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Consider clients in digital ambitions

Simnikiwe Mzekandaba
By Simnikiwe Mzekandaba, IT in government editor
Cape Town, 28 Sept 2016
Organisations stand to lose business if they fail to innovate, says Tom Pegrume, VP of emerging markets at Hitachi Data Systems.
Organisations stand to lose business if they fail to innovate, says Tom Pegrume, VP of emerging markets at Hitachi Data Systems.

Senior IT executives and analysts attending this week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2016 in Cape Town agree customer experience is one of the main pillars of digital transformation.

Speaking on the event's side-lines, Tom Pegrume, VP of emerging markets in Europe, Middle East and Africa at Hitachi Data Systems, said digital transformation is the process of gaining operational efficiency to be able to free up money to spend on innovation, creating new revenue streams and improving the customer experience.

In his keynote address, Peter Sondergaard, global head of research at Gartner, told CIOs the level of investment in customer experience shows how serious businesses are about this area of operation.

Pegrume said customer experience is key because business can disappear right before a person's eyes.

"New business models are coming in and you can lose your customers at the click of a finger. We already see this in some markets, especially in Europe, where people can very easily swap bank accounts or telephone service providers."

According to Pegrume, previously, people didn't want to spend any money on IT and treated it as a cost to be controlled instead of a strategic tool to drive new revenue streams for the business.

Many organisations, not only in SA but also in the Middle East, are now starting to focus on customer experience, he said. "The customer experience isn't about the interaction with the people but rather people's interaction with the IT systems."

CIOs are placing greater importance on revenue in customer experience than operational efficiency.

However, CIOs might be missing a trick because it is a balancing act as to where money is allocated, Pegrume stated. "You need operational efficiency to get the money to spend it on these other things."

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