How Customer-Centricity affects Technology Planning

I have previously said that today’s CIO needs to be a business leader ahead of a technology leader. It is critical that we always frame technology possibility within the context of business strategy. Customer-centricity gives us an even more clearly defined lens with which to think about the technologies we recommend.??

The first thing it forces us to consider, especially in a global organisation such as DHL that operates in more than 200 countries, is that ‘customer’ is not singular. There are a multiplicity of personas whose needs we need to understand and design for. Personas based on business needs – we deal with individuals and very small businesses sending individual packages and with the world’s largest organisations sending millions of shipments, including in bulk or ones that have highly specialised requirements such as medical supplies. And of course, there are regional differences – the requirements of customers in Asia and Africa can be different from ones in Europe or North America.?

For smaller or customers with less logistics experience, the focus may be on making the tools they use as simple as possible. But for major customers, we win because our tools can be more easily configured to meet their precise requirements and integrate with their internal systems.

Customer-centricity isn’t just about understanding their functional needs, it is also important we understand their emotional needs, especially the things that make them anxious. There is no question we have seen, in the last few years, increasing anxieties around cybersecurity and data protection. The challenge for IT then is to always balance how we use technology to create more frictionless experiences without compromising the security of those experiences and the integrity of the customers’ systems and data.

Third, even though IT are not directly customer facing, much of DHL’s ability to be the world’s Logistics Provider of Choice comes from our sales people having the confidence that, whatever the needs of a customer, we have the capabilities to deliver the best solution. Such confidence can only exist if they are confident in the expertise and ability of IT.??

Finally, I realise that if I am talking about technology planning, I should probably mention AI, as that’s a question everyone in IT hears a lot these days. The short answer is that AI is clearly a tool that every IT team needs to consider; and indeed, we have been using machine learning for route optimisation and delivery network design for some time now. But if one truly stays focused on being customer-centric then AI is simply that, a tool that may or may not be relevant. To decide if it is means not starting with the technology but with what you want to do with the technology. At DHL what we want to do is deliver a frictionless experience. And doing that is about far more than just the technology we use.?