By Nilesh Gupta
Today, startups that build tools for businesses looking to automate their customer service experience and operations are being acquired by global companies. Though they may have the necessary automation tools that may be required during the digital journey, they may not necessarily have the experience to accelerate the digital transformation itself.
User / Customer Experience (CX) is the most important element in the journey of digital transformation that every organisation should be striving to improve. Today AI drives almost every aspect of your shopping experience wherever or whoever you are. The dominance of user experience in retail, healthcare or banking verticals are due for the part to its mastery of artificial intelligence (including the decision-making process) to the ability of machines executing your request that was once the purview of humans alone. But then the question arises as to who should be the right people you will need to sign-up to be part of your journey? As customers we strive to expect more, and we will handshake only with partners / vendors that embrace this and deliver it through meaningful experiences.
Nowadays, most enterprises in their journey are not on a single digital platform. They’re on disparate platforms with number of different channels. For example, during our visits to different customer offices, we have witnessed enterprises using multiple tools that form their unified communication standards. Now if enterprises have to deep-dive and bring in their own teams to learn and then chalk out the DX roadmap, it could turn out very expensive or the RoI will take forever to be effective. Collaboration of these instant-messaging or other in-house communication channels used with another programmable based API (voice, data, ITSM etc) is something a managed service provider (MSP) will bring in the experience to integrate with all the components that form the part of the unified communication.
Secondly, the digital infrastructure that will be required as part of the digital transformation is often comprehensive and will be requiring a right service provider to stitch the solutions from many CX based solution partners that will form the full technology stack along with base infrastructure. This includes everything from managing the security and network for various omnichannel to rolling out AI and machine learning solutions to enable true digital transformation. I believe that enterprises will take more proactive steps to engage with the right service provider that has experience in bringing both sides of experience to empower their employees on how technology can change their everyday lives by embracing the DX journey.
Thirdly, with the way technology is behaving by evolving everyday as against a decade ago, managed service providers need to understand the enterprises ever changing business conditions and respond with a holistic solution during and after its DX transformation journey. Besides the one-time implementation strategy, a continuous improvement enhancement to analyse and inventory the CX environments on a regular basis, typically every quarterly will help to evaluate the validity of outcome when compared to its competition in the marketplace.
Enterprises that plan taking the plunge into digital transformation journey, will need to have a strong relationship with IT managed service partner who can successfully guide them in adapting the new way of services model in this digital age.
The author is the Vice President & Global Head – Digital Infrastructure Managed Solutions & Strategy (IMS), 3i Infotech
