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Customer experience should always be an integral part of every business strategy. Especially now, in today’s climate of adjusting to COVID-19 restrictions, paired with a lack of direct contact with customers, a shift to online services has emerged and with it, the need to provide a stellar experience from beginning to end.  

Businesses making the transition to digital transformation is not a new one, but a shift in customer behavior to online models won’t be a temporary change. Lockdown or not, we are living in an era of digitalization, and customer experience management must be a prime concern.

Quick Question: What is customer experience?

Customer Experience (CX) defines every interaction a customer encounters with the brand during his or her buyer journey. From initially navigating the website, inquiring, purchasing and talking with customer service if necessary.  

Everything businesses do to make a customer’s journey hassle-free impacts customer’s perception about the brand. Great customer experience drives both loyalty and revenue in the long run.

Why Customer Experience is important?

Great customer experience is more important than ever before, in order to maintain a long lasting relationship with consumers, businesses must deliver the products and services they promise. Consumers own the decision to stay with a brand or to switch to any of many other options in the marketplace.  

With engagement across social media becoming more prevalent, buyers are increasingly making decisions based on recommendations from those in their network and reviews they read online. Focusing on consistent, meaningful customer experience builds loyalty and will contribute to additional customers long term.  

What is the ROI of focusing on CX?

The impact of customer experience varies across industries varies but prioritizing CX from a strategic, operational and technical perspective helps companies gain a competitive edge. For industries like insurance and retail, improving customer service at any level proves worthwhile. Quality customer experience in healthcare engages patients, improves care outcomes, and reduces operating costs.  

ROI might manifest within weeks or might even take as long as a year to manifest. Some examples of areas for potential ROI include :  

Growth in the revenue

Additional opportunities for cross-selling

Expenses are kept in check

Better optimization of the customer journey

How digital transformation is changing the customer experience.

Today, digital transformation is driving businesses to adapt to new market realities. This transformation isn’t driven by businesses but consumers themselves. Consumers look for ways to interact with the brand across more and more platforms, from social channels to voice assistants and expect fast responses and comprehensive services more than ever before. With your competition is just a click away, it’s important to understand how to provide meaningful customer service through technology in every interaction.

User-friendly and device-independent application/ website

Good UX means good CX. A website’s design is a major contributor to credibility. Therefore it’s important for a website to be user friendly, load quickly, be responsive across all screen sizes, and  the transition across devices should be functional and seamlessly. All links throughout any apps and website should work and navigation across the pages should be seamless.  

A poorly designed website can upset potential clients and prompt distrust. It affects the customer retention rate and can affect future business. Also if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, your SERP ranking can suffer. A good website is more than just appearance.

Personalized customer experience.

Great customer experience requires a customer-centric mindset. Today every customer wants to feel valued as a unique individual and are willing to share personal information like preferences and interests. In fact, customers are three times more likely to respond to the companies that:

Know them by their name.

Understand their buying history

Suggest and recommends product based on it

Companies should these insights to specify a target audience and design marketing campaigns accordingly. With a CRM system, it becomes easy to stay connected with the customers through welcome emails, sales follow-up, or a recent campaign based on their navigation history. This data helps to create highly targeted messages to provide a personalized experience.

Monitor and measure performance

Customer experience is a complex and wide concept so it’s important to break down the specific metrics and how to leverage technology to stay on top of it.  

Conversion Rate – Measure when your prospect completes an action such as sales or transaction and becomes a customer

Customer Churn Rate – How often you lose customers.

Net Promoter Score – Customer willingness to share your product.

Customer Effort Score –Effort it takes a customer to purchase your product  

Customer Satisfaction Score – Includes customer feedback

Measuring the above qualitative data will help to improve the positioning of your services and products. Doing so allows you to know what your customers want and when. Taking insights from your customer database helps you make predictive business decisions and develop a respective marketing budget. Tools like Googly Analytics and web analytic tools, customer surveys and feedback help monitor and measure performance.  

Chatbots and voice assistance

Today AI-enabled voice technology has found its way into almost all aspects of our lives. Many businesses rely on these voice assistant interactions to provide better customer experience. Alexa, Siri, IBM Watson are just the tip of the iceberg.

Bots can offer customer service at any hour on their preferred platform and handle multiple messages to focus on accelerating customer engagement. This avoids customer impatience and helps address behavioral cues to interpret the urgency of a question. Bots can analyze interactions and escalate if necessary.  

