As the digital universe continues to evolve, the way we work, collaborate, and connect with customers, employees, partners, and suppliers is rapidly changing.

Fundamental to this is the emergence of a new set of connected users that are increasingly demanding access to information in order to aid their decision-making processes.

Differentiation has long held the key to delivering a sustainable competitive advantage, but it is the ability to link customer experience (CX), workforce, commerce, business networks, and innovation together that now sets the new breed of market leaders apart from the rest.

Technology is the critical enabler of these linkages, but there is much more to it than simply implementing some new software/hardware, automating a handful of processes, or learning a new workflow.

Differentiation on this level requires sweeping changes to be made right across the organisation, altering the way work is done, the type of work that is done, and the way people interact.

Once this is understood, it is important to open your mind beyond the stand-alone social applications that we have become accustomed to. This is because the day is looming when all new applications will incorporate at least some form of social capability.

Whether we are talking about a customer making a purchase, an employee trying to make a decision, or a partner looking for support from a vendor, the way businesses interconnect these applications will ultimately determine the sustainability of their competitive advantage.

Creating a disruptive innovative product or service will, of course, remain a viable route for achieving traction and gaining market share, but the unprecedented disruptive power of the internet and 3rd Platform components such as cloud, mobility, Big Data analytics, and social can no longer be ignored.

With digital disrupters like Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb ripping up the rule book and creating innovative new ways to deliver products and services, it is little wonder that organisations of all shapes and sizes are wary of their own business models suddenly being disrupted.

This very real risk threatens all industries, but it is particularly pertinent in older, established markets where the leaders have become complacent and ignored the ongoing revolution in consumer behaviour.

Consumers increasingly want to interact with their favoured brands and seek out a range of relevant insights before making their purchasing decisions. They are also demanding that this information is made available whenever and however they want it.

The result of these emerging competitive threats and increasing consumer demands for tailored services is that more and more businesses are focusing on customer experience as a method of differentiation.

Indeed, by 2020, 50 per cent of companies worldwide will have consistent and measurable customer experience strategies in place to deliver business metrics to senior management.

Such initiatives are direct reactions to the shift in control over buying processes from the seller orchestrating the transaction to the customers buying from an informed position via the channel of their choice, often well beyond the influence of any sales representative.

This behaviour initially flourished in the business-to-consumer space, but it is also increasingly now transitioning over to the business-to-business landscape, where sales models are coming under the same kind of pressures first seen in the consumer market.

All of this is happening at a time when businesses are being challenged to do more with less. Indeed, budgets continue to be cut, staff numbers continue to fall, and automation is increasingly being deployed to drive efficiencies.

This means there is not an endless pool of resources to call upon. So, as important as CX strategies undoubtedly are, they will not be tolerated for long if they suck up valuable time and funding without providing a tangible business benefit.

Any shift to a true CX-focused corporate strategy requires buy-in right from the very top of the organisation, so there is simply no room for manoeuvre if such initiatives fail to deliver the required results.

Viable metrics for measuring CX success remain in their infancy, with organisations overwhelmingly relying on self-reporting mechanisms such as customer satisfaction surveys.

While these are valid when it comes to measuring customer sentiment, they do not present a holistic view of the relationship between the customer and the organisation; nor do they deliver insight into business benefit.

And it is overcoming this particular hurdle that may prove to be the most challenging of them all.

The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC). He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC. Content for this week’s feature leverages global, regional, and local research studies undertaken by IDC.