3 Digital Infrastructure Use Cases to Advance Customer Experience

Delivering high-quality, consistent and personalized customer experience (CX) is pivotal to sustaining any successful business in today’s economy. Modern customers now demand proactive, personalized, immediate and consistent interactions across digital channels, and businesses that succeed are delivering smoother, more straightforward and frictionless journeys over their competitors.

But over the last decade, a series of technological developments across cloud, mobile, social and artificial intelligence (AI), have enabled businesses to transform their approach to CX to gain a competitive edge.

IT teams are increasingly focusing their digital strategies to address CX and capture customers mindshare. According to the 2022 Global Tech Trends Survey (GTTS), over 82% of digital leaders in Asia-Pacific identified that improving customer experience is a priority strategy. As more and more teams are rethinking how customer care is delivered, they are deploying intelligent technology to support customers at every single touchpoint in their journeys. Let’s look at some industry-leading examples and how Equinix is supporting CX goals with a digital-first infrastructure.

How advanced digital infrastructure can be your competitive edge in molding superior CX

1. Next-level visibility into inventory with connected infrastructure to support CX

Retailers are facing enormous pressure to digitize as an explosion of online shopping shifts customer behavior. From inventory and supply to online experience and shipping fulfillment, customers want faster, more efficient, and more accurate information. Inventory and supply chain management have become ever more critical to get right; correspondingly, technology has played a more prominent role in meeting these demands.Nowadays, retailers who fail to deploy technology for clearer inventory visibility and the ability to adjust supply are struggling with dissatisfied customers, many of whom turn to alternative choices to receive their products. The demand for digitalization won’t stop, and retailers need to re-assess their digital infrastructure to create the best experiences possible to ensure they continue to stay top-of-mind.SML, a leading global digital identification technology and solutions provider, is a prime example of how technology supports retailers in this new era. SML’s RFID technology utilizes Platform Equinix®  to bridge the gap between a business’s inventory and customers’ demand by providing increased visibility and tracking opportunities throughout the supply chain. It is playing a key role in driving more intelligent inventory management, whether it is showing real-time insights straight from warehouses, using historical data to improve stocking, or gathering predictive analytics to reduce unnecessary inventory in the future—all crucial data points to help retailers adjust and respond to customers instantly and empowering them to grow at scale without sacrificing customer care.

2. Delivering seamless and frictionless experiences to millions of online users

With new products and services hitting the market every minute and brand loyalty diminishing, CX is the key differentiator for businesses’ success. Consumers are not looking for a simple transactional relationship but want to engage with brands and companies and leave with a positive memory from their interaction.  This has propelled business to rethink their digital CX strategy as a key differentiator for success.

Tokopedia, Indonesia’s largest marketplace platform that houses more than 12 million merchants offering more than 638 million products, is a great example of this. To ensure an elite experience for millions of users across the country, Tokopedia differentiated itself based on its digital capabilities.

To create a consistent and resilient user experience across its platform, regardless of the location it is being accessed from, Tokopedia leveraged Equinix Fabric™ to connect to major cloud service providers (CSPs) of their choice, based on their needs for performance, speed, and flexibility at the time. In addition, customers today are concerned about providing sensitive information to shop online. To handle and store these transactions securely Tokopedia, through Platform Equinix, deploys on the edge to ensure compliance and reduce security threats.

Digitalization on this scale also enabled them to support rapid growth and expansion plans, quickly scaling operations through Network Edge and deploying in new locations without investing heavily in new hardware or additional equipment. This means meeting demands in new regions to continue capturing Indonesian shoppers and merchants for happier, safer and more seamless shopping experiences, solidifying Tokopedia’s position as Indonesia’s best marketplace.

 3. Adapting to ever-evolving new customer demands

Although keeping up with customer demands has been challenging with fast-evolving demographics and consumer preferences, businesses that find themselves able to adapt have been able to prosper. To stay competitive, these businesses must truly understand and deliver against what their customers. And what customers want right now is a stellar digital experience.  Organizations that fail to nurture digital operations are falling behind quickly, and if maintain a rigid approach to CX it will end up costing them in the long run.

A great example of an organization thriving via adaption is Sime Darby Berhad, a Malaysian multinational organization with a reach across Asia-Pacific. They understood the need to go digital early on and deployed on Platform Equinix to transform their infrastructure across the region. With the support from Equinix’s technology partner Coevolve, Sime Darby Berhad also adopted Equinix’s Network Edge on Equinix Fabric to achieve secure and stable SD-WAN integration to rapidly scale and adapt to external factors by deploying digital infrastructure as needed, eliminating prior, outdated systems. Ultimately, this supported addressing CX as they made it easier and more seamless for their customers to do business with them, unlocking new capabilities with software-defined connectivity to thousands of partners and providers to accelerate delivery.

The time to get customer experience correct is now

 In the future, customers will have more choices than ever before when it comes to where and how they spend their money.  Their demand for superior experiences from any business they engage with will only continue to grow. As a result, leaders need to improve their CX capabilities to create extraordinary experiences while also ensuring they continue to address new demands for technology-driven and sustainable businesses.

Now more than ever, technology that enhances flexibility, speeds up time-to-market, and provides better overall performance serves as a strategic differentiator for global organizations in CX. As the world’s digital infrastructure company, we are focused on supporting these organizations build their digital infrastructure to make CX their competitive edge.