What can you learn from a cup of coffee? A single cup might seem trivial in terms of its impact on the overall business. But capture that cup with a smart camera, track it, apply analytics—and voilà! Suddenly, for the coffee shop, that beverage becomes an opportunity to gain insights to deliver better experiences for all of their customers. These high-quality experiences delight coffee aficionados, save them time, and sharpen the shop’s competitive edge.
How? Tracking each cup could reveal details like how long each beverage takes to make, how long it sits before it’s picked up, and if it hits any bottlenecks along the way. The result? Patrons get their beverages at just the right temperature, as fast as possible—every time—ensuring consistent quality that turns occasional customers into regulars. One global coffee retailer is already deploying these kinds of capabilities to 10,000 locations across North America, with more shops coming online all the time.
And it’s not just coffee retailers. Every day, technology offers organizations countless opportunities to improve their customers’ experiences—and reap the benefits that go with them, like deeper customer loyalty and better differentiation. Now is the time for IT leaders to seize these opportunities and lead the way to better business outcomes.
Customer experiences depend on IT
In the 2022 State of the CIO, 42% of CIO respondents said improving the customer experience was a top imperative. But for IT, improving customer experiences keeps getting harder. Today’s experiences aren’t confined to a single space. Far from it: they extend from locations, things, and applications to people, organizations, and communities. They depend on connections between everyone—and everything.
And the connections keep evolving and multiplying, making them harder to see, manage, and scale. As a result, the IT experience is suffering. This has ramifications beyond just IT. A poor IT experience can often mean a poor experience for end users, customers, and business partners.
How IT can be the hero
How can you empower your teams with the speed and agility they need to accelerate digital business? The answer is to simplify the solutions and platforms IT teams use, empowering them with the technology to work and innovate as one. This approach helps IT build secure bridges between different technologies, locations, organizations, teams, people, and things to deliver the unified experiences their customers, employees, and partners expect.
Providing unified experiences for your users requires a transformation that includes both network simplification and data intelligence. With a simplified, more data-driven approach, you can bring together the benefits of cloud-driven automation, network insights, and APIs to break down barriers and complexity.
Unlocking the transformation potential of IT
Transformation isn’t driven by advanced technology alone, but by innovative approaches like bringing a cloud operating model to the network. This enables IT leaders to expand the agility and scalability of cloud management across the entire infrastructure. It lets them apply automation to help siloed organizations work better together, using a common, consistent set of tools for more agile, frictionless collaboration. Armed with cloud agility, you can transform your operations from being reactive to more proactive and predictive.
Transformation also means not being satisfied with just simple integration that can add to tool sprawl, and instead, moving to the idea of convergence—like organically bringing together networking and security to sidestep manual, time-consuming integration steps. It lets you take advantage of automated provisioning, unified policies, and integrated workflows to manage risk—and work smarter, not harder.
We saw how a single customer touch point can lead to more consistently satisfied patrons, a smoother workplace for employees, and improved efficiency and revenue. As more businesses understand the competitive advantages that come with a fully empowered IT team, we’ll see a renewed focus on aligning IT and technology for better outcomes. With a simplified approach, CIOs can seize more of today’s opportunities to help their organizations unlock the full possibilities of every moment, and every experience.
