This article was originally published in The Telegraph.

To overcome customer experience (CX) challenges and be future ready, brands must infuse intelligence throughout every part of their business to better understand their customers and remove experience frictions. According to Avanade’s recent survey, 89% of organisations agree that becoming an intelligence-driven enterprise is a big part of the digital transformation journey.

Several changes are pushing CX to the forefront. From digital-native organisations disrupting traditional industries, to evolving customer expectations. Today, customers expect highly intuitive, personalised experiences and interactions, instead of being treated like an unknown person.

To get CX right, companies must digitally transform and connect the entire customer journey – from sales to marketing, customer service and beyond. This requires an innovation mindset enabled by company culture, plus a strong connection from strategy through to design, data science, and technology implementation.

Many organisations are on a digital transformation journey, but are facing challenges. 43% are becoming fatigued with their digital transformation efforts, according to our survey. Skills and talent, integration between new and existing systems, siloed and unusable data are among the major barriers to success.

Great customer experiences start with the employee experience. Organisations see employee and customer experiences as the biggest factor driving digital transformation initiatives, even over the technology and innovation agenda. Connecting employees and customers to intelligent technologies is dependent on integrated and accurate data, an area that most organisations recognise needs attention.

People are the most important part of digital transformation due to number of skills required throughout the journey. Organisations need alignment from the C-suite, by implementing a change-enablement strategy that allows people to share ideas and establish collaboration frameworks between strategists, designers, technologists and data scientists to collectively work together and implement those plans successfully.

Great CX should be able to scale. Automation, machine learning and AI will help here. Offloading the resource-heavy parts of content production, personalisation and optimisation will help result in better employee experience and more relevant, high-impact CX, freeing up marketers and creatives to work on innovation and other high-value pursuits.

With an integrated customer experience management (CXM) platform and data that provide a complete view of their customers, brands can personalise customer experiences across every touchpoint at global scale. Removing friction points across the experience life-cycle helps maximise revenues and customer loyalty.

Avanade believes people, creativity and technology play an important role in CX, but great customer experiences start with a vision and a plan. Our unique approach combines human-centred design with the latest engineering principles and technologies.

Leveraging more than 700 UX professionals, 38 LUMA human-centred design practitioners, 4,200 business excellence and automation experts, and 3,500 analytics professionals, Avanade is ready to help you deliver great customer experiences. We offer CX and digital marketing solutions across strategy, design, analytics and AI, and technology services. We can help you get started with an immersive CX workshop to meet you where you are and discover your path for successful transformation to a future-ready business.