The relationship between business, technology and customers. How does it work?

We have been hearing for some years that technology is an inseparable part of business or companies, and unquestionably more and more we must to interact with technological tools in our work in small, medium or large companies. Basically, having a technology product has become a need, sometimes without a clear explanation. Almost that the inertia of the market takes us there, without having time to ask ourselves why I am using what they call technology.

What we know about these tools is that they help us to do tasks faster, more orderly and more easily, protect the organization's data that is the “new oil” and communicate with everyone almost instantaneously (my competition uses them too). This is all part of that complex operation that supports a business, which every day we try to align more with those technology solutions to be efficient and productive. There are many challenges in this alignment between the information technologies (IT) and the operation of the business, but within these challenges a very important ingredient is missing from the perfect formula of a business, the customers.

Customers are the most important external actor to the organization, since without them there are no sales and therefore no company. But there is very little development about the relationship of these clients with technology strategies, what leaves the most important external actor in the operation disconnected from that relevant topic in the organization. It is then necessary to work under structured frameworks, to assess how aligned the IT strategy is with the customer experience into the business, starting with the customer life cycle composed by customer discovery and engagement, sales process and after-sales support and loyalty.

Starting from the life cycle of the client in the business, we can begin to wonder how these technological tools can add value in it, improving the customer experience. This improvement in the customer experience will be translated into greater attraction of new customers, more streamlined and satisfactory sales processes and a high quality after-sales support to retain and make the customer into a case of success that attract more clients. But this is not achieved overnight, we must to do it following a process of evolution, which begins with understanding the current maturuty situation of the organization.

For this evaluation of the alignment of IT strategies with customers we can establish three major evaluation criteria that arise from customer life cycle, these criteria are: customer understanding, marketing and sales process, customer service. In each of these criteria, we will be evaluating how much technological tools helps the organization, to effectively meet the challenges present in each of these stages of the customer. For this, it is important to ask ourselves the following questions in each one of the criteria:

Customer understanding:

• How much do I know about my clients? - What do my clients need? - What do my clients want? - What do my clients like? - How much information do I have about my clients? - How can I get more information from them? - How much do they know about me? 

Marketing and sales process:

• How easy is it for my client to buy? - How effective are my marketing campaigns? - How much do I know about the results of the marketing campaigns? - How agile is my sales process? - How flexible is my sales process? - How much do I know about the sales process? - How easy to access and use are the sales tools?     

Customer service process:

• Is it easy for my clients to connect with service? - Do my clients have useful information and tools? - How agile is the response to the requirements of my clients? - Do they always have a contact channel available? - How good is the support experience of my clients? - What do my clients say about their experience after buying?     

From these questions, we can begin to identify how technological tools, as simple as a spreadsheet or email, or as complex as artificial intelligence systems and business intelligence, help us to solve these questions in the most appropriate and effective way. In general, these evaluation processes will place the organization on a 5-level Likert scale, from a very basic level to a very advanced level of implementation and understanding of IT tools, referring to these needs. The goal is to scale into these maturity levels.

Information technologies are the best ally that we can have to interact with our clients, but only if we are very clear about their impact on their experience.

These evaluation criteria mentioned must contain a standard business processes, which could serve as a guide for the evaluation, as we can see in the figure below:

Each of these business processes can be evaluated at the 5 maturity levels , according to reference states established by the evaluation framework for each of the levels, as I have proposed in the article: “A Model to Assess Customer Alignment Through Customer Experience Concepts” which is product of an academic research process, in teamwork with the Professor Oscar ávila from the Universidad de los Andes. It is necessary to clarify that not all organizations must be at the highest level of maturity in the use of technology, everything will depend on the context of the business.

Thus, through evaluation processes focused on customers into the business, we can connect the technological tools with the experience of them, responding to the demands of a customer who most of the time is connected, have bargaining power and expect the best experiences in their relationship with any solution provider for their needs. Information technologies are the best ally that we can have to interact with our clients, but only if we are very clear about their impact on their experience.

For more information on Digital Transformation and IT and Business Alignment with clients, you can consult my academic work at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Leonardo_Munoz9/publications

References:

• Mu?oz L., Avila O. (2019) A Model to Assess Customer Alignment Through Customer Experience Concepts. In: Abramowicz W., Corchuelo R. (eds) Business Information Systems Workshops. BIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 373. Springer, Cham
• F. Buttle, Customer Relationship Management, Concepts and Tools, Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004.
• B. Morgan, "Forbes - Breathing New Life Into The Customer Lifecycle," April 24, 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2017/04/24/breathing-new-life-into-the-customer-lifecycle/#4f0d19014294 [Accessed 19 September 2018].
• J. Luftman, B. Derksen, R. Dwivedi, M. Santana, HS Zadeh and E. Rigoni, "Influential IT management trends: an international study," Journal of Information Technology, vol. 30, pp. 293-305, 2015.
• O. Avila, V. Goepp and F. KIEFER, "UNDERSTANDING AND CLASSIFYING INFORMATION SYSTEM ALIGNMENT APPROACHES," The Journal of Computer Information Systems, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 2-14, 2009.
• Bonnet, Didier; Buvat, Jerome; KVJ, Subrahmanyam; Digital Transformation Research Institute, "Rewired: Crafting a Compelling Customer Experience," Digital Transformation Review, no. 6, 2014.