How to Thrive in the “Ongoing Abnormal” by Building a Differentiating Customer Experience

Blog: The Tibco Blog

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There’s a lot being written about the “new normal,” but with continued global supply chain shocks and associated financial volatility, it might be better to think of this time as the “ongoing abnormal.” Organizations no longer merely need to outcompete to win—they must outcompete to survive. As you’ll see, differentiating the customer experience (CX) is key to the resilience needed to go beyond surviving to thriving, despite our time’s unprecedented pressures.

Read on to learn:

Why differentiating CX—being able to see, understand, and meet the needs of current and future customers through a 360-degree view—is so rarely achieved
How one organization, NOS, defied the odds
Questions to ask as you prepare for a differentiated CX

Customer Experience Has a Massive Impact, For Good or Ill

You might have a gut feeling that CX matters, but industry analysts and CX leaders have the data to prove it:

Performance: According to Qualtrics, CX leaders outperform CX laggards in their industry across three dimensions—revenue growth (leaders up 20%), profitability (leaders up 17%), and employee retention (leaders up 8%).

Loyalty: Gartner explains that CX drives more than two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined.

Customer Churn: 49 percent of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to poor CX, according to Emplifi.

And the influence is persistent. A customer’s most recent experience with a business continues to influence their perception of the company three months post-experience, according to Gartner.

The New Path for Customer Experience Differentiation

As the “ongoing abnormal” continues, businesses must ensure their differentiation for customers is paramount. A differentiated CX derives from:

Seamless, hyper-relevant, dynamic experiences (leaders up 28 percent from laggards, according to Accenture)
Alignment of business purpose, values, and innovations with customer needs and values

But friction in connecting and integrating people, processes, technologies, and data have slowed the process of getting that differentiated value. What’s needed is a path to augment shrinking support teams and enhance relevance and responsiveness at customer touch-points—a path that speeds the integration of relevant technologies and reduces friction for governed access to data across an explosion of data sources.

Such a path exists, and NOS, a leading telco in Portugal, is already finding financial success from its customer experience journey.

The Impact of Differentiated Customer Experience Value for a Leading Telco

NOS serves 4.8 million mobile clients,1.8 million landline clients, 1.8 million broadband fixed internet clients, and 1.6 million television clients. In its Q1 2022 earnings report, the company notes a focus on technology leadership and customer experience drives its strong telco financial and KPI performance. Before partnering with Accenture and TIBCO, NOS struggled to attain 360-degree customer views. Data was held in legacy data warehouses and multiple applications. Using TIBCO Data Virtualization, NOS now can provide all its data on demand in a single, logical layer that is governed, secure, and serves all business users.

According to Henrique Zacarias, IT central director, “TIBCO Data Virtualization software enables our users to access large and useful enterprise data volumes, and reimagine the way that data can be put to use.”

Nuno Ferreira, associate director at Accenture, states, “Data-driven architectures allow our clients to be more effective in business transformations, giving them competitive advantages. We were very excited to be part of this journey with NOS.”

Questions Towards Building a Differentiated Customer Experience

Providing an end-to-end customer experience that reduces churn, improves satisfaction, and has a measurable impact on financial performance requires orchestration across four key dimensions. Here are some questions to help identify and fill gaps:

People: Is there executive sponsorship for improving CX? Is there a workgroup or a center of excellence that brings the relevant roles together, across departments, to support the effort?
Processes: Are there repetitive, manual processes that slow customer response and prevent agility? If staffing is a concern during the “Great Resignation,” what customer touch-points could be augmented with AI and automation?
Technologies: What technologies can enhance CX agility—would cloud help, would geofencing and related analytics help? How are disparate CX technologies being integrated?
Data: To meet customer needs, relevance and salience demands data-driven insights at the speed of experience—would data virtualization assist in bringing disparate data into CX workflows?

To learn more about NOS and its progress, read the case study here.

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