Happy Customers and the Experience Economy

By Manish Sood, Founder & CTO at Reltio

By Manish Sood on February 17, 2022

As we begin 2022, sales organizations across all types of businesses are tasked with delivering results in a vastly different marketplace than just 12 months ago. Massive changes to how consumers and businesses make purchasing decisions were born out of necessity (due to the COVID-19 Pandemic) but have ultimately made an indelible impression on the expectations for future experiences – and there is no turning back.

In order to be successful selling in the experience economy, companies must place a high value on four key areas of their business.

These include

1) Possessing an in-depth knowledge of your customer base,

2) Valuing the quality of your customer data over quantity,

3) Implementing a cloud-native infrastructure, and

4) supporting your remote and hybrid workforce with powerful SaaS (Software as a Service) tools.

Key #1: Know Your Customers

The Pandemic forced innovative companies to create unique and customized digital experiences for their customers, and those experiences set the baseline for expectations in 2022. The only way for organizations to compete in the experience economy is to truly understand their customers at a deeper level than ever before. It will be imperative to collect and leverage customer insights and turn to Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to inform all of your business decisions and to power the enhanced, customized experiences you’ll need to deliver to satisfy your customers.

Key #2: Remember that Quality Trumps Quantity When it Comes to Customer Data

Few will argue the importance of using customer intelligence to enhance the customer experience. However, the reality is that not all data is created equal. Meeting these lofty customer expectations is next to impossible if you’re relying on disparate, disconnected master data management (MDM) systems and reporting tools.

Volumes of information gleaned from customer interactions and transactions, third-party, public, and social media sources, can be virtually worthless unless there is a way to verify their quality and accuracy and merge them into useful and consistent data points. Successful companies will streamline how they collect, store, consolidate and report their data. Running analytics on a reliable data foundation allows your teams to make better, more informed decisions that lead to meaningful action moving forward.

Key #3: Develop A Cloud-First Infrastructure to Create and Deliver New Digital Experiences.

Now you have this pristine data from which to glean actionable insights and the confidence that comes from truly understanding your customer from all different angles. The next step in delivering this type of enhanced digital experience requires a technology infrastructure that can quickly build and deliver personalized solutions in response to your customer’s needs.

In today’s business environment, this will only be achieved by taking a cloud-first approach that enables developers to build faster and release new iterations of software to keep pace with the changing needs of your customer and the market. Effectively responding to your customer’s needs will lead to higher satisfaction, longer customer retention, and ultimately a pathway to success.

Key #4: Support the Future of Work with SaaS Tools

If your infrastructure is your organizations’ backbone, your employees are the brains of the operation. In order to keep up in this fast-paced, COVID-impacted world, organizations will need to expand their digital tech portfolio to work towards preserving efficiency and flexibility in the workforce. SaaS tools help deliver best-of-breed services to your remote and hybrid workforce in a way that traditional software can’t match.

It is our responsibility as business partners to embrace the distributed remote work model as the present and the future of the way people work. In order to do so, companies must heighten their investment in SaaS, Cloud, and Data as the fundamental technology tenets required to compete in their marketspace.

Staying Focused

In an era where experience is everything, businesses need to respond quickly to shifts in the market, shifts in their customer base, and shifts within their own organizations.

Truly innovative companies will focus on collecting and maintaining high-quality customer data, building out cloud-based infrastructures, and implementing SaaS tools to empower their workforce and better position themselves to deliver a richer customer experience.