There is no digital transformation without customer centricity

Leading a digital transformation requires a comprehensive approach that impacts every aspect of an organization. To stay ahead in today’s rapidly changing market, it’s crucial to have the right skills, technology tools, and a customer-focused approach.

Organizations that want to succeed long-term need a loyal customer base that supports the business, makes recommendations, and provides feedback that drives innovation. Making customer centricity a top priority is the best approach to building a loyal and satisfied consumer base. It allows companies to serve their clients by anticipating and addressing their needs in light of changing circumstances.

Customer centricity describes an organization that makes positive customer experiences its top priority. Those businesses are not only more likely to retain existing customers but also more likely to gain new ones. Without customer centricity, it would have been impossible to anticipate the changes that a secure digital transformation requires.

Here are three action items CXOs can take to set themselves up for success in delighting their customers:

• Creating and constantly refining formalized processes for improving a company’s products and services to respond to customer feedback swiftly. Long-term business survival is dependent upon cultivating a loyal customer base.
• Monitoring consumer ratings (like NPS) to keep your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment. M&A help to shore up product gaps and anticipate customer needs.
• Happy customers are brand advocates, so ensure that your company’s values align with your ideal customers‘. Maintain open and transparent communications and be aware that different customers may be on opposite sides of any given topic. Have a plan for dealing with this.

Why is it so important? After all, happy customers continue to buy from the businesses they like. When companies make a big enough impact – by making their jobs easier, offering mutual benefit, or sharing their values – some users even become brand ambassadors to their colleagues.

Staying ahead of the game

The last decade has been one of incredible change, upheaval, and technological progress. Applications essential to business productivity have increasingly migrated to the cloud or were born there. Major attacks like NotPetya and Colonial Pipeline expanded our understanding of the damage and disruption cyberattacks could cause – and the difficulty in stopping them. Even prior to COVID-19, workers were expecting more mobility and the ability to access resources from anywhere. When the pandemic hit, it was no longer a preference. It became a necessity.

All this radically transforms the IT and security needs of organizations. Perimeter-based security was not well-suited to meet these new requirements. Hub-and-spoke networks were costly and inefficient beyond justification. VPNs were just an extension of a problem inherent to routable networks, being easily discoverable from the open internet expanded organizations’ attack surface.

Due to these circumstances, organization’s were looking to improve productivity, reduce risk, and lower the costs and complexity associated with IT functions. Digital transformation, enabled by the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform helped organizations to:

• Report significantly reduced end-user wait time associated with VPN connections (stated by 73 % of customers in a survey)
• Address security gaps and mitigate 79% of attack techniques through zero trust network architecture
• Reduce or eliminate technology spending stemming from business growth by 64%

This is why there is no digital transformation without customer centricity. It is a response to the changing circumstances that are causing pain for enterprise IT departments and exposing businesses to high risk. Therefore, customer experience should be the lens through which C-Level decision makers should be guided to make all their IT decisions to best support customers along the way.

A significant source of validation is when an executive customer makes a career move, only to spearhead another digital transformation at their new organization. It’s proof our customers believe in what we are doing, and that it would benefit any organization. At Zscaler, we have a team of former CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs who were so convinced by the promise of a secure digital transformation with Zero Trust that they committed to it full-time, explaining the challenges and benefits they experienced first-hand along the way.