Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Customer and User Experience and Loyalty

Customer experience improvements can result in lower churn, higher prices due to perceived value-add, greater engagement and higher customer loyalty, greater willingness to repurchase, greater awareness of offline products and services, and thus increased purchase volumes.

The cloud can enhance customer experience by providing a richer, more interactive experience, whether it is at the front end—shopping, awareness, solution design—or the back end—installation, maintenance, support, returns.

Rena Granofsky, president and founder of RIT Experts, leverages a model developed by J.C. Williams Group claiming that buyers often are driven by one or two of four factors, the four E’s: economical (cheaper), easy (convenience), ego (need for status), and experience (enjoyment of a multidimensional shopping process).12 In the offline world, this explains why Walmart (economical), 7-Eleven (easy), Coach (ego), and Nordstrom (experience) can all be successful.

Online, it means that a simple, clutter-free, interaction such as Google’s home page can be successful as well as a rich, multimedia, Flash, Silverlight, or HTML 5 interaction. In Chapters 16 through 20, we explore several dimensions of customer experience. For now, we note that reduced response time has been frequently correlated with increased revenue. Also, as we discussed in Chapter 3, Treacy and Wiersema’s value discipline of customer intimacy can be an effective strategic focus; providing ...