According to the worldwide survey of 1500 CIO’s by Gartner Executive Programmes, Retaining, Targeting and Attracting new customers will remain a top priority for all CIOs in 2008. The CIOs will need to work with the business teams to align their IT systems to meet this goal. In their recent article, Gartner came up with 7 Initiatives to Improve Customer experience. This is an interesting food for thought for all SOA strategists. Technologists have been boasting about Service Oriented Architecture for a long time on how SOA can help make IT systems more scalable to changing business needs. I see this as a tremendous potential for the SOA visionaries to prove their points. It’s time, we revisit these 7 initiatives and see what advantage an organisation would get if they are already onboard SOA journey.

1. Act on feedback, deploy changes and communicate actions to
   employees and customers
2. Design processes from the outside in
3. Act as one organisation to ensure consistency
4. Be open
5. Personalise products and experiences
6. Alter attitudes and employee behaviour
7. Design the complete customer experience

The trick here is, once your feedback machinery is up and working, how quickely you incorporate customer feedbacks and respond to their needs. The potential bottleneck areas would be typically Business processes, Products/Services, Faster response to customer issues and reach the right customers for right products. Typically, changes in all these areas will not leave the IT systems untouched. The companies who have been hooked on to SOA for sometime now, would be able to discretely make changes in the services to bundle new products. They would be better armed to localize business process changes and come to production much faster. Using SOA, it will be easier for organisations to integrate diverse applications to generate a 360 view of customer for better customer behaviour intelligence and customer service. Canonicals will do the trick for information aggregation and will play a vital role in making customer data available as one entity. SOA principles have always been advocating that a business is run by business processes. So, let all the actors interact and be governed by business processes. The organisations, that have enterprise architecture on SOA principles, will see the fastest returns on the improvements as their multiple channels respond uniformly to the changes/improvements in the business processes. The organisations no longer act as silos and will repond to customer, irrespective of multiple channels, as one entity now. The theory of “doing the way, it should be” will take care of their pain points.