How to Drive Innovation Through Strategic Partnerships
DeCoster presented several uses cases in which CDW partnered with Dell to help organizations reimagine their infrastructure to address their desired outcomes. In some of those cases, this partnership successfully accomplished its goals via the innovation offered by Dell APEX, which “delivers cloud services for a range of data and workload requirements, enabling you to simplify transformation, adapt to evolving conditions, and stay in control of your data,” according to Dell.
DeCoster mentioned a recent project with a large healthcare provider that needed to fix its virtual desktop infrastructure environment to enable access to critical applications. The organization partnered with CDW to find a VDI solution and ultimately settled on APEX because, as DeCoster said, “APEX was able to get the customer there the fastest,” completing the project in less than a month.
He cited another use case, this one with a professional services firm that needed to upgrade an aging, costly infrastructure. By partnering with Dell, the company was able to successfully migrate its data center to a multicloud platform.
In each case, DeCoster explained that, regardless of the customer’s stated goal, the intended outcome was “making the customer experience exceptional.”
READ MORE: Learn how to preserve business outcomes by protecting your infrastructure.
How Customer Experience Can Become a Competitive Advantage
In a later session the same day, Cheryl Cook, Dell’s senior vice president of global partner marketing, sought to explain why the customer experience has become such a high priority. Customer behavior is changing, she said, and that affects the way most companies do business.
Cook listed several key considerations to guide an organization looking to improve the customer experience. “How do you automate it? How do you personalize it? How do you make it simple, and the interactions and the engagements a pleasant experience?” she asked. “And you need to be thinking about these digital strategies across all routes to market.”
Cook then introduced Tiffani Bova, global growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, who noted that 88 percent of customers now say they’re making decisions based less on price or product, and more on the experience.
Bova also noted a connection between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and she pointed out the importance of updated technology, which allows employees to provide better customer service. “The average enterprise has 900 apps, and only 29 percent of them are integrated,” Bova said. “This integration problem is real. And as we go more and more hybrid, it's going to get worse, unless you can help your customer base really understand the power of that integration. Because ultimately, poor employee experience leads to poor customer experience.”
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