How Evergreen IT Upgrades Your Customer Experience

If you’ve read any of our previous blog posts about the operational costs and business risks associated with legacy IT infrastructure, you’re probably familiar with the business case supporting a shift to an evergreen IT model.

But your business operations and IT expenditures are only part of the ROI argument in favor of transitioning to cloud-based IT infrastructure. As you consider the value of undertaking this infrastructure project, it’s equally important to consider the benefits that cloud-based IT can bring to your customers—including your current customer base and the one you hope to grow over time.

The customer experience remains one of the most important factors when determining a brand’s ability to retain customers and grow its customer base. Research has identified a positive correlation between high customer experience scores and higher customer loyalty, and the quality of your technology’s experience—from platform integrations over app performance to data security—all play an integral role in maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.

Your IT infrastructure can impact your brand’s customer experience across each of the above-mentioned categories, along with many more. Here’s a look at some of the biggest benefits your customers may enjoy by your brand’s decision to abandon its legacy IT infrastructure and leverage the full functionality of the cloud.

Fewer Disruptions to Your Customer Experience

A frictionless customer experience is always the goal. But legacy IT is inherently opposed to this frictionless experience. Patchwork solutions and ill-fitting integrations all serve as possible disruptions to the smooth, seamless experience your customers are craving.

On top of that, the frequent updating and maintenance required by these solutions create inevitable disruptions of service and functionality across your customer-facing tech stack. In some cases, overzealous app versioning can create service disruptions which yield only minor improvements to the customer experience and possibly introduce new technical errors that require troubleshooting.

Constant updating can also sap your IT department’s bandwidth to handle other customer IT support needs, resulting in long delays for technical support that frustrate users and possibly cost your business customers. With an evergreen approach, applications can be seamlessly integrated with minimal updating and maintenance required, resulting in a more consistent user experience and fully available access to business services.

Improved Flexibility to Meet Your Customers’ Evolving Needs

Since cloud-based IT infrastructure isn’t built upon limited legacy solutions, it’s able to accommodate greater modifications and integrations that help you keep pace with your customers’ needs.

For many businesses—such as financial institutions providing online and mobile services to their customer base—the limitations of legacy infrastructure made it difficult to implement changes that kept pace with the fast-evolving needs and preferences of those customers. This made established enterprise institutions more vulnerable to upstart businesses that had founded their tech stack on cloud-based IT infrastructure.

By transitioning to evergreen IT, enterprise organizations can eliminate this competitive advantage previously held by industry disruptors. Cloud-based IT infrastructure supports innovation and iteration that keeps pace with customer expectations and allows your business to scale as its customer base grows.

Better Security for Customers and Users

While cloud-based IT environments require custom security solutions and an application of the contextual security model, this custom-built approach to enterprise security is a vast improvement over the technological limitations of legacy IT security.

Evergreen IT eliminates the outdated technology at the core of your enterprise technology stack, and in the process eliminates the gaps and entry points that have historically served as high-risk vulnerabilities in enterprise security. Through contextual security, cloud-based IT infrastructures enjoy the support of better threat detection and risk mitigation—which benefits not only your enterprise data and assets, but also the private data of your customer base.

By reducing the risk of data theft or breaches affecting your customers, you can help your organization avoid a security event that tarnishes your reputation and potentially leads to a mass exodus of disgruntled customers.

Scalability to Support a Growing Customer Base

Through the use of cloud-based IT infrastructure and the support of a third-party service management partner, your business can achieve the scalability required to grow your business without compromising the customer experience.

Legacy IT infrastructure makes it difficult to scale a business without growing pains that can affect backend operations as well as the customer experience. Evergreen IT eliminates these challenges, and allows you to sustainably scale both your services and your operating costs as you build toward a brighter future.

Don’t wait until your legacy IT infrastructure costs your business customers and revenue. Find out how a trusted partner can help your business make the jump to a cloud-based IT infrastructure—download our free guide, “Managing Tech Debt On the Road to Evergreen IT,” today.

Get in touch with Origina today to find out more.