?Delivering Happiness? ? the Tagline Every CIO Needs to Understand

Posted by skyhighnetworks on June 17th, 2014

The best companies are dedicated to their customers and build their processes using the customer’s experience as the primary gauge of success.  These are what I call “customer-centric” organizations.  Great customer-centric companies that have earned my loyalty are Zappos, Nordstrom’s, American Express, and Virgin America.

What makes company customer-centric?

Here’s a perfect example.  I recently exchanged a pair of shoes (twice) that I had purchased at Zappos.  I had seen the “Delivering Happiness” tagline and the book by the same name by CEO Tone Hseih (*sigh*).  When I indicated I wanted to exchange the shoes a “Customer Happiness Rep” immediately contacted me and walked me through the process.  The entire process, which took less than 4 minutes, was designed around making my life easier, and I could feel it.  Within 2 minutes of jibing my customer-happiness rep for her “drinking the corporate Kool-Aid” job title, I was convinced that the customer-centric approach actually made a gigantic difference.
Why is Zappos so successful? Because they allowed me to shop when I wanted to, when I wanted to, how I wanted to, and hassle-free.

IT has changed

Now think about the IT organization.  IT has done everything it could to meet employees’ needs. But over the years, the process has become bureaucratic and inefficient. At the same time, the employees needed IT to be more responsive so they could be more productive, innovate at a faster rate, and drive the business forward.

Today, with the advent of the cloud, employees are no longer dependent on IT. Employees can go around IT and sign up for IT services directly with nothing more than an email address and credit card number.  According to stats by GigaOm, this is happening on a epic scale, with 90% of IT purchasing projected to occur outside of IT by 2020.

Author :

Skyhigh Networks, the cloud security company, enables companies to embrace Cloud Analytics Services with appropriate levels of security, compliance, and governance while lowering overall risk and cost. With customers in financial services, healthcare, high technology, media, manufacturing, and legal verticals, the company was a finalist for the RSA Conference 2013 Most Innovative Company award and was recently named a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner, Inc. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Skyhigh Networks is led by an experienced team and is venture-backed by Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. For more information on Cloud Security to Visibility and Cloud Control, visit us at http://www.skyhighnetworks.com or follow us on Twitter@skyhighnetworks.