Break the barrier between customer channels

Customers today look for quick responses and technology has given them the power to demand this irrespective of time and place. Most customers expect a customer service response within an hour no matter whether on weekdays or weekends. This has put a weight on businesses to stay available.

Customers expect seamless service no matter what stage of the buying journey they are in, so leveraging technology helps increase communication and support this experience. This improves customer experience, ensures real-time responses for them, and ultimately increases revenue.

The Take-Away.

Digitalization in providing the customer experience can be quite complex to understand. If you are looking to get started with digital transformation, think of cloud solutions first, instead of onsite solutions.

It helps your business to meet customer demands at times and stay updated with the latest features. Data management and analytics help you to map out the perfect customer journey and single user-friendly customer experience.  

No matter the size of the organization, digitalization opens a new landscape to improve your relationship with the customers.  

On March 12th, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the COVID-19 outbreak, generally known as coronavirus, a pandemic. Even after continuous efforts from leaders of the world, it’s been difficult to fully contain the spread which is hard to forcing many organizations to experience significant disruptions.

Though the organizations have transitioned their employees to working remotely, many were not prepared to make this change so abruptly, due to the lack of ‘work from home’ arrangements. This requires solutions to address previous in-person communication:

Instant messaging

Real-time feedbacks

Project management

Daily check-ups and

Performance monitoring

To make this adjustment as smooth as possible, technology will play a vital role for the companies to ensure they maintain a competitive edge. This digital transformation helps workforces to stay connected and serve the clients without a disruption to normal workflows.

How is iLink Systems Bridging the Gap?

Being an IT infrastructure solution provider and Microsoft Partner, iLink understands the need for technology and digital tools. Our technical solutions across various platforms empower companies to bring teleworking outside the conventional office setting and generate a customized roadmap of solutions.

For businesses to maintain productivity, iLink offers an in-depth evaluation of the existing business frameworks to focus on the technologies that will make sure your company is the most productive it’s been.

In these times of global health crises, our following remote working services keep your collaborative working space both active and agile.

1. Microsoft Azure VPN

Wherever you take remote work, your organization needs to have adequate infrastructure to handle all the employees working on a Virtual Private Network. A VPN gateway is used to transmit data from one point to another over the internet. Microsoft Azure VPN gateway transmits your encrypted traffic between Azure virtual networks over the Microsoft network. It connects the in-house network to Azure through Site-to-Site VPN.

Though each virtual network can have only one VPN gateway, we can create several connections to a single VPN gateway. Microsoft VPN provides secure connectivity and uses industry-standard protocols, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), and Internet Key Exchange (IKE). This means your employees can access the important data they need, anywhere to do make sure the essential work doesn’t stop.

2. Remote Desktop Services (RDS)

Remote Desktop Services (RDS) enables employees to access applications simply through logging into an internet browser. It provides secure remote desktop access to the end-users to run the business applications and desktop resources from the cloud.

RDS is highly flexible and easy to set up on Azure, as it accepts secure connections from any computer and mobile device having a reliable network connection. It can run multiple desktop environments from a single RDS installation, making management simple and efficient.

3. Microsoft Teams Enablement

Working remotely can result in employees feeling isolated without daily in-person meetings. Microsoft Teams helps employees stay connected and get together virtually, whether for a brainstorming meeting or just for daily updates. It keeps the operational plan in place so that your organization ensures long-term success.

It enables organizations to collaborate through online chats, video calling, and document sharing. The video meetings can be recorded for the team members who have missed them or were not able to join. They can even access the automatically generated transcript to review any important information that needs to be repeated. The employees can even edit shared documents simultaneously.

4.Birdie

Though technology is narrowing the communication gap, getting messages across clearly without any technical barriers is still a problem for many organizations. Handling numerous meetings, managing emails, and quick conversations between teams can be challenging, if not dealt in an organized way.

Birdie, a virtual assistant for every team member, brings this culture of open communication and teamwork. It uses simple vocabulary to interact and keeps every team member informed with a virtual stand out. With the help of powerful AI features, your team can easily plan out their day and focus on what matters the most.

Through simple dashboards, Birdie keeps the information organized and immediately look for what they want. It keeps everything virtual, documented, and available across different time zones, helping companies to achieve more productivity from their employees.

