Your Guide to Customer-Focused Technology

How to build a technology roadmap around your customers, from vision to integration to adoption.

 
Time to Read: 5 minutes
 
John Durocher
Executive Vice President, Customer Success
 
 
 

No matter the business leader I talk to, without a doubt, their top priority is to deliver value for their customers. And now more than ever, this value needs to be delivered consistently and it needs to be delivered FAST!

This means making your customers happy is everyone’s job.

Encouraging and supporting your teams to think, act, and operate with a customer-centric approach requires alignment across your organisation’s processes, culture and mindsets, and of course, your technology.

In order to successfully do this, your employees need the right tools, powered by the right data. You also need to confidently put your customers front and centre with a scalable solution supported by an operating model to ensure accountability across every touchpoint.

In this guide, we share how to work toward a lean, cloud-based tech stack that’s focused on achieving a single view of your customers. We also reveal how improving your employee experience leads to a better customer experience. Because when your employees are more productive and effective in their work, they can deliver the connected experiences your customers want and deserve.

Chapters In This Guide

Is your IT focused on products or customers?

Your employees need the right information and tools at their fingertips to respond to customer needs and design connected experiences across touchpoints. But the average enterprise uses about 900 different applications, and only 28% of those are connected. Many businesses still have a product-centric systems architecture, with CRM and other systems used tactically, department by department.

CRM is fragmented across the organisation, contributing to silos.

 
Fifty-seven percent of companies say
CRM is fragmented across the organisation, with a few, many, or all departments having their own CRM
 
Fifty-eight percent of companies say
organisational silos negatively impact the quality of customer/prospect experiences
 
 
Source: Make CRM the Foundation of Your Customer Obsessed Strategy
The fact is, technology can either hold your organisation back or propel business forward. It can create more silos, or it can bridge them. And only by connecting your organisation’s silos can you offer customers what they want: personalised, consistent experiences across all channels.

A new direction: Say hello to the lean, customer-focused technology stack.

Technology generates the reach and scale you need to effectively engage with customers where they are. However, moving away from legacy technology debt and refocusing IT on innovation (versus systems maintenance) is an essential part of putting customers first. The key is to replace traditional product-centric IT architecture with a truly customer-centric approach.

Your CRM platform will play a central role. That’s because an integrated CRM system that’s used across departments:

  • Consolidates the number of tools needed for your workforce to do its work.
  • Empowers employees closest to customers to deliver the right experiences at the right time.
  • Delivers insights and recommendations, not just data.
  • Makes customer data easily shareable.
  • Keeps you flexible and connected in an age of APIs, IoT, and the platform economy.

Admittedly, making the transition takes some work. Customer-centred transformation is a journey spanning people, process, and IT that requires evolving legacy mindsets and bridging organisation and information silos to put customers front and centre.

This same goal has driven our evolution at Salesforce: to help companies break down the traditional silos that often exist between marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams. We do this with Salesforce Customer 360, one integrated CRM platform that gives everyone a shared view of their customers.

Over the next four chapters, we will help you and your stakeholders build a strategic technology roadmap that puts customers at the centre of your plans, provides your employees with a single, shared view of your customer, and sets the foundation for ongoing innovation across teams.
 

More Resources

 

Guide

The Transformation Playbook

Research and Reports

State of the Connected Customer Report