The CIO’s Role In The Growth Agenda | Forrester
Customer Experiences |
CIOs and the tech team drive revenue growth by expanding and securing customer solutions, fostering product collaboration for new market entry, and enhancing growth through insights, automation, and algorithms. AI emerges as a pivotal technology in this growth strategy.
CIOs play a crucial role in unifying technology strategies for marketing, sales, customer experience, digital, and product teams, shaping a comprehensive framework for action as detailed in this report.
Technology Powers The Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine
Over the past four decades, technology has evolved from the confines of back-office dungeons to become a driving force in direct customer engagement. The growth potential of technologies like ChatGPT, software, cloud, IoT, and AI becomes apparent when strategically placed in the hands of individuals and teams focused on creating growth.
The alignment of business and technology capabilities is crucial for companies to thrive. Customer obsession, expressed through technology, shapes the foundation of growth. Technology serves as the engine of the company, fostering collaboration among marketing, sales, CX, product, and digital teams.
This synergy leads to unified efforts, empowering organizations to achieve substantial revenue growth and operational efficiency. Forrester’s 2023 data highlights the significant impact of alignment across customer-facing teams on revenue growth and IT effectiveness.
CIOs And Their Teams Play Three Roles In Technology-Driven Growth
Enable Growth By Flawlessly Scaling And Securing Customer Solutions
The solutions your company provides, spanning the entire customer lifecycle, are fundamental to its growth—embracing marketing, sales, purchase, products, and beyond. Even though CIOs may not be the creators of all customer systems, they invariably become responsible for them.
This responsibility extends to managing technologies crucial for growth, demanding flawless operations that render these systems imperceptible to both customers and employees, seamlessly blending into the engagement backdrop.
To earn a pivotal role at the growth table, CIOs must:
- Scale Adoption of Customer Solutions: Ensure the widespread adoption of customer solutions by enhancing their usability and impact. Regardless of their initial funding source, once these platforms attain critical mass, CIOs are tasked with fixing and operating them for all users. Collaborating with other leaders, such as CMOs and CDOs, to build an integrated experience architecture that supports a holistic commerce experience is crucial.
- Protect Brand, Reputation, and Trust: Safeguard the digital expression of your brand and reputation by securing customer-facing systems through the principles of Zero Trust. Maintaining customer consent and permission to operate is paramount for trust. Operational excellence, as emphasized by Christian Berthelsen, CTO of Fourth/HotSchedules, is pivotal for preserving the company’s reputation, leading him to rely on the resilience and trustworthiness of the MS Azure cloud.
- Empower Employees for Revenue Generation: Develop applications and processes that assist employees in their workflow, freeing them from repetitive tasks through automation. By leveraging technology to streamline operations, as exemplified by Dan Saltich, CIO of Shamrock Foods, salespeople can focus on revenue-generating activities rather than manually entering customer orders, thereby enhancing efficiency and growth.
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The Table of Contents of “The CIO’s Role In The Growth Agenda” Report:
- Technology Powers The Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine
- CIOs And Their Teams Play Three Roles In Technology-Driven Growth
- Enable Growth By Flawlessly Scaling And Securing Customer Solutions
- Create Growth By Collaboratively Building Products That Open New Markets
- Amplify Growth By Elevating Insights, Automation, And Algorithms To Optimize Everything
- Artificial Intelligence Rewrites The Calculus Of Growth
- Full-Throttle Your Company’s Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine
- Supplemental Material
Number of Pages:
- 13 pages
Pricing:
- Free
Methodology
Forrester’s State Of Customer Obsession Survey, 2023, was fielded from December 2022 to January 2023. This online and computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) survey included 1,473 business, technology, and marketing decision-makers (director level and above) in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US from enterprise organizations with an annual revenue of $100 million or more.
Forrester ensures that the final survey population contains only those with significant involvement in the planning, funding, and purchasing of business and technology products and services. Dynata fielded this survey on behalf of Forrester. Survey respondent incentives included points redeemable for gift certificates.
