CIOs are shifting their collective focus from the back-office to the frontlines as customer engagement and customer experience become critical for business strategies moving forward, according to a report from IBM’s Institute for Business Value.
The report, which is based on interviews with more than 1,600 CIOs from 70 countries and 20 industries worldwide, and shows that CIOs want to devote more time to customer experience management (+15%) as opposed to sales and new business development (+6%) and marketing and communications (+2%).
“We have to think about customers more,” Matthew Young, CIO of the European hotel group Travelodge, said in the report, “not just the customer experience, but whether something moves the dial on customer consideration metrics.”
What moves the dial revolves around CIOs using technology and data as the main drivers, the report says. When asked what technologies they’re focusing on most to improve customer engagement, mobile topped the list:
Mobility solutions: 84% (compared to 68% in 2009)
Business analytics and optimization: 83% (also 83% in 2009)
Cloud computing: 64% (compared to just 30% in 2009)
CIOs know that engagement on more digital channels is a must, but they also understand that it’s not just being on the channels–it’s understanding customer behavior and anticipating and delivering on individual customer desires. As a result, CIOs ranked the following in importance as enablers in creating a closer connection to customers:
Insights and intelligence: 84%
Front office digitization: 82%
People skills: 76%
Internal collaboration and communication: 72%
Data collection is just one piece of the puzzle, according to the report (In 2011, the top three priorities for CIOS were: master data management, client analytics, and data warehousing). Now, it’s more focused on leveraging the data through sentiment mining, social network analysis, and other analytics tools to “identify deeply buried behavioral patterns, predict new trends and prescribe the best responses.”
“The CIO’s job is changing,” according to Arian de Wit, NIWA’s GM of Information and Technology. “We have to be information stewards rather than heads of technology.”
The report confirms a growing sentiment that unites and serves as a best practice for top brands: Customer engagement is no longer just a function of the customer service or marketing departments, but a function of every department.
David Cooperstein noted the following in the Forrester report titled, “Competitive Strategy in the Age of the Customer.”
“A customer-obsessed enterprise focuses its strategy, its energy and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of and engagement with customers and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers,” Cooperstein wrote.