5.Azure Backup

The Azure Backup service is simpler and more cost-efficient than the other cloud backup solutions. It backups your on-site resources and recovers the data from the Microsoft Azure cloud, keeping the data safe and secure. Azure Backup uses Recovery service vaults to retain data for the short as well as long term.

The key benefits of using Azure Backup services are

It provides independent and remote backups to protect against the accidental loss of original data. With built-in management of recovery points, you can easily restore the data as needed.

Azure backup provides high availability of cloud space with zero maintenance or overhead monitoring. The inbound or outbound data is free of charge with no limit on the amount of data transfer. Though cost associates with inbound data if a large amount of data is imported using Azure Import/Export service.

It also provides inherent monitoring and alerting facilities without any additional management infrastructure. The application-consistent backups by Azure reduce restoration time and require no additional fixes to get your work back on track.

Azure Backup automatically allocates and manages backup storage. The best thing is you only pay for the storage you use.

6.Smart Work Analytics

As the world is becoming more data-driven, iLink’s Smart Works tool provides insight into employee’s performance and time expenditure. With the help of this data, organizations make their teams work as efficiently and remotely as possible.

iLink Smart Works provides solutions that automatically classify the digital work of the employees and helps to determine the effort spent on a particular project. This visualization of the team workload helps you to meet accurate deadlines and stay ahead on projects.

iLink Smart Works can be easily installed on employees’ computers and manage large volumes of data to generate insights for executive dashboards. Functional insights cut costs and save time, improving employee engagement and outlining responsibilities for the efficient spread of the workload.

The Take-Away!

Remote working is here to stay. iLink offers solutions that aim to optimize your company’s performance and enhance efficiency that focus on customer experience. Not sure why you should care about Customer Experience? Learn more about how Digital Transformation is changing Customer Experience : https://www.ilink-systems.com/blog/why-you-should-care-about-improving-customer-experience/

What is business process engineering?

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is the process of redesigning organizational workflows and processes to achieve radical improvement in quality, efficiency, and cutting costs. It is a business management strategy that originated and widely popular in the 1990s. In 1990, Michael Hammer, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published an article called ‘Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate’ in the Harvard Business Review, where he claimed that Most of the work being done does not add any value for customers, and this work should be removed, not accelerated through automation. Instead, companies should reconsider their inability to satisfy customers and their inefficient cost structure.

BPR consists of the analysis of existing processes to identify opportunities for improvement. This analysis is conducted by representing business process in the form of flow charts.

Why someone would do it?

Business Process Reengineering is used by companies to reduce cost, improve cycle time and customer experience to gain an edge over the new entrants and foreign competitors.

BPR has shown to reduce cost, cycle time and errors through the elimination of tasks and processes that are identified as unproductive. Through the implementation of lean processes, employees can focus on providing better customer experience. The elimination of unproductive process allows companies to be able to quickly respond to customer needs and build products.

What are the steps to implement BPR?

The key steps to successfully implement Business Process Re-engineering as follows:

Define the objective and framework: This step involves the identification of the goals and objective of implementing BPR. Once the objective has been identified, the company must layout the framework and build the foundation by creating a BPR team.

Process analysis: Map out the current processes and tasks to identify bottlenecks or steps that do not add value.

Redesign: Identify the opportunities for improvement for the processes that were identified as unproductive.

Implementation: For BPR to be successful, it is necessary for the company to involve its employees in the process by constantly validating hypothesis and gathering feedback.

Unparalleled! Unprecedented! Black Swan event!

I have not seen the world changing so much in such a short span of time. Not in my lifetime. Just 2 weeks back I was in the US, visiting multiple cities including New York and Seattle. Unthinkable right now! Entire countries are shutting down.

We still do not know how COVID-19 would play out. While a gloomy picture is being painted by many, calling the current measures being too little and too late, we do not know if it’s a reality or perceptual panic. The reality of this panic (real or perceptual) however is that we are already seeing a huge slowdown in the economy. More and more companies are asking people to work remotely (or work from home — wfh), governments are shutting down everything (including a country wide curfew in India on March 22nd) and people have stopped travelling for business. This does not augur too well in the short run for sure and might have long lasting impact on certain industries that operate on tight margins and huge capex, for example, airlines and hospitality. Many companies may not be able to come out at the other end, whenever that happens.

