Not long ago, customer experience (CX) was the remit of the service team. As long as they answered the phone quickly, were friendly, and could fix the problem, that was it; job done. But that’s not enough for today’s customers. As more and more of the customer journey happens online, through portals, apps, emails, automated payments, and cloud platforms, experience has slipped away from the customer service team and landed squarely in the lap of the IT department. And if SMEs don’t start acknowledging and addressing the problem, they could soon find themselves coming unstuck.
System reliability is now a CX fundamental
When emails go missing, invoices arrive late, websites time out, or payments fail, customers don’t see “technical problems.” They see unreliability. They don’t really care how it happens; they’re just looking for positive outcomes. Did it work? Did it arrive? Was it easy? And that all comes down to your tech foundations. If a customer portal glitches or support requests disappear, you may have valid reasons for it, but from the customer’s perspective, it feels like a lack of care.
Maintaining uptime, and taking care of updates and patching are critical elements of customer perception. Unmaintained systems degrade over time, with pages loading more slowly, data failing to sync, and bugs appearing. Occasionally, this will result in a dramatic outage, but it usually shows up as subtle friction that causes mild, cumulative irritation. And when security issues are factored in, the problems become even more damaging.
The problem of disconnected growth
There are various reasons why these issues occur for SMEs, but one of the most obvious is because very few small businesses start with a complete and comprehensive tech stack. They don’t have the money or even the need to do so. Rather, their tech evolves as they do. A new ecommerce platform here. A finance tool there. Then you add in marketing automation, file sharing, customer messaging, analytics, all adopted at different times, as the need arises. It all makes very good sense. But when the right tools are chosen, but not properly integrated or governed, problems arise, along with data siloes.
The tech doesn’t communicate. Data gets trapped. Orders don’t sync. Customer history is incomplete. Teams ask customers to repeat themselves. Requests fall through gaps between systems. Each small failure adds irritation, and the customers feel it.
Where companies begin to lose customers
When customers get frustrated, staff are often blamed. Managers search for inappropriate behaviour, terse words, slow replies. But in many SMEs, the real cause comes from within the IT system.
When your tech doesn’t talk, information has to be copied manually. Things take longer, mistakes get made, and all of these inefficiencies get built into the customer experience. And they don’t look good.
The quiet cost of unmanaged cloud systems
Some of these issues come down to an overreliance on cloud software. In many ways, cloud computing has changed the game for SMEs, levelling the playing field and allowing them to compete with much larger organisations. But it’s also made it easy to lose control. New tools can be added quickly and with little upfront expense. Old ones are never fully retired and yet slowly overlooked, with permissions unmanaged and ownership unclear. Updates are also missed because no one knows who’s responsible.
For the business, this carries the risk of unnecessary expenditure for tools they no longer use. But more importantly than that, it introduces unnecessary security and compliance risks, which can involve customer data.
For the customer, it means reduced functionality and service. For every missed update, performance faulters. Sync errors occur, features stop working, feedback is never seen. And whether these things happen gradually or suddenly, the impact is one of frustration and disappointment.
What good CX looks like from an IT perspective
Seen through an IT lens, good CX is remarkably simple: systems that customers never have to think about. Everything works. Information flows. Problems are rare, and when they do happen, they’re resolved quickly and clearly. And the only way to supply that is through proactive IT practices: comprehensive monitoring, regular updates, clear ownership, reliable backups, and thoughtful integration between systems. That doesn’t mean massive budgets and enterprise-level complexity. It means ownership, clarity, and a CRM that ensures visibility, so that you and your teams are able to deliver dependable experiences, consistently.
Customer expectations have risen throughout the last few years. To the point that most people don’t even notice when things work anymore. The attention comes only when they don’t. So, if your digital services don’t stand up to scrutiny on the most basic level, your company is going to stand out for all of the wrong reasons.
William Thackray, Operations Director, of AGT Computer Services