There’s an interesting new concept emerging in the market called ‘Customer Experience Networks’, proclaims Stephane Castellani, Global Head of Digital Marketing at digital infrastructure company Axway.
What is a CX Network?
Castellani defines a customer experience network as being something that “[creates] more value and better experience to the customers by delivering new services, made possible thanks to flexible and dynamic interactions with a large panel of business partners.”
Axway, whose main offering is the data integration and engagement platform AMPLIFY™, says it “unites not only employees, but suppliers, partners and developers into an agile force for innovation that’s as fast and fluid as today’s digital consumer.”
The company also claims that very few enterprises have “cracked the code of CXN.” To reinforce this claim and “to understand the adoption, challenges, and future of CX networks,” it commissioned IDC to interview more than 600 senior executives in large global enterprises.
The report, titled The Role of Customer Experience Networks in Delivering Value-Based Digital Transformation, defines these three foundational elements of CX networks:
- Internal and external enterprise stakeholders are embraced in a strategic, holistic, meaningful, and coherent way
- Enterprises develop an ecosystem of internal staff, external business partners, customers, and other stakeholders to provide communication, collaboration, and co-innovation
- The synergetic value created by the network is greater than the sum of its parts.
Why is it important to a business?
According to Gerry Brown, research director for software with IDC Europe, “CX networks are central to digital transformation, enabling enterprises to co-create and co-innovate with customers and business partners for mutual benefit.”
The IDC report also found that enterprises now perceive their customers and their ecosystem to be a key source of co-innovation rather than their traditional internally-focused R&D organisations.
And, it says: “Key aspects of co-innovation are network connections and scalable customer experience networks that facilitate collaboration and sharing of data.”
Leading enterprises, says IDC, “are investing in customer experience networks that join together not only internal staff and business partners, but also all stakeholders in the business value chain, including customers, to create ecosystems that deliver long-term value to all participants and also act as an effective defence mechanism against the incursions of digital disruptors.”
IDC summarises the concept of the customer experience network as being: “when an organisation connects and embraces co-innovation from entities in a customer’s journey, including customers, employees, business partners, and suppliers — all collaborating and co-innovating to deliver improved customer experiences and customer journeys.”
Here’s why you should be thinking about CX Networks in your organisation
What might come as a surprise is that, according to the results of the IDC survey, customer experience networks are now the most important digital initiative for over 70 percent of enterprises, or at least those that responded to IDC’s survey.
Customer experience networks beat ‘a single customer data view’ (64 percent) and ‘customer journey management’ (58 percent) and omnichannel management (45 percent).
According to the results of the IDC survey, published in May 2017, “Thirty two percent of large enterprises currently operate CX networks and further 29 percent plan to operate CX networks by 2020.
This, says IDC, “should concern those 38 percent of organisations that neither operate nor plan to operate CX networks.”
Support your CX Network journey with the best possible customer interactions
Over the 31 years that Premier Technologies has been in business, we’ve always looked for new ways to generate even more value for our community of customers, suppliers and partners. In part, we’ve achieved this through our cloud-based customer interaction platform, to help organisations deliver the ultimate customer experience. And for our business communities, we’ve been delivering value by actively seeking opportunities to introduce organisations to each other, where there’s obvious benefit to be gained. The concept of CX Networks is an exciting new way to add value to our communities, and you can be sure we’ll continue to explore how CX Networks can benefit our customers, suppliers and partners.
