The importance of reimagining what customer success looks like

For organisations to meet the high expectations of today’s customer, they need to transform their digital experiences into a brand in itself. In this blog, Sumeet Walia, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Tata Communications, discusses the importance of the customer journey when accelerating business growth. 

The pandemic and subsequent rise of distributed working patterns significantly accelerated the digitalisation of enterprises across the globe, and of society as a whole. And it’s now completely commonplace for the average business to leverage an array of cloud applications or to conduct operations through collaboration platforms.

As a result, there’s already an expectation that every business will have an online presence and will strive to provide a seamless digital experience. But to make a real impact on modern customers, businesses need to be able to go further than simply providing a run-of-the-mill digital experience – they need to be able to solve their customers’ problems in dynamic, sustainable and highly personalised ways.

That’s why technology alone is no longer the great differentiator it once was – and why business leaders are becoming increasingly sceptical of the latest shiny piece of tech.

To solve the jigsaw puzzle, enterprises, their vendors and ecosystems at large need to all be geared towards creating the types of digital experiences that solve real-world problems. Most times, these solutions are not just embedded in technology but people and the nuances of relationships. If long-term value creation is the goal, developing fruitful relationships is at the heart of it.

In the future, whether a business is trying to formulate more adaptable strategies or is attempting to pivot its digital transformation strategies, the ability to achieve digital goals nimbly while uncovering new business opportunities will require co-creation.

Customer intimacy journey

Now technology is so ubiquitous to our society, there’s greater pressure on enterprises to find better ways to cater to the needs and demands of their customers. And considering the access to knowledge businesses now have – either through its vendors or just the internet – organisations today can access all the innovations they would need to become digital-first at the click of a button.

But considering more than 90% of enterprises say they are yet to achieve a digital-first strategy, there’s clearly more to the challenge than simply accessing technology. For a business to become digital-first, the initial and most important step is taking on partners that want to understand their environment. This is why relationship management is crucial.

“Partners need to move closer together not simply to face the problems of today, but to begin working on the challenges of tomorrow.”

And there’s no way for a partner to predict what those challenges are going to be without a deep understanding of that business’ goals and objectives.

The aim of any successful digital transformation initiative should be to future-proof, and that can’t be achieved through the implementation of individual innovations. Digital-first strategies need to be holistically built solutions that address real problems and make organisations adaptable to whatever the future throws at them.

These sorts of solutions are unique and require a strong element of co-creation to become a reality. When every business has all the knowledge in the world at their fingertips, true differentiation can only come from the value co-created in the ecosystems that businesses build.

“Becoming digital-first will require an all-inclusive convergence of several innovations and ecosystems, it’s simply essential.”

As being digital-first enables businesses to keep customer experience as their focal core and eventually transform their digital experience into a brand in its own right, which in turn, will unlock the hypergrowth for those organisations.

Leaders get to set the pace

It’s clear that the rapid expansion of the digital landscape has led to new buying patterns and product preferences. This will only continue evolving, transforming market dynamics and business models in the process.

So, business leaders can no longer afford to have a reactionary stance to the market – they need to set the pace. To achieve the hypergrowth that’s on offer, leaders need to fundamentally reimagine what customer success looks like. And in the age of hyperscale, it’s up to partners to show leaders what’s possible so they’re well incentivised to no longer accept nominal growth.

“Once leaders begin seeing hyper scaling as the arena they need to win in, they’re on the right track towards hypergrowth, as they will start fostering environments that proactively works to scale up every solution that shows promise.”

It will take a concerted effort from leaders to make this an organisation-wide priority. It will have to include ensuring they’re attracting and retaining the right talent to push innovation, while also fostering talent internally through upskilling.

Because the ability to leverage data and enhance infrastructure will only take a business so far on its own, especially when it comes to understanding the large, diverse range of customers out there today. So only once decision-makers start to see customer success and hypergrowth as two sides of the same coin will they truly have a chance at truly succeeding.

To learn more, read this blog post on the challenges faced by remote workers, and how enterprises can help to alleviate these challenges for employees.