By Boomi
In retail, a shop window is literally the lens through which wares are displayed. The goal is to create an appealing display that will entice prospective customers to enter the store and (ideally) make a purchase. In business, that shop window can consist of mobile apps, responsive websites, omnichannel commerce experiences, and more. But providing an attractive shop window is only part of the big picture.
In this blog, we’ll explain why organizations that turn their digital transformation ambitions toward internal processes will gain a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
A Seamless Customer Journey Has to Go Beyond a Slick Website
It’s not surprising that organizations have focused on the shop window. That’s what first engages a customer’s interest. But it’s not enough.
For an entire customer journey to be seamless, customers must be onboarded quickly and seamlessly; billing must be accurate and timely; complaints must be handled efficiently and professionally, etc. The devil is truly in the details and if an organization fails to pay attention to those details, it jeopardizes all the investments already made in digital transformation. That’s because the customer journeys so many organizations strive to digitize are powered “behind the veil” by multiple business operations.
The Tide Changes
Organizations are starting to turn their attention to how they can use digital technologies and approaches to reinvent internal business processes, decisions, and operations. In a 2021 study, IDC found that 61 percent of organizations have prioritized investment in automation technologies to create adaptive business operations, and 55 percent have sought investment in data management, analytics, and AI to drive visibility and better decisions.
These new investments can help improve the “moments of truth” for customers (handling complaints, dealing with customer service inquiries, onboarding, and many more), which are currently not well-supported with integrated systems that make workers’ lives easy.
Effectively Addressing Customer Moments of Truth
As it stands, workers playing key roles in delivering customer moments of truth struggle with challenges that include:
- Data sprawl. Data sources that organizations can use to drive insights are very often highly dispersed (across on-premises systems in different datacenters, as well as multiple cloud platforms) and stored across heterogeneous data management platforms.
- Poor-fit existing systems. Systems, particularly systems-of-record, are typically designed and delivered in ways that make sense for workers deeply engaged in detailed administrative work. Yet, those systems rarely provide experiences that are optimized for use cases that cut across business processes such as onboarding
- Diverse, badly integrated, or inconsistent data leads to process inefficiencies, hold-ups, and poor and inappropriate actions and service levels, impacting operational performance, giving poor customer engagement, and creating other disadvantages.
- Coordination challenges. To ensure that integrated experiences designed around the needs of users do not create more function or data silos, key use cases must integrate data and coordinate actions across multiple back-end systems, and do so at scale, reliably and securely.
Assembling Custom-fit Platforms is Rarely an Option
Time, skills, and budget constraints mean integrated platforms offering suites of tools that help to integrate data and systems, while supplying low-code automation options, offer most organizations crucial value that cannot be ignored.
The more that platforms support ways for teams to build common capabilities once and share them across multiple application use cases, the better. Capabilities that help drive enterprise-scale reuse and development consistency are particularly important.
Advanced platforms like the Boomi AtomSphere integration platform as a service (iPaaS) extend value further by providing capabilities that help accelerate initial integration and app development, as well as scale efforts more efficiently while delivering more sustainable value over time.
To learn more about supporting your customer journeys with more efficient internal business processes, download “Bringing the Power of Digital Experiences to Everyone, Everywhere.”