Connectivity at the heart of app ‘experiences’

Experience is everything, or so we’re told — this is the age of the experience economy and millennials and Gen-Z’ers will (allegedly) now even turn down (or leave jobs) if they’re not ‘getting the right experience’ in their workplace.

This new truth has given rise to the terms User eXperience (UX) and Customer eXperience (CX)… and please be sure to make sure it’s the X that you capitalise, just to be difficult.

So if application developers have to now consider the UX & CX factor that much more prevalently in the software the software that they now build, then what factor (or factors) will be the most influential in terms of the way their applications operate.

Surely it should be application power, speed, core functionality and the degree to which the user interface is presented with intuitive functionality, right?

Colt Technology Services says yes… and no.

Although the above factors will be crucial, in the age of mobile and cloud, the firm says that connectivity is viewed as a significant enabler when it comes to achieving Customer eXperience (CX) goals.

The claim is made as part of a study produced in line with analyst shop GigaOm.

So wait… a company that describes itself as a network and communications specialist for information intensive businesses says that connectivity is the most important aspect of CX experience?

So is this all just fluff and puff mixed with spin and subterfuge, or is there any substance at all here?

The study itself is available to download from Colt.net and explores the link between connectivity and customer experience; in particular, whether underlying connectivity platforms can have a positive impact on CX goals.

Of those sectors more likely to use connectivity to drive CX, the study found technology and financial companies have made more progress than manufacturing and consumer-facing industries (63% and 59% versus 50% and 47%), while more distributed corporations feel they have more work to do than centralised organisations (63% versus 44%).

“When we set out to explore the link between connectivity and customer experience, we weren’t sure what we would discover, so it’s encouraging to see that many companies are already taking advantage of the strong relationship between the two. This research shows that setting clear, customer-centric goals is the key to success,” said Keri Gilder, chief commercial officer at Colt.

Gilder notes that the research shows that having a single point of customer contact and management frameworks set up solely around CX are practices aligned to organisations which are progressed along the CX journey — however, only 32% of businesses thought they had these processes in place.

This ‘news’ is arguably pretty well pre-loaded to serve the agenda that Colt wants to reinforce. That being said, given the fragmented nature of work today and the fact that some organisations are self-identifying as ‘inherently distributed’ in the cloud-connected world, there could be a message for software developers here i.e. put collaborative connectivity concerns at the heart of the way so-called ‘experiential’ applications are now developed.

Well, there you go… whatever next?

Maybe the famous printing and photocopier company Ricoh could commission a study and find out that printing was a ‘key enabler of agility and innovation’ — no, that could never happen, could it?