How to deal with the tech-savvy customer?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Contrary to current popular perception, IT heads are dealing with issues like consumerisation better than people tend to think. But they are having to do more with less, and they are concerned that their customers are getting away from them.

Fed up with outdated corporate IT, staff members are increasingly alarming chief information officers (CIOs) by using their own superior personal kit when at work, the conventional wisdom goes. (See for example Nancy Davis Kho on LiveWire last April, or my own pieces in October and this January.)

But now research from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) suggests that the problem of consumerisation is overstated and that CIOs are actually doing pretty well in delivering the goods. In a survey of over 500 executives from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, over four fifths said that technology investments aimed at increasing efficiency had succeeded, and almost as many said the same of investments designed to reduce costs; as for consumerisation – that was merely “a distraction”.

Nevertheless, CIOs are increasingly facing flat budgets, according to recent findings from Gartner – so they’re having to prioritise. Top of the heap for technology priorities is analytics and business intelligence – allied to social technology when it comes to customer engagement and acquisition, which is their top business priority.

Indeed, it’s the customer experience that CIOs believe offer the greatest opportunities currently. “As business executives see the potential of technology to transform customer channels and the customer experience, their view of technology has leapfrogged conventional ideas of IT,” says Gartner’s Dave Aron.

These views are also reflected in another survey last autumn, from IBM. Its global study of chief marketing officers (CMOs) revealed that delivering value to empowered customers was their first priority too.

But this is where the problems kick in. At least 80% of CMOs currently rely on traditional sources of information such as market research and competitive benchmarking to make their strategic decisions, IBM finds. And while three quarters of CMOs are using customer analytics to mine data, only a quarter are tracking blogs and less than half track third party or consumer reviews – and it’s worrying them.

Back with that EIU survey, younger employees may be more comfortable with new devices and social media – but their older bosses are no slouch either when it comes to knowing about technology use in the business. Far more worrying from the CIOs’ point of view is how much their customers know.

One in three executives believes that the growth of their customers’ technology expertise is outpacing their own, the EIU finds – and low profit growth firms are nearly twice as likely as more successful ones to experience a technology gap between themselves and their clients.

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