Modern organizations need to deliver great digital experiences throughout the customer lifecycle, across different stages and touchpoints, and for every customer and prospect. If you want your offerings to your customers to always hit the spot, you need to invest smartly in digital customer experience strategies as quickly and strategically as possible.
The challenges with in-house IT management are way too many
“Wanting” to deliver great experiences and being able to offer them are two different things.
Technology is constantly changing; so are customers’ expectations. Implementing, managing, and supporting an array of systems and processes can get extremely overwhelming. If not done right, the digital customer experiences you offer to your customers can drown in the technological complexity. Here are some challenges in-house IT management presents in this complex technology ecosystem:
- Staying abreast of the latest in the world of technology – from programming languages to tools, enterprise system capabilities to futuristic technologies
- Hiring and retaining a skilled talent pool – especially in an era where the skills gap is constantly widening
- The costs and complexities of managing complex IT systems in-house
- Constantly monitoring, maintaining, supporting, and updating systems to ensure they perform to their fullest potential
- Upskilling the existing resource pool to ensure they can proficiently navigate the modern technology landscape and innovations
- Knowledge of the latest tools and technologies needed to run and maintain systems and applications
Managed Services opens doors to several new capabilities and opportunities
In today’s complex world, trying to manage and support the IT infrastructure of your business on your own might seem like an easy, and cost-effective option but ends up being extremely time, cost, and effort-intensive. If you want to improve the experiences your customers get, you first need to ensure you have a robust IT foundation – something a Managed Services provider can offer.
A provider provides access to a skilled pool of qualified and certified IT resources with experience in and know-how of the latest in the world of technology. With deep domain expertise, knowledge of industry best practices, and familiarity with the latest tools and systems, a provider brings in all the capabilities you need to manage your complex IT infrastructure and empower you to deliver unmatched digital customer experiences.
How Headless Commerce And PWA Are Coming Together To Create Next-level eCommerce
Let’s look at the capabilities and opportunities Managed Services can make possible:
- Cloud-based hosting: The competitive advantages that cloud technology brings to modern businesses are many – especially in the realm of digital customer experiences. Using a fully-managed cloud platform, you can seamlessly build, run, and scale digital experiences to every channel and touchpoint. From websites and apps to social media channels – with cloud-based hosting, you can have tailor-made strategies built especially for your business, helping you drive the agility and flexibility required to drive customer satisfaction and sustain and scale business growth. Cloud-based hosting can also allow you to cater to the evolving needs of your customers and ensure all their expectations are met more easily.
- Software development infrastructure management: The underlying infrastructure of your software development processes also plays a huge role in the digital experiences you offer to your customers. If you want to ensure the required levels of customer satisfaction, you need to constantly manage the building blocks of your applications – including your hardware, software, systems, and tools. Engaging with a qualified Managed Services provider means all of your software development IT infrastructure is constantly managed, monitored, and supported. Right from application development to code repository management, database analysis to release management – a provider will be able to overcome development roadblocks, deliver shorter release cycles, and support your evolving business needs.
- Application support and maintenance: In today’s competitive and constantly transforming business landscape, just having a suite of modern applications is not enough. They need to be supported and maintained across their lifecycle, so they can enhance business process efficiency and drive the level of engagement and satisfaction your customers expect (and deserve). Ongoing maintenance is not only critical to ensure your mission-critical ERP, CRM, eCommerce, and LOB systems perform to their maximum capacity but also sustain and accelerate business results. Engaging with a Managed Services provider means your application portfolio is constantly supported, maintained, and updated to keep pace with changing market trends, industry dynamics, and customer needs.
- Performance tuning: In addition to supporting and maintaining your products and systems, Managed Services can also ensure your applications are continuously tuned via including code optimization, caching, and load balancing – among others. Such tuning is extremely critical if your demand is constantly fluctuating and ensures the experiences you offer to your customers are consistent – despite oscillations in market dynamics, industry trends, and technology advancements. By constantly monitoring the performance of your applications, a Managed Services provider will be able to set up a benchmark and make necessary tweaks to eliminate issues and bottlenecks.
- Ongoing enhancements: A competent Managed Services provider will also be able to enable ongoing enhancements and updates to your business processes, systems, and applications. Given the pace of technological innovation, these updates and enhancements play a crucial role in the experiences you offer to your customers. A provider will also be able to re-engineer, re-platform, or completely revamp your application portfolio – and bring it up to speed with the tempo of innovation – so you can deliver the best and most-updated experiences to your customers.
Customers have become the epicenter of any business: regardless of what industry you belong you, you need to be able to offer great digital experiences to your customers. But given the complexities involved, opting for Managed Services is the best way to deliver on your promises. With a Managed Services provider in tow, you can easily manage, support, and maintain the different components of your IT infrastructure, and ensure your systems and processes work in the most optimum manner, so you can deliver experiences that are truly out of the world.
