Using cloud innovation to take customer experience to the next level

HAVING a great customer experience used to be all about human interaction. A smile from a shop assistant or a waiter remembering your favourite meal made all the difference. And you know what they say: Have a good experience, and you will tell around six people; have a bad one, and you'll tell 15 people or more.

Companies poured their efforts into making sure that they trained their customer experience staff and backed them up with the right resources. Giving customers the attention that they craved was possible, but it was expensive and labour-intensive.

Nowadays, businesses are waking up to the fact that what customers really crave is convenience and value. As long as the service is comparable, they are happy to choose whatever channel or service is quickest, easiest or the best value for money. The trouble is that when things go wrong these days, it is no longer just 15 people who hear about the problem. In 2009, an airline broke Canadian musician Dave Carroll's guitar. He uploaded to YouTube a song that told the tale and by July 2016, 15,839,321 people knew about it.