Being in software/IT services industry has its own pluses and minuses. The main disadvantage being our heavy dependency on the health of other industries and the key advantage being ability to move to “work from home” relatively easily.

Here are some thoughts in terms of what we can do in software/IT industry, especially the Indian software/IT, to stay afloat and prevail.

Work from Home (WFH) –

It’s extremely important to make sure that wfh is as effective as work from office. There are challenges like connectivity, distractions and isolation. We must ensure productivity and responsiveness maintain momentum. It’s imperative to come up with crisp guidelines including dos and don’ts when you ask people to work from home. iLink has established a set of guidelines for our employees and can offer insight in this area for those who are looking for additional guidance managing a remote team. While connectivity at home would be the biggest risk, this is the time to demonstrate to your clients that you can be as good as before.

Analyze your business –

Divide your accounts/projects by industry and type of work you do. There are certain industries which are more vulnerable than others and discretionary budget will be slashed first. Non-discretionary will remain relatively safe. All of a sudden, the mundane support work sounds very attractive!

Be Prepared for the worst case –

I do not want to sound pessimistic, but we must be prepared for the worst-case scenario. We generally plan for growth, but these are different times. What are the steps you are going to take if your business goes down by 30% this year? 50%? When you analyze your business, you can gain perspective on the areas to focus on. Discuss the necessary steps with internal key stakeholders and try to drive consensus around an action plan. Doomsday planning is always important, but it largely remains academic when things are going well. But now is the time — do your fire drill now!

Build your NextGen models –

Everyone is accepting the reality of remote working or wfh (work from home). This is the best time to build your NextGen models. This is the time for the Indian IT to demonstrate that “offshoring” can work effectively beyond the mundane IT work. This is the time to demonstrate that offshoring can work for innovation, R&D and ideation! This might be the time to build models around virtual offices — this has been tried before but never at a large scale. Think of the cost savings which come with virtual offices. Every “cloud” has a silver lining!

Have Faith –

This too shall pass! The world has seen plagues, spanish flu, wars, famines and so on but we are still alive! Don’t get me wrong — we are alive today because our forefathers survived everything that happened before us. We still do not know how big this is but my hunch and belief is that the panic is overblown, thanks to social media. We need to be careful for sure but there is no need to panic.

Stay Healthy. Stay Safe. Stay Calm.

Companies managing remote employees are shifting focus to maintaining productivity. What does productivity mean, now that employees are working with their spouses, children, trying to home-school and establishing boundaries between work and home is harder than ever?  

While much of our focus is on business continuity, employers are responsible for supporting employees to avoid burnout and maintain open communication at all stages of the business.  

We’ll look at some ways companies can engage their remote employees and ensure a successful WFH environment.  

4 “Facilitative factors” for the success of working from home:  

Maintain Employee Engagements –

Employees need support now more than ever. Providing resources keep your employees happy and balanced. You might want to consider:  

Offering sessions/courses to keep employees motivated and engaged such as:

Time Management

Health Management

Financial Management

Conduct surveys to get employee feedback, act based on results and communicate appropriate changes

Provide support for laptop/desktop equipment and other necessities like transport of desktops, chairs, etc

Encourage employees to establish a routine–

Without a commute to an office, it’s easy to feel like each day runs into the next. Establishing some sort of routine can help not only increase productivity but employees set boundaries on their mental energy and time spent. Some ways to help facilitate this include:  

Scheduling regular calls

Simulate office conditions at home

Maintain fixed hours

Unwinding – Take scheduled breaks of 5-10 minutes at regular intervals. Walk around the house, get outside if possible or do a few muscle-stretching exercises.

Participate and facilitate meaningful goal settings aligned with current productivity expectations.  

Managers should trust their team and be available for them when needed.  

Communication–

How are you connecting with employees consistently? Though many of us are self-distancing with family, none of us are seeing a variety of people regularly and in times of uncertainty, need to hear from our employer. Here are some ways to do it:  

Consistent and efficient communication across various stakeholders like leaders, managers and team members.  

Stakeholders’ support – the support from one’s team and other teams like Infra, HR and Admin are crucial for overall success.  

Virtual open-door policy – make sure your employees know you’re available and they can ask questions.  

