IT may not traditionally rank at the top of the list when you think about customer-facing departments throughout the business. But perhaps it should.
The second annual “State of IT” report even reveals that 75% of tech leaders say IT is currently in the midst of the biggest historical shift of its role, becoming more ingrained with the business and playing a fundamental role in enabling customer-centric data and processes.
IT Plays a Fundamental Role in Customer Experience
While IT is usually behind the scenes of the customer experience, its partnership with business units throughout the company is critical to helping them achieve their goals. In fact, 79% of IT leaders believe they are the primary enabler of customer experience initiatives across the business. Without IT as their backbone, other departments could fall flat on powering crucial customer experience initiatives altogether.
Whereas IT previously served as a cost center that focused primarily on “lights on” projects, they are becoming more integrated with the business, so much so that lines between IT and other business units are blurring. Deeper than traditional relationships between departments, 77% of IT leaders believe they now act as an extension/partner of business units rather than as a separate function. The question is — can IT help marketing, sales, and service teams deliver on their customer-centric initiatives?
IT Must Align with Business Units to Meet Customer Expectations
IT’s switch from “order takers” to service brokerages means increased project flow — which IT teams aren’t always able to deliver on. In fact, over half (56%) of all customer-facing business initiatives go unfulfilled.
To improve, IT is doubling down on alignment across the organization. Sixty-seven percent of IT teams even say improving their collaboration with other lines of business is one of their highest priorities, second only to improving security policies and practices.
The trouble is, only 44% of high-performing IT teams (and 11% of underperformers) excel at aligning strategic priorities across business units, which is not enough to meet the needs of fast-paced teams — especially as customer expectations continue to grow. In fact, 77% of business buyers say tech has significantly changed their company’s expectations of how companies should interact with them. Further, 75% of consumers agree they expect companies to provide a consistent experience wherever they engage with them (e.g., website, social media, mobile, in person).
IT Leaders Make It a Priority to Provide a Single Customer View
Customers don’t care how many business units you have within your organization or whether or not your IT team has the capacity to meet their growing demands. They only see one organization, and they want all of their interactions to be consistent.
So IT can’t afford to lag behind. Already, 61% of IT leaders say providing a single view of the customer is a high priority over the next 12–18 months. Of those, high-performing teams are 3.2x more likely than underperformers to rate this as a critical priority.
It’s more important than ever for IT leaders to prioritize alignment with their internal business partners to put customers at the heart of every business decision they make and create the ultimate connected experience.
By, Seema Kumar
Source: Salesforce.com
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Lava Protocols is an authorized Salesforce Partner in Malaysia with more than 9 years of cloud solutions, CRM implementation and consultation experience. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.