Thoughts on the Frost and Sullivan Customer Experience Event – Part 2

Aweek on, I wanted to follow up with part 2 of my blog from the recent Frost and Sullivan event. In this blog, I really want to reflect on some of the elements from the second day and share the items we’ve put in practice at UKCloud since my return to the office, along with the impact these changes are already starting to have. One of the biggest messages I can give is that, for all the great technology available to us to support our customers, the importance of people in customer experience remains critical and cannot be replaced.

How many great ideas, innovations or improvements come from technology, robots or chatbots? The reality is none… not yet anyway. At this time, it’s our front-line teams who really understand the challenges facing our customers on a daily basis and are able to identify how we can improve and make the process easier.

The World Economic Forum recently stated that 60% of businesses will fail in the next two decades, and only those able to innovate will remain relevant. The importance of our staff in keeping us relevant is critical and is something we as a business continue to invest in. We want them to keep asking the question: “what do our customers want next?” Many companies are driving a more technology-integrated approach to drive down costs, but this is actually at the expense of great customer service. As technology continues to improve, this gap will shorten but, for the time being, it remains something to be aware of.

Off the back of the event, we’ve already run two SCAMPER sessions to look at how we can improve the service we offer to customers and the outputs are being put in place to enable us to further improve. We’ve started to look at using Slack differently to create a virtual suggestion box and enable real time feedback from our customer interactions. We continue to innovate by using the UKCloud family as ultimately, it’s our people who know our customers best, and this is not something I’m willing to change as our customers are central to everything we do. Technology should support not hinder nor totally replace.

 

Like what you read? Part 1 is available here.