CompTIA Survey Finds Channel Focusing More on Customer Experience

CompTIA this week published a report that suggests IT solution providers are starting to focus a lot more on customer experience as a means of differentiating themselves.

A survey of more than 400 IT solution providers finds about a third of the IT services providers surveyed have embraced an “omnichannel” approach for interacting with customers spanning a variety of tools and mediums for interacting with customers. Another third of the survey respondents embraced a hybrid approach that augments existing traditional practices, such as in-store sales and basic e-commerce websites with new communications tools.

The study also reveals that 41% of the respondents are making use of a multi-device approach to serve customers; and 37% have added automated tools such as chat bots, video and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to their web sites. Solution providers are also increasing their reliance on metrics to evaluate how these investments are paying off, with 55% of respondents rating analytics as being “very useful” in measuring and improving the customer experience.

Overall, it still early days as far as increasing the sophistication of the approaches IT service providers are taking in terms of enhancing customer experience, says Carolyn April, senior director for industry analysis at CompTIA. However, in the absence of metric many solution providers are often surprised by customer churn because most customers don’t proactively share how they feel about the level of service being provided.

“Solution providers just one day discover customers are just gone,” says April. “They’re ghosts.”

Historically, IT service providers have relied on the quality of the services they provide to differentiate themselves. However, at a time when IT services are increasingly becoming commoditized being able to attain and maintain differentiation based on the quality of the services being provided alone is becoming difficult, says April.

Solution providers that don’t regularly engage their customers are not only likely to find those customers are likely to be wooed away; many of them are missing upselling opportunities to provide additional services.

Partially in recognition of that new reality, the CompTIA survey discovered that 43% of companies surveyed have retrained technical staff; 36% have retrained sales staff; 33% have hired dedicated customer service staff, and 31% hired full-time marketing and/or social media professionals.

Investments focused on providing a superior customer experience are being made across every major vertical industry sector as organizations the quality of a product or service is no longer enough to ensure customer loyalty. The challenge that IT solution providers need to overcome is a comfort level many of them have with a level of anonymity that most of customers don’t tend to especially appreciate or value.