Technology –

We are living in a time of changes in technology on an almost daily basis. Without the ability to be together physically, relying on technology to stay in touch and enable efficiency is critical. Make sure you incorporate the following:  

Right Support Mechanisms – Do people know how to get in touch and use existing technology to do so?  

Strengthening remote-working capabilities – Make sure employees have what they need to be successful from home meaning access to files, collaboration tools and so on.  

Improving Data Security and Cybersecurity – What was previously kept on lockdown is now being shared across work and personal computers, make sure your company is set to share securely so employees can focus on the task at hand.  

Migrating your IT Infrastructure to Cloud using Lift and Shift approach is a great way to switch IT spending to a pay-as-you-go model and reduce CapEx costs. But in order to get a better ROI, already a variety of organisations—from tiny startups to global corporations, government agencies to non-profits—are embracing the cloud technology to build applications for improving their Product Quality and Business Productivity.

A cloud application simply refers to any software or application that is deployed in a cloud environment rather than being hosted on an On-Premise server or machine. When it comes to application development, is there any difference between On-Premise Web App Vs Cloud App? Yes there is. Cloud based apps are sort of “evolved” web apps that uses extensive array of cloud services to achieve reliability, elasticity, high availability, multi-tenancy and global replication.

Following are some of the tips for developing Cloud Applications

Identify Cloud Provider

Once you finalize the cloud strategy that aligns with your business vision and mission, the selection of cloud provider is essential.  There are a number of cloud provider like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform that offer developers the platform and tools in order to simplify the actual development process. What matters is choosing the one that best meets your business requirements.

Understand the Infrastructure and Services

When it comes to developing applications for cloud, you will have multiple cloud services and tools to choose from. For example,

·        do you really need a dedicated infrastructure to host your application or can you leverage serverless architecture?

·        Where to store your data?

·        How to secure your applications?

·        How to improve the performance?

·        What to use for working with the events?

Once you understand when to use each cloud services, you will be able to come up with the right architecture for your scenario.

Loosely Coupled Architecture

A cloud native architecture should be similar to SOA. Instead of creating tightly coupled applications with a focus on user interface, the developers should exposing the underlying functionality as services that can be leveraged independently. The application architecture when developing for the cloud needs to have the in-built capabilities to interact with highly complex, widely distributed systems.

Plan for Resiliency

The cloud application developers need to be plan for unexpected resource failures and design accordingly. Instead of trying to prevent failures altogether, the goal is to minimize the effects of a single failing component. The applications should be Resilient and recover gracefully from failures, and they continue to function with minimal downtime and data loss before full recovery. Also it should be Highly available and run as designed in a healthy state with no significant downtime.

Adopt DevOps Strategy

The benefits of DevOps in developing a cloud application include fostering of a culture that focuses on frequent releases of high quality deliverables. In order to ensure that your application is running effectively over time, you need to consider implementing multiple processes to make sure that your users are getting the right experience. Some of the major processes that needs to be considered are

·        Manage infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

·        Implement CI/CD pipelines for all applications

·        Setup Cloud Monitoring

·        Automated Testing

·        Performance Monitoring

Consider performance and scaling

To gain the maximum performance, the applications should be designed to be horizontally scalable. Apps often don’t need more processors, just a better way to handle high workloads. If you expect a high traffic volume at specific times, you can create a scheduled autoscaling policy. It can create instances even before your demand increases. Performance monitoring tools to oversee the performance of the application can help make the necessary provisions needed to design the application to scale.

Security considerations

Security is one of the most important aspects of any architecture. Use native security capabilities built into cloud services instead of adding external security components (for data encryption, network traffic filtering, threat detection, and other functions). These services provide better security, reliability, and efficiency because cloud providers operate and secure them with dedicated teams with deep expertise in those areas. Following are some of the capabilities that should be prioritized

·        Identity

·        Data Protection

·        Key Management

·        Application Configurations

Summary

The cloud is changing how applications are designed. Instead of monoliths, applications are decomposed into smaller, decentralized services. These services communicate through APIs or by using asynchronous messaging or eventing. Applications scale horizontally, adding new instances as demand requires. These trends bring new challenges. Application state is distributed. Operations are done in parallel and asynchronously. Applications must be resilient when failures occur. Deployments must be automated and predictable. Monitoring and telemetry are critical for gaining insight into the system.