3 ways to outpace customer expectations with cloud

What prevents some companies from meeting customer expectations while others are thriving? Knowing the answer to that question could be the difference between failure and success.
According to a Dynatrace survey, 79 percent of users will abandon a mobile app if it fails to meet expectations.
And guess what, an engaging customer experience isn’t just essential for consumer business. It’s also critical to your business-to-business (B2B) customers and partnerships. If you can’t manage expectations for B2B customers fast enough, they too may go elsewhere.
The shift to cloud technology is rewarding the leaders and exposing the laggards. In nearly every industry, the organizations excelling at creating delightful customer experiences are also leading in cloud transformation. More than twice as many high-performing organizations report having fully integrated cloud initiatives than low-performing organizations.
If you study these top companies closely, you’ll notice three things every business needs in its cloud strategy. I am convinced that organizations with these characteristics will continue to win business and entice customers with personal, engaging and interactive experiences.
1. Flexibility
Change is the only constant in the digital economy. A hybrid cloud model gives you the flexibility to adapt and grow. This flexibility allows you to go after the big opportunities knowing that the location of your company’s data won’t be an obstacle. The value is in more than just cost and speed, though these remain key rationale for the public cloud. The hybrid model also enables you to realize new insights across your entire ecosystem and quickly move priorities and resources to meet opportunities.
2. Freedom to choose
Never forget you have options. You need to be able to easily change where an application runs based on your business needs. Which cloud helps you realize the most value: public, private? What if that changes? If you’re locked in with a public vendor, for example, moving data without disruption can be very costly and time-consuming. Look for solutions that give you the freedom to choose, with easy application portability regardless of your architectural environment across any cloud. Solutions like IBM WebSphere Application Server Version 9  are built to put clients in control, not cloud providers.
3. Cognitive insights
We’re living in the cognitive era, inseparable from cloud innovation. Cognitive is the way to outthink the competition and make sense of information. What can your data do?  Bring new customer experiences, new applications and even new business models, for starters.
IBM Cloud offers a host of accessible cognitive capabilities which you can build into your applications. IBM WebSphere Connect, for example, provides the ability to seamlessly connect your on-premises apps to hundreds of Bluemix cloud services like IBM Watson, IBM Cloudant and IBM dashDB.
You can rapidly infuse apps with cognitive capabilities to gain operational insights and dazzle your customers. Use these cognitive capabilities to breathe new life into your existing investments and extend their value while still putting the customer first.
If you are looking to learn more about how IBM Cloud can help you maintain a spot at the top of your industry, take the WebSphere Cloud Readiness assessment. You’ll see how to take advantage of hybrid capabilities and receive suggestions on how to cut costs, speed time to market and create new business models with WebSphere on cloud.
 
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud