Future State 2025

Chapter 6The New Customer Focus Imperative

Today's empowered customers expect and demand easy, effective, and fast experiences from brands. In fact, research from PwC reveals that 42 percent of consumers would be willing to pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience while 52 percent would pay more for a speedy and efficient experience.

Customers are also increasingly looking at a brand's experience as a differentiator as they tend to purchase experiences, not products. Because of this, the line between front-office and back-office applications is disappearing. Customer-obsessed enterprises are leveraging digital technologies to create new customer value and increase operational agility in the service of customers. As CIOs create their technology agendas (in support of their organization's business objectives), they need to take a more proactive approach to investing in technologies for competitive differentiation. These technologies should be able to bring similar experiences to customers as well as employees, which can increase return on investment and decrease total cost of ownership.

Out of the many technologies that are fueling new forms of business disruption, the maturity and evolution across the following areas provide CIOs the capabilities to create compelling experiences and generate operational gains:

• Hosted cloud infrastructure to native. Flexible and modern cloud architectures built on containerized microservices architecture will be able to provision machine ...