation.

Each application and IT component has its own information fact sheet in LeanIX, allowing comprehensive reporting and mapping. You can even visualize that information into presentations and share them with your stakeholders from within the platform.

Armed with this information, your entire organization will be able to drive CX innovation forward, offering the best-possible digital service to your customers. Application modernization drives CX improvements, and that empowers your business to thrive.

Customer experience (CX) optimization requires a tool that can oversee your application portfolio data and help you design a brand-new IT landscape for your organization. To find out more about SAP LeanIX, book a demo: