Background:

At FINN Partners, I penned a byline for cloud computing firm, Xtremax, that was attributed to the Chief Executive Officer as part of a comprehensive communications strategy to grow the brand's share of voice in the APAC region. This piece positions customer-centricity as the core of business resilience,  innovation, and growth.

Format: 

Media byline

Why Customer-Centricity Is Key for Your Organisation

To achieve greater cost-effectiveness, business resilience and privacy and security, organisations across Asia have been adopting digital tools at unprecedented rates. But in their pursuit of becoming a smart enterprise, many often fall short in delivering products and experiences that meet customer expectations and lose sight of delivering value to employees and the community. In fact, only 25 percent of CIOs say customer experience is a top priority.

Research shows that it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than retaining an existing one, and the success rate of selling to a current customer is far higher than selling to a new customer altogether. By focusing on customer-centricity, businesses can develop a holistic digital transformation strategy that helps you reap the benefits of being a smart enterprise.

Tapping on the Cloud to Deliver Customer-Centricity

With the digital economy in Southeast Asia now expected to grow from US$170 billion in 2021 to US$360 billion by 2025 — and to US$1 trillion by 2030, customers today are interacting with organisations across multiple touchpoints. They expect nothing less than tailored experiences, frictionless transitions between channels, and exceptional customer service.

However, many organisations struggle with siloed legacy infrastructure that makes it challenging to gather the data required to deliver on this hyper personalisation. By tapping on the cloud, organisations can consolidate all their services and data and transforms how customers interact with them, all while ensuring scalable, agile, and sustainable growth.

Take for example, the National Environment Agency (NEA), which accumulated hundreds of services that resulted in confusing user experiences for customers who had to navigate various systems to access e-services. With the help of Xtremax, NEA now houses all their applications in one place to streamline and simplify their range of services on a one-stop e-Portal for easy user access without the need for multiple logins and redirections. 

By going one step further and building a modern, microservices architecture in cloud, organisations can further improve on their ability to deliver customer-centricity. If built well, a microservices architecture enables quicker deployments, allowing companies to perform updates, and roll out new features that cater to customer needs much faster, and at a greater scale.

Empowering Employees to Adopt a Customer-Centric Mindset

However, in this journey towards becoming a customer-centric smart enterprise, organisations need to think beyond just the technology, and remember their people. There is often strong internal resistance to digital transformation because of the pressure to upskill. McKinsey revealed that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals due to employee resistance and the lack of management support. Whether an organisation is in its early days of moving towards the cloud or looking to transition from a monolithic architecture to a modern infrastructure, organisations must remember not leave their employees behind.

By providing development programmes for tenured employees that adapt to their needs, interests, and concerns, organisations can ease the stress of upskilling and efficiently reskill valued employees and redefine their capabilities in the digital age. This empowers employees to adopt an “Always-On” approach to meet customers wherever they are, whenever they are, throughout the sales journey. To keep abreast of industry trends and needs, smart enterprises need to digitalise customer touchpoints to deliver customer-first service through hyper-personalisation, omnichannel experiences, and round-the clock availability.

When Customers Benefit, So Do You

A customer-centric organisation advocates for the user, keeps a pulse on their needs, and works with technology partners who encourage alignment and collaboration across the entire organisation. The move to digitalise should not be born out of the fear of missing out on the latest tool, but instead to achieve real growth, innovation, and efficiencies for the customer. This transformation needs to encompass the entire organisation, and as such, strive to ensure that their people, processes, and tools are all geared towards smart practices.

That said, digitalisation is not a one-off endeavour, but instead a complex, ongoing effort that requires regular evaluation and continuous optimisation. For organisations embarking on the journey to becoming a smart enterprise, having a trusted service provider by their side will be crucial to alleviating pitfalls, and to reap the full benefits of digitalisation.