E03: Sonia Phillips on Maximising Data to Enhance Experience

‘Data is the new oil’ is a phrase familiar to organisations looking to polish their decision-making process and uncover new ways of understanding the market and their customers.

As solution providers continue to navigate the challenges of a volatile economy, customer experience has taken on a new meaning in a market dominated by established and emerging technologies.

Hyper-personalisation and proactive engagement are now the rules and not the exception.

Sonia Phillips – Director of Customer Success and Digital Experience across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) at Ingram Micro – outlines changing consumer norms in a post-COVID era and new opportunities that leverage the power of data for sharper insights.

Meeting new expectations

“Post-COVID, we saw a lot of the B2C experience roll into B2B businesses,” observed Sonia. “Clients are looking for not only the best possible solution but also how they experience their engagement with you and your team.”

Differentiation in the buyer-seller arena is no longer limited to talking about solutions or skills offered. It now extends beyond product and brand appeal to empowering customers – ensuring they feel like they are seen and heard by solution providers and deriving value from these interactions.

According to Sonia, meeting these new customer demands requires a thoughtful plan that allows partners to create “a more tailored but also scalable” approach.

Sharpening data toolsets

“The more we think about data as this commodity that is flowing through the distribution network, the more we’ll start to understand the opportunities we have to really differentiate that experience,” Sonia noted.

There is an element of complexity for service providers who have worked hard to nurture and maintain strong ties with their customers, accumulating extensive knowledge and executing customer strategies that utilised limited single channels such as phone calls.

The transformation from complex reactive to simplified proactive approaches to customer experience has been enabled by data and technology integration across omnichannel platforms.

“One thing I really like about data is you can’t really argue with it,” Sonia added.

Data then acts as a “litmus test” for partners when they evaluate the quality of the relationships they have with customers in terms of how they adapt and evolve to drive desired outcomes.

“There is a point at which you can’t work harder, you have to work smarter,” Sonia continued.

“That’s really about how do you get those insights that are going to delight your customers and save your team time?”

Sharing aspirations

In assessing the solutions required for minimising some of the complexities identified around maximising partner data, Sonia outlined the benefit of Ingram Micro’s Xvantage platform.

“Ingram Micro as a distributor is really there to stand behind our partners and to support their success,” Sonia emphasised.

“The Xvantage platform is about enabling our partners to be able to go about their day-to-day transactional operations or deliver some of their business growth strategy with Ingram Micro in one single place.”

Sonia also described the flexibility afforded to partners as the platform caters to the different business environments in which partners operate in and how they go-to-market.

Xvantage was deliberately built to be “modular” to allow partners of all sizes the option to employ all the core functions while providing the freedom to conduct business processes in a way that is “right for them”.

“It really helps people step back and think differently about how they might manage different parts of their organisation,” Sonia concluded.

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