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Forget the digital leap already, CIO! Total experience will help you be a better partner for business

Does all the talk about a digital leap get on your nerves? You are not alone. For too many businesses, the digital leap still equals a singular solution, like a chatbot. However, separate trials only produce moderate results. If you wish to build a truly digital business and develop your customer and employee experience, you need to look at the whole picture.

The decision-maker research Sofigate published in Spring 2021 revealed that only 32 percent of companies are happy with how they use business technology.

In many companies, the norm is still to use technologies as one-off miracle solutions. Sadly, in these kinds of cases, the best results will not be reached.

Instead of the traditional talk of a digital leap, we should be discussing how we work and manage processes. Real business benefits will not be created, if different business units along a supply chain do not communicate in the same language or we still insist on doing manually what could be automated, for example.

Not investing in citizen developers and customer workflows? Read why our experts say you should

Total experience and the story of the double bill

Gartner launched in their Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021-report the concept of total experience, which brings customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) together. What does this mean in practice?

While visiting the Housing Fair, Juha subscribed to a sport-themed streaming service – the fair offer was too irresistible. For some reason, the subscription registered twice for the service provider. At the end of the month, he received two bills. However, customer service was able to sort out the issue and correct the billing – or that was what he thought, anyway. Eventually, he received double bills for the subscription for six months.

The moral of the story is, that even the best customer service cannot save you if the processes behind it, like billing, have not been designed as a whole. In the end, poor employee experience and siloed processes were painfully clear all the way to the customer.

So, why should you be excited about this? Customer experience and employee experience are closely tied to each other – if one suffers, so does the other. This revelation is at the core of total experience.

Complete renewal, but one step at a time

The concept of total experience is the antivenom to single miracle technologies and solutions. Instead of us looking for a single solution to a single problem – ”We need one of X” – we will shift our focus on the whole, processes, and workflows. This way you will take your first steps on a marathon, where small steps take you toward a larger goal.

By investing in digital workflows you can offer both employees and customers better experiences. Modern business platforms like ServiceNow offer tools that cover both background processes and workflows for excellent customer service. On the other hand, low-code solutions offer tools to take any processes toward a great service experience in an agile way.

Are you excited? Great, so are we! Together we have mapped the employee and customer experience renewal capabilities of several Finnish organisations. In our next blog, we will share seven steps to recognise the low-hanging fruits of the customer, IT, and employee processes. You will also hear how two businesses took their first steps on the digital marathon.

Juha Kujala is a two-time ServiceNow customer who is now the CTO of Sofigate Service Management. His professional passion is to lead organisations and ecosystems toward excellent service by utilising the best of modern technologies and methods. Juha has extensive experience in ServiceNow architecture and leading service development in both client and service provider environments.

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