How the midmarket can beat the big guys at customer experience

| June 6, 2013


As a medium sized business you are more agile and should be able to deliver a better customer service than larger companies. Scott Middleton explains how. 

Providing your customers with a great experience across all platforms is something you can’t afford to ignore. The good news is cloud software services can help the mid market deliver a consistent experience, an important aspect of great customer experience, before Australia’s larger organisations are able to. 


I was recently speaking with Dr Catriona Wallace, a customer experience expert, adjunct lecturer at AGSM and CEO of leading customer experience consultancy, Fifth Quadrant. Catriona emphasised that Australian consumers are demanding that organisations deal with them in the same way, regardless of which channel the consumer is interacting on, regardless of if they are contacting you via a call centre, online, mobile, in-store, email or direct mail.

A study produced by Optus and PriceWaterhouseCoopers echoes Wallace’s thoughts, finding that 65 per cent of consumers want a consistent experience. However, only 12 per cent of organisations actually deliver.

The good news is large organisations will have a hard time providing a consistent experience across the organisation. Often, their departments don’t talk to each other and have separate systems for dealing with customers.

This is a great opportunity for mid market companies to get ahead of enterprises.

Thanks to cloud software services the mid market now have access to many solutions that have been designed to help ensure consistency across the business, can be implemented quickly and don’t come with significant upfront investment associated with traditional software.

Examples of cloud software services that help provide a consistent customer experience are Salesforce, NetSuite and ZenDesk. With NetSuite, for instance, in the one system your sales team can see an outstanding support issue before they make a prospecting call. Your support team can see the last items your customer purchased on the website (if you want them to) and a change to your customer’s account record can be made visible at every engagement point in the organisation as it happens.

As well as being affordable and accessible, cloud software could be what distinguishes you from your bigger competitors, providing you with the systems you need to offer a smooth and consistent customer experience.




Scott Middleton is the CEO of Terem Technologies. Terem builds cloud software, web application and mobile applications for companies wanting to use technology to create new products, services or points of differentiation. Terem also provides cloud-based, integrated financials, CRM, project management and inventory management through a partnership with NetSuite.

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