In the current economic climate, chief information officers are feeling the pressure to contribute to growth through technology. But only one in 10 CIOs will meet their growth goals this year, according to Forrester. Forrester attributes this prediction to what it sees as a pervasive disconnect between tech strategy and business strategy.
3 Ways a CIO Can Contribute to Growth
- Declutter your tech stack — efficiency helps your teams and your customers.
- Built a customer insights function to better understand the customer experience.
- Give customers a way to connect by building a platform that allows them to connect with each other and your product.
Based on what I see in my network of CIOs, this prediction seems off base. In my view, CIOs are better equipped than ever to align with business strategy and use their insights and expertise to help drive it.
The key is to zoom out and gain perspective on the entire customer journey in order to tightly align tech strategy with customer experience (CX) and ultimately, revenue.
Gartner and Forrester both suggest that for companies to excel, customer-obsessed decision-making is essential across all business operations. Technology is no exception. But again, the vast majority of companies struggle to get it right. According to Forrester, only 3 percent of companies are truly customer obsessed, leaving a big gap between the ideal and the reality.
CIOs are in a position to help change this by taking a significant ownership role in enhancing CX. By embedding customer centricity into everything they do, CIOs can help prospects and customers enjoy the kind of brand experience that makes them want to sign up and stick around. Here are three ways to do just that.
Declutter Your Tech Stack
A streamlined tech stack might not seem directly tied to CX. After all, it doesn’t matter much which CRM or webinar platform you use, as long as it works well and doesn’t cause friction for the prospect or customer.
But what about the friction an inefficient tech stack causes for your team? Does the customer feel that?
I’d argue yes. And Gartner research backs me up. According to their recent survey, 64 percent of customer-facing employees blame unnecessary effort for keeping them from delivering high-quality experience to customers.
Here’s what that means for CIOs: If we want to tie our strategy back to customer experience, and we should, we need to enable our organizations with an efficient tech stack.
The Gartner survey points out that leaders struggle when they emphasize the vision for customer-centricity but fail to enable employees to execute on that vision. By being strategic and intentional about tech stack efficiency, CIOs can transform that vision of customer centricity into reality.
Build a Customer Insights Function
Organizations need to go beyond customer-centricity and ensure that every aspect of the business grows out of full-bore customer obsession.
That means every team, not just the customer-facing ones, needs to operate from a customer-first mentality. Whether that’s the sales team, product team or even the accounting team, everyone should be committed to understanding the customer, anticipating their needs and going above and beyond to exceed their expectations.
For sales and marketing executives, implementing a customer-obsessed strategy is relatively straightforward. But for CIOs? What does customer obsession look like for us?
Even CIOs can be powered by the motivation to foster deep connections with customers, cultivate personalized experiences, and turn customers into superfans. We have the power to help every single person in our organizations know the customer better by supplying more and better data and, crucially, making it broadly ingestible across the organization.
Data that provides deep customer insights allows your marketers, sellers and success managers to better connect with your customers, understand them, and help them succeed. It helps your product teams build products that better solve your customers’ problems. In short, it puts your customers’ needs and desires, not your team’s hunches and best guesses, at the forefront of everything your organization does.
In the end, it’s about aligning tech strategy with business strategy.
Give Customers a Way to Connect
At 6sense, the mindset of customer obsession permeates everything we do. In my role as CIO, here’s an example of what that looks like.
Our revenue team leadership recognized our customers needed to be better enabled to find help, network with peers and build their skills with our platform more easily. I have been working with them to bring all our technologies together in a way that engages and empowers our customers.
One element of this is the rollout of RevCity 2.0, a customer community that serves as a vibrant and frictionless destination for customer self-service enablement, technical help and peer networking. It’s a go-to resource for advice, where customers can connect and share their own successes and tips. It’s also an incredible listening tool for our team, providing insights into how we can further improve CX across the company.
RevCity is a company-wide effort, with each stakeholder bringing a different customer-obsessed perspective to the table. As CIO, my perspective was, naturally, how to bring the technology and management necessary to accomplish the initiative’s business goals.
In part, I did this by developing a process for using generative AI to help customers get their questions answered more quickly, to build out our knowledge base, and to improve search personality. This required connecting the dots between teams and ensuring efficiency all while keeping the customer experience front and center.
Build a Customer-First Future
Even if, as CIO, you’re not a member of a customer-centric team, you can take on the role of your company’s architect of customer-centric growth. That means aligning technology strategies with CX enhancement and advocating for a shift toward customer obsession.
By prioritizing the customer in every tech decision, CIOs can spearhead the transformation toward a business model where technology serves as the backbone of customer engagement and satisfaction. This approach addresses the immediate challenge of aligning tech and business strategies and sets a new standard for achieving sustainable growth in a customer-driven market.
