Customer Experience Platform
Companies modernizing their technology platforms must strategize around one unifying goal: transforming customer experience into a competitive advantage.
Across regions and industries, businesses are embarking on large-scale digital transformation efforts aimed at replacing outdated legacy systems with sophisticated platforms built on modern technology. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on digital transformation is expected to reach nearly $3.9 trillion by 2027.
When companies develop and implement their transformation strategies, they often focus on improving operational efficiency and reducing operational costs as their top goals. While these are important objectives, companies need to think bigger. Artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital innovations are helping companies fundamentally rethink how they interact with their customers. “We believe that in the future, the greatest ROI on technology investments will come from efforts to reinvent parts of the customer experience. But to realize that return in the future, companies need to embrace improving customer experience as a primary goal in their digital transformation today,” said Ross Solomon, head of product management for customer communications at Broadridge. “When companies focus on customer experience, other benefits of digital transformation will also come, including operational efficiency and innovation,” he added.
Laying the foundation for next-generation tools
Transforming customer experience into a competitive advantage should be a top priority, but companies have a long way to go to get there. Before they can begin reinventing their customer experience, companies must first build the technology infrastructure to support the next-generation systems needed to do the job.
For most companies, that means close to a complete rebuild of their existing data management platform. Companies of all sizes and types are working to aggregate, normalize, and structure data from sources across the organization into comprehensive data warehouses. In most cases, these data management projects are part of a broader transformation drive that also includes cloud migration (moving companies off legacy on-premise infrastructure to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the cloud) and efforts to simplify, modernize, and consolidate the entire platform across the organization.
Through all these steps, the smartest, most agile companies are focused on moving their technology stacks to open architecture configurations with plug-and-play capabilities that make it easier to integrate in-house applications and implement third-party applications. “Only when all these elements are in place will a company be ready to implement next-generation technologies at scale. At this point, with data organized and accessible across a modern, highly flexible, scalable platform, companies can finally adopt AI and other emerging technologies to transform all aspects of their business, including how customers interact with and experience the company and its products and services,” says Solomon.
The CXM Revolution
New digital tools are revolutionizing how companies understand, measure, and manage customer experiences. Leveraging newly modernized technology platforms, companies are deploying digitally-driven customer experience management (CXM) platforms designed to optimize every interaction a customer has with a company. At the most basic level, that typically means streamlining communication between customers and companies to make it simpler, more effective, and more efficient. But increasingly, it also means personalizing the experience for every customer. “The end goal, of course, is to create seamless, personalized experiences that increase overall satisfaction and loyalty, differentiate from competitors, and improve business performance,” says Solomon.
AI: Accelerating change
The widespread adoption of AI allows companies to dramatically accelerate this process: 33% of consumers who participated in Broadridge's 2024 CX & Communications Consumer Study said that AI has improved their overall experience. In reality, the impact is much greater, as customers are typically unaware of the AI applications operating behind the scenes.
For example, companies and third-party providers are using AI to build “voice of the customer” systems that collect and monitor customer feedback on an ongoing basis, in a largely automated way, and at surprisingly low cost. The data from these platforms can inform companies on where they need to improve.
In customer interactions, one of the most common and high-profile applications of AI is the chatbot. The best versions of chatbots provide customers with a quick and easily accessible way to communicate with a business. These AI-powered applications are readily available from third-party providers and can be easily integrated into open architecture technology platforms.
But businesses moving towards chatbot communications should tread carefully: A recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey found that 85% of banking and financial services customers still prefer to converse with a human, including a staggering 80% of Gen Z consumers and almost 95% of Baby Boomers.
Prosper – AI chat program for banking and financial services
More generally, 90% of consumers who participated in the Broadridge CX survey believe it's important for companies to respect their communication preferences, whatever they may be. Unfortunately, less than a third of consumers say that companies do this.
Make personalization a priority
This is where personalization comes in. Companies and their technology partners are leveraging AI to build flexible omnichannel communications platforms. AI tools enable companies to infer customer preferences across a range of metrics, not just communication channels, and provide preference management capabilities to communicate and serve customers how and when is best for them.
The content delivered through these platforms is also personalized to the interests and needs of individual customers, thanks to AI applications that analyze user behavior. The tailored experiences created through these systems really pay off. For example, clients of Broadridge's Wealth InFocus, a platform that streamlines and personalizes client communications for wealth managers, report that their customers are three times more likely to click on communications generated by the system and open them 56% of the time, well above the industry average. Nearly 80% of customers prefer the new personalized communications over traditional monthly statements.
In fact, some of the world's most sophisticated companies are so good at personalizing customer experiences that consumers have come to expect curated, customized experiences: More than half of Gen Z and Millennial consumers have stopped doing business with a company because the experience wasn't personalized enough.
The survey findings paint a powerful picture for the future: businesses' ability to deliver compelling customer experiences will have an increasingly significant impact on business outcomes. “That's why we advise companies that are modernizing their technology platforms to put the customer at the center of their strategy and dive into AI solutions and other next-generation technologies that will revolutionize the customer experience,” says Solomon.
