Enterprise Architecture and Customer Experience: Putting Customers’ Needs First

The word “digital” is at the heart of many businesses today. Digital transformation and the related demands of customers and competitors are changing the business landscape as we know it. Established organizations are feeling the pressure to continue delivering their services while also quickly responding to these demands for transformation.

Enter the enterprise architecture team. These nimble collaborators have traditionally been focused on serving internal stakeholders and IT teams within an organization. But as firms increasingly invest in digital products, executives and business leaders are now depending more heavily on their enterprise architecture teams to effectively engage customers, and align customer experience and business capabilities with IT. These formerly internal-facing employees are more and more often being called upon to interact with a broader range of stakeholders: external customers.

Excellent customer experience is a must

Those external customers, naturally, demand a satisfying and effective customer experience, which can only be achieved with a customer-centric design approach. Again, it’s the enterprise architecture team that helps with the key activities to ensure that technologies support the effortless and excellent experience that discerning customers want. 

There are lots of reasons why enterprise architects are well suited to getting involved in improving customer experience. But their most valuable attribute is their ability to be cross-functional team members who have a perspective across many of an organization’s silos and lines of business. They’re able to assess data, measure results, reduce costs and suggest new ways of doing business. 

There are two key ways in which an enterprise architecture team can enhance customer experience:

1. Creating customer-centric designs

Mapping out each step of the current customer experience is the first step to customer-centric design. Customer journey maps help visualize what customers really do as they navigate and interact with products and services. Combining customer journey maps with the business capability maps created by enterprise architects allows teams to see and plan the whole process.

2. Identifying poor transitions

In siloed organizations, customer experience pain points occur frequently at the transition between different teams that support a shared product or service. Enterprise architects have the unique ability to spot these gaps because of their intimate knowledge of technology roadmaps, business capability maps and the current state architecture. 

Once enterprise architects identify business capabilities that are below par, they can be flagged for re-evaluation through meaningful and productive IT investment discussions. And although enterprise architects are very versatile individuals, they can achieve results even faster when they work closely with creative designers and product innovators. 

The bottom line

When an organization struggles to deliver exceptional customer experiences, enterprise architects can help it to reposition, resolve and recreate the customer experience. 

Simply put, enterprise architecture helps bring customer needs to the forefront, where they can be seen, understood and acted upon. They’re a proven part of our team: Let us show you how.