How IT Leaders can Serve as Change Agents
Key Takeaways
⇨ IT leaders play a crucial role in enhancing customer experience (CX) by collaborating with marketing to integrate technology and data insights across all departments.
⇨ Companies that excel at CX can achieve revenue growth significantly above their competitors, underscoring the financial importance of customer-centric strategies.
⇨ A unified tech stack enables data-driven personalization at scale, empowering marketing teams to create exceptional customer journeys and drive long-term brand loyalty.
Customer experience (CX) has historically been a marketing team mandate to innovate across sales, service and commerce. But retail teams have increasingly realized that leading-edge CX is a holistic proposition, requiring every department, including IT, to work in unison toward a greater mission: customer obsession.
To get there, teams are leaning on a robust technology stack powered by enormous amounts of rich data. They also need a highly informed gatekeeper with cross-functional visibility who understands the big picture and can pull it all together in a way that makes it actionable.
That’s where IT comes in. CIOs and CTOs play a pivotal role in the digital innovation that powers leading CX. In many cases, they hold the keys to creating successful CX campaigns and must therefore be involved at all phases.
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CIOs agree: A recent IDG report found that 53% of CIOs expect to increase their involvement in CX in the future. In addition, CX is among the initiatives that will drive the most technology investment, say CIOs, because of its direct impact on revenue and overall business goals.
Research shows that companies that excel at CX can achieve revenue growth that’s 4% to 8% above their competitors. What’s more, 62% of leaders in customer-obsessed companies say their company’s omnichannel strategy has yielded higher margins for them, according to research from Forrester, commissioned by SAP Emarsys.
