Ah, the IT team. It’s fair to say: they’re not everyone’s best friends. Known for often slowing down buying processes or keeping the security protocols very tight, some CX professionals see them as the necessary evil they need to deal with on a daily basis.
However...
When we look at what makes a great customer experience, it’s often the background processes that make the difference. Especially when we’re dealing with customer interaction in a digital environment, the IT structure becomes the backbone of the interaction, so here are 4 reasons why your IT team deserves more credit:
When you offer digital services, you don’t have a friendly face that can save the day when things go wrong. A slow-loading website can have customers turn away after a couple of seconds, so the performance and usability of your website are crucial! Customers mainly want convenience, and it should start at the entry point of the journey, which is usually your website.
Let’s face it, every company has silos, and breaking them is easier said than done. Any IT team can contribute to breaking them by making customer feedback available to all teams. When there’s an overview of the latest interactions, feedback, and the operational data (what products they use, who serviced them, where are they located) available, it offers opportunities for all customer-facing teams to deliver a personal experience. It might even spontaneously drive cross-team collaboration when people read the same complaint over and over again. An up-to-date, centralized, and integrated CRM system is the main requirement to achieve this, but that’s definitely easier said than done.
Behind a great customer experience, there are some really boring but helpful processes. Checking the website if a dress is available in the store near you? That’s a link between the site and the stock management system. That perfectly timed “we’ll be at your house in 15mins!” delivery text is a collaboration between the logistics team, communication tools, and the customer’s address input. Customer service agents need access to pretty much all the back-office processes if they want to answers questions correctly and quickly. Automated IT processes tie it all together and rest assured, it’s not an easy feat.
This ties into our first point. You cannot build a hassle-free experience if you don’t continuously monitor, measure, and optimize your processes. Bugs are a turn-off and downtime can cost you business from a performance point of view, so it definitely influences the bottom-line. Asking for customer feedback in-app or on the website can give you insights on why visitors (dis)like the experience, so it’s definitely worth setting up touchpoints there to complement these metrics with the why behind the numbers.
As you see, these processes are often taken for granted by the customer but definitely deserve some in-house recognition. Does your team get it right? Corona-proof high fives for everyone!
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