Ongoing Digital Transformation and The Push Beyond Experience Economy

No longer can organizations compete solely through the goods and services, or even price, they offer. Instead, the customer experience has become the differentiating factor. To learn about tools and ways to deliver on the promise of customer experience, thousands of industry trendsetters blazed their way to Salesforce World Tour New York at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for a day full of learning.

Salesforce’s World Tour New York event offers over 200 learning sessions, the chance to demo countless innovative business tech solutions and endless networking opportunities. Attendees dived into customer success stories and discovered how to get closer to their customers by bringing their communication channels inside the Salesforce ecosystem.

On the Expo Floor, Vonage showcased its contact center solutions designed for Service Cloud and Sales Cloud, with product experts available to demonstrate its latest and most innovative capabilities. Today, Vonage’s contact center solution is one of the leading computer telephony integration (CTI) providers on the Salesforce AppExchange with more than 711 5-star reviews.

But before the scores of attendees packed the impressive all-glass venue in Midtown New York, a small group of thought leaders - including Stephanie Onoshi, Service Cloud AE for Salesforce, James Roth, VP & GM Applications Sales for Vonage and Joe Scofield, IS Application Manager for Cradlepoint - kicked it off with an early morning breakfast panel. They discussed today’s evolving customer demands and how to provide an exceptional customer experience to meet them.

Experience Economy: What’s Next?

Imagine a life without shared and affordable rides, the convenience of the car getting to you, knowing who the driver is, no cash transfer at the end of the ride and an option of a quick chat with your driver before they arrive, if needed. That’s what today’s customer expectation is: a fast, multichannel, responsive and memorable experience.

“Millennials, especially, demand an experience that requires meaningful, omnichannel and a seamless experience,” said James Roth, VP & GM Applications Sales for Vonage.

The question then becomes, how do businesses compete? According to James, the ultrac-connected customer is pushing beyond Experience to include Expectations. In an Expectations Economy, listening, identifying and delivering on the demands of the customer is going to be the focus for businesses in the near future.

Proactive Support Is the Next Big Thing

Joe Scofield, IS Application Manager for Cradlepoint, a provider of cloud-based wired & wireless WAN networking solutions, echoed Generation Y’s high expectations and talked about the idea of Proactive Support as an answer to the customer’s demand. He illustrated the approach by sharing Cradlepoint’s experience with Vonage during an outage.

“Within minutes of ID-ing the outage, there was an email alerting me that Vonage was aware and working on the solution,” remembers Joe. “An approval email to reroute traffic quickly followed. Next thing we knew, we were back live!”

Monitoring systems especially in SaaS environment, understanding uptime, latency, performance issues and proactively reaching out when a problem is ID-ed is the winning strategy. In short, a proactive support is a long-term investment in an ever-evolving digital transformation journey, and ultimately, an absolute win.

Digital Transformation Is an Ongoing Journey

With high customer expectations for a flawless experience and technology always ahead of the demand, digital transformation is becoming an ongoing process. The key, per Joe, is to take it one step at a time.

In the case with Cradlepoint, their digital transformation started with telephony to provide superior phone experience with a focus on the support team. It involved identifying callers, routing to appropriate agents, understanding why they are calling and providing support. Then, it was creating communities and leveraging live agents. Next, for Cradlepoint, is capitalizing more on Vonage’s API capabilities, leveraging SMS and delivering proactive omnichannel support approach with chat bots being at the front end of the live agent experience at the time the customer specifies.

To learn how Vonage has helped Cradlepoint provide seamless customer experience check out this video.