How to Manage Your Customer Experience Like a Multi-Billion Dollar Company

Ever since the Net Promoter Score was introduced in the early 2000s, it seems like "improving the customer experience" has been on the top of almost every executive's list of priorities. We can debate whether the NPS is the best metric to use, but what isn't up for debate is that customer experience matters.

It's all about the experience.

In 2018, PWC conducted a study to determine how much more customers would pay for a superior customer experience. Coffee topped the list at 16 percent. Hotels came in at 14 percent. Even annual physicals carried a 14 percent customer experience premium.

According to the same study, 73 percent of people around the world said that experience helps them decide which product or service to buy. Almost a third (32 percent) said they would walk away from a company — even if they loved the product or service — after a single bad experience. If the old adage that it costs ten times as much to earn a new customer as it does to keep an existing customer is still true, then it seems to me that the customer experience deserves the top position on everybody's priority list.

Customer experience goes virtual.

For many consumers, the customer experience isn't physical anymore. It's virtual. Websites were the first foray into this, but now it's apps. I suspect COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward the virtual customer experience, but we've been headed in this direction for some time.

But what makes a good in-app experience? Functionality is key, of course. Does the app do what I need it to do? 

Design also matters. Not just is it pleasing to look at, but can I find what I need quickly? But these are tangibles, or at least the things your customers notice right away. If your business is app-savvy, your marketing and/or development team probably already spends a great deal of time on user research in these two areas.

What about the intangibles your customer is only likely to notice if you do poorly?

The two most obvious examples are availability and response time. That is, is your app easily accessible when I need it, and how long does the app take to respond to my requests? 

Security is a close third, especially if you're dealing with personal information such as financial data or health records.

Maybe it's not fair, but your customers are comparing your app performance to the experience they get with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and other giant, app-building companies. The bar set by these organizations creates a level of app performance expectation that is nearly impossible for the average organization to match. Unless that organization approaches operations the same way.

Yes, these companies have an army of market researchers and designers that few can match. But the secret to their app performance isn't people. It's automation.

Make your efforts count with AIOps.

In 2017 Gartner coined the term AIOps to refer to the practice of using AI and machine learning to improve IT operations. They also added much-needed structure to what constituted an AIOps platform. Today, not only can AIOps enhance IT operations like monitoring, automation and service desk functions, but it can also enable the concurrent use of multiple data sources, data collection methods and real-time analytical and presentation technologies.

In a nutshell, AIOps allows to you to automate the monitoring of not only your app experience, but your entire IT performance, isolating high-value decisions that need human attention while letting AI and machine learning make the smaller, less consequential operational decisions. For decades, companies have been trying to figure out how to do more with less. From an IT perspective, AIOps helps turn that dream into a reality.

Automating these functions enables your IT department to focus on the most critical initiatives that deliver positive business outcomes. Keep in mind that AIOps doesn't necessarily translate into smaller IT departments. Most of the organizations we work have a difficult enough time finding the people they need to fill vital roles. What AIOps does mean is that your team will be able to focus less on the immediate and more on those initiatives that have a positive impact on the business. Like building the next killer app.