The focus on ‘going digital’ and ‘digital experiences for customers’ continues to increase at a rapid pace across industries. We often hear that in this age of digitization, “customer service” is becoming less and less important.
In our view, that’s because “customer service” is too often defined as the interactions between our frontline staff and customers.
We define service as “taking action to create value for someone else” – and feel that service is even more important now throughout an organization, because employees across so many levels and functions are involved in creating digital experiences.
With increasing speed and agility, companies must understand a customer’s evolving needs as the digital space expands with possibility. New ideas from everyone at all levels of the enterprise must be fluid and forthcoming. Unexpected partnerships with new suppliers, as well as with customers and staff, need to be invented and shaped. New measures of success must be used – based not only on quality and reliability of the experiences, but also on the momentum of ideas and experimentation to discover new value.
NIIT Technologies is a leading example of how to do this right – they are successfully navigating, and winning, in this new market for creating digital services and digital experiences. They have been focusing on building a sustainable service culture of new ideas that deliver more value, which in turn influences and shapes their digital strategy.
As CEO, Arvind Thakur states:
“Our greatest strength is our culture, a change we embarked on two years ago to address the changing expectations of our client… Our service vision ‘New Ideas, More Value’ fosters a culture that promotes innovation and constantly seeks to find new yet simple ways to add value for our customers…”
Thakur explains NIIT’s approach in this insightful interview which includes this provocative quote:
“In the digital world there are no clear cut specifications as customers themselves are experimenting with business models. The mind-set of the workforce has to shift from doing what they are told to do well, to identifying opportunities to value add. To get the entire workforce aligned requires strong management will and an investment which is not trivial.
For companies embarking on the digital journey the simpler task is to build technology capability. A bigger challenge is to build the creative capability and where companies are going wrong is underestimating the challenge of the culture change.
Read more to learn how NIIT successfully meets this challenge and wins.
What are you doing in your company to build a culture that challenges the status quo, stimulates new ideas, creates and delivers more value?
