Volkswagen Group, one of the world’s largest auto companies, had a problem. Its customer experience scores were suffering – an ominous portent in a fiercely competitive vehicle market. Yet, when the company found the solution to its problem, it wasn’t what they had expected. In fact, it had little direct connection with the customer at all.
The issue was not one of customer experience, but of employee experience. The company had high turnover in key sales and account roles, which meant new staff were constantly starting from scratch. And customers were feeling the impact of that learning process.
By implementing transformative technology to link employee and customer experience, the company was able to minimise churn and, consequently, drive benefits for its customers.
Transformative experiences
Volkswagen Group’s example is not uncommon. As organisations digitally transform, they are increasingly differentiating based on end user experience rather than cost or product alone, and the network is increasingly becoming critical to maintaining and improving that experience.
As enterprise apps increasingly move to the cloud and bandwidth demands boom, the key challenge for network managers is how to improve access, performance, cost and security for all employees.
This has increased the use of Internet connectivity for non-mission critical applications and created a wider range of connectivity options. A spread of infrastructure brings a number of potential issues, however.
For example, accessing cloud-based services like Microsoft Office 365 or other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications becomes a problem if there is bandwidth degradation, congestion, or delay. Downtime results in lost revenue, reduced productivity, frustrated workers, and a poor experience for staff, customers, and partners.
Investing in a software-defined future
One way to improve the experience you offer staff and customers is to finetune your infrastructure with a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) layer.