Collecting Sensing-as-a-Service Data to Improve CX

Forward-thinking technology companies are evolving from a customer support and service model to a customer success model. In today’s fickle market economy, offering a seamless and personalized customer experience (CX) is critical for building revenue and thriving financially in these times of intense industry competition. By adopting IoT-enabled connectivity that evolves with the rapidly changing digital ecosystem, enterprise leaders can integrate a proactive CX framework with Sensing-as-a-Service data collection that continuously improves all operations delivering on CSAT.

Gartner research recently discovered that high-quality CX and positive customer satisfaction (CSAT) drive more than two-thirds of brand loyalty levels and are more influential than brand reputation and price combined. Similarly, a survey by Harvard Business Review reveals that companies with the highest CSAT ratings have generated twice as much shareholder value over the last 10 years.

Given fundamental shifts in customer demands due to e-commerce and smart technologies, businesses simply can’t afford a poor CX that puts their profit margins in jeopardy. After all, it takes only one negative experience for the average consumer to stop doing business with a brand … for good.

Sensing-as-a-Service suppliers must offer more than hardware and software specs. Much more importantly, they must partner with companies to deliver descriptive insights and prescriptive workflows that achieve their CX objectives.

IoT Cloud Dashboards That Increase Customer Retention

For technology companies with subscription business models, mitigating churn is a top priority. A customer service model, although necessary, is by nature reactive, focusing on solving problems only as they occur. Alternatively, a customer success model takes a proactive approach that aligns outcomes with the original desires of customers, thereby actively generating revenue, savings, and value.

By using a cloud dashboard to manage operations, customer success managers (CSMs) who help their customers make faster decisions about how to leverage the technology platform improve desired outcomes. In the process, they convert their customers into raving fans, which in turn helps mitigate churn.

Stand Out from the Crowd with IoT Analytics

Given the proliferation of SaaS vendors, many of which offer similar products and services, standing out from the crowd requires more than merely providing access to data. Customers now expect solutions to produce real-time insights that are visible, understandable, and actionable. They demand the immediate corrective actions necessary to improve their business processes, increase revenue, and save labor.

Whether it’s their supply chain, sales cycle, marketing funnel, or production workflow, customers want software and hardware providers to give them more meaningful information from every segment of their operations. They need a centralized location to visualize, manipulate, interpret, and act on data.

Customers are attracted to vendors who operate as partners, who have a vision for both innovation and proactive business process improvement, and who operate transparently. With more sophisticated yet simplified insights, enterprise leaders can make more long-term decisions with greater confidence.

Sensing Data Helps CSM Teams Achieve Operational Excellence

Customer success (CS) teams within each organization collaborate with product, R&D, sales, and marketing to drive adoption and engagement, retention and renewal, and expansion and upsell. Each of these drivers creates value for the customer.

The role of the CSM is to communicate with the customer to understand how the solution can help them achieve their set key performance indicators (KPIs). At the same time, CSMs must actively discover and present methods to generate continuous value in order to increase the likelihood of renewal.

Communication with the customer should not emphasize the solution’s technical specifications. Rather, the CSM should impart knowledge from business intelligence and sensing analytics to apply the solution in the most efficient way to achieve optimum outcomes. Such communication may involve translating data into common language, identifying trends in data, and providing best practices.

Create Raving Fans

When companies own their CX from end to end, they can document their customer journey, measure adoption and improvements, and make appropriate changes to boost loyalty. Whether it's increasing net revenue, decreasing churn, or improving CSAT, every effort of the customer success model should be mobilized to create raving fans.

For example, maintaining the highest levels of CSAT encourages positive social media postings by user evangelists, who in turn help the CS team acquire more customers moving forward. This personal and tangible form of value is an essential component that ensures customer success. 

A Continuous Improvement Approach to CX

In our volatile economy driven by constant innovation, solutions that meet customer expectations demand continuous improvement within a complex design process. The American Society for Quality defines continuous improvement as “the ongoing improvement of products, services or processes through incremental and breakthrough improvements.”

The continuous improvement management model of “plan-do-check-act” (PDCA) creates a virtuous cycle of enhancements that propels product, process, and platform development to repeatedly generate progress one step at a time. Continuous improvement guides both technology development and process optimization within operations.

Using an IoT Vendor to Ensure Progress

To apply continuous improvement principles in product development, business leaders must answer the following questions to fully understand the context in which they plan to initiate progress:

• What are the accepted technology standards within the industry?
• How do potential partners help the enterprise solve the pain points of customers?
• What level of investment in innovation will be required to meet customer expectations?

Business leaders cannot predict the future, but they can prepare for digital transformation by ensuring their products are adaptable. Choosing vendors that support emerging standards can help businesses take advantage of product enhancements and software updates.

Enterprises need a system able to assemble and incorporate new technology blocks rather than a “rip-and-replace” method that wastes capital expenses, interrupts operations, and reduces ROI. The ideal situation is backward and forward compatibility that easily extends a platform so it can integrate new technologies. This proactive approach aligns with continuous improvement principles.

Automated asset monitoring systems help businesses practice continuous improvement. After identifying the root cause of behavior, intelligent platforms send corrective actions to remedy behavior. Continuous sensing capabilities identify the source of a problem more quickly and accurately, thereby enabling real-time decision-making.

IoT Checklist for CX Continuous Improvement

By taking the following steps, enterprise leaders can solve problems that their current continuous improvement models aren’t addressing by adding different capabilities to their existing IoT technology infrastructure.

• Identify problem areas for new opportunities. Find gaps in employee workflows for compliance, training, manual labor reduction, and asset performance.
• Collect input from relevant stakeholders. Involve staff from facilities, IT, operations, safety, and compliance who can help define requirements for new technologies, processes, and capabilities.
• Re-evaluate fixed ideas. Diagnose pre-existing ideas embedded in the organizational culture that affect decision-making and determine whether they are serving progress and improvement.
• Document potential solutions. Consider technologies that can solve the identified problems by taking advantage of existing resources and processes.
• Measure progress and success. Introduce a feedback loop for constructive feedback and lessons learned.

By definition, continuous improvement is an unending process. It is the responsibility of business leaders to ensure that the mechanisms for progress are deep-rooted within their enterprise’s operations and workflows. As the technology ecosystem enables platform efficiencies, executives will continue to see increased capabilities to automate continuous improvement within their operations.

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