How Azure Developers Improve Customer Experience

In today’s digital age, business moves extremely quickly and competition is rife. Meanwhile, customers have grown to expect instant, personalised responses regardless of time or channel. More than anything else, the customer experience has the power to determine whether companies strive or struggle. Ultimately, customers are the market-makers and their behaviour has the potential to reshape industries and determine business success. 

To meet these demands, businesses have begun to transform the way they deliver customer service. They are using innovative tools, migrating to cloud services and harnessing mobile devices. The result is that they have become more agile and are able to expand the services they offer more efficiently while still delivering an excellent experience. And it doesn’t require an ever-expanding budget. Microsoft Azure is empowering many businesses to improve customer experience and grow their business as a result. 

What is Microsoft Azure

The cloud has become an integral part of our lives and enables businesses to deliver experiences at scale. One of the biggest companies empowering business in the Cloud is Microsoft. The company, now in its forties, has been very much a cloud-focused one ever since Satya Nadella took over the reins in 2014. Microsoft embraces the open-source community and collaborates openly. One such open-source offering is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure. The platform delivers a range of computing, storage, networking and data analytics and is empowering a new era of customer experience. With the help of Azure, organisations can create more personalised, efficient products and services and ensure customer experience comes first and foremost. 

The Importance of Delivering an Excellent Customer Experience

Outstanding customer experience is fundamental to every business. That’s because, when customers feel valued and enjoy interacting with a brand, they’re much more likely to want to do business with it again and recommend it to others. Your reputation is strongly linked to the experience you deliver and can be just as important, if not more so, than the products and services you offer. Ultimately, customer experience is key to driving long-term business growth. However, the customer experience has evolved a lot over the last few years. As technology has evolved and grown, so have customer experiences. Today’s customers expect seamless, integrated journeys across all touchpoints. Moreover, they expect an always-on experience regardless of device, channel or time zone. 

A personalised customer journey and great customer experience are fundamental to customer retention. After all, the internet is flooded with information and apps, so unless what your business provides goes above and beyond, people won’t necessarily stick around for long. You need to be able to choose the right metrics, segment results and then use your findings intelligently to service your customers. While most businesses use customer relationship management (CRM) software, many solutions lack the tools needed to deliver intelligent data analysis. Fortunately, Azure has the power to do more and can significantly enhance the customer experience. 

How Can Azure Enhance the Customer Experience?

Managing all the elements required to deliver excellent customer experiences can seem overwhelming. You need to ensure high availability, scaling, security management, and constant updates. If your business is trying to manage that all manually, you are going to need a huge amount of time, money and resources. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Azure has the power to drastically improve customer experience as well as your business processes. With Azure developers on your side, you can:

• Deliver personalised journeys – with Azure, you can create a tailored set of digital interactions that reflect the specific needs and interests of each customer. This means that content and experiences are always highly relevant at each stage of the customer journey. 
• React quickly to change – you can quickly adapt personalised journeys to real-time changes in customer behaviours and preferences and automate intelligent decisions based on real-time data. This means that your business can always interact with customers when it matters most.
• Manage fluctuations in demand – whether seasonal and predictable or entirely unplanned, with Azure, services and apps can meet fluctuations in demand. By consuming services on an ‘as-needed’ basis, your business can manage capacity and always fulfil customer demands. Moreover, customer service levels can be maintained without a large capital investment. 
• Add new services – adding a new service for your customers used to take a significant amount of time and money. However, Azure enables you to upgrade existing tools or add new ones and deploy them instantly. This gives your business the agility required to stay ahead of competitors, satisfy existing customers and attract new ones. 
• Streamline workflows – with Azure, you can ensure that workflows aren’t inhibited by departments, channels, systems or countries and that complex business processes are made simpler, all of which have a direct impact on the customer journey. 
• Create a single customer view – Aure combines data and analytics with machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), national language processing (NLP), Internet of Things (IoT) intelligence and more to deliver a single view of the customer. The holistic cross-channel view you can gain with this advanced tech gives you a valuable view of customer needs. 
• Gain advanced insights – there are many ways to tackle a customer problem or opportunity. However, by being able to analyse data effectively and gain better insights into customer needs and behaviours, Azure can help to deliver the right solution and deliver a seamless experience spanning all touchpoints. Meanwhile, powerful predictive analysis can be applied to help improve experiences and connect the dots across multiple systems. 
• Harness sophisticated analytics – with Azure, businesses can run powerful queries against streaming data, create sophisticated analytics and process large sets of historical data without getting caught up in infrastructure provisioning or maintenance.
• Empower your team – to deliver excellent customer experiences, your workforce needs the right tools at their fingertips. Cloud-based Azure enables them to work faster and more efficiently with a wide range of productivity tools. This means your team will always be ready and able to respond to customer needs. 
• Manage security and privacy – with Azure, you can handle security and privacy without making huge investments. Azure comes with numerous privacy compliance and security certifications, allowing you to stay automatically up to date without having to worry about updates and patching.

Making Your Business More Intelligent with Azure

Customers want to interact with businesses that are able to meet their unique needs. So, it stands to reason that businesses need solutions that can help them to automate multiple processes end-to-end across all their systems. Not only does this make employees’ lives easier, but by improving these workflows, businesses become smarter and are better placed to meet the needs of their customers. With Azure, businesses can connect systems and data sources to build intelligent interactions and deliver personalised experiences on the right channel at the right time.

Intelligence is key to business success and that’s just what Azure helps you to do. With Azure, you can automate manual tasks, discover patterns and relationships and empower data-driven decision-making. What’s more, you can build cognitive apps that take advantage of today’s advanced and evolving technology to ensure you are always one step ahead and are ready and waiting to serve your customers’ needs.