The heart of Digital Transformation
Why CRM implementation strategies should be at the heart of companies’ Digital Transformation processes.
Think about all the new terms that have appeared because of the technological revolution: Big Data, Machine Learning, IoT or Digital Transformation. There is a lot of talk around digital transformation, and there can be a common thought that it is all just about technology, but setting up a CRM, ERP or BPM can be done by anyone, and digital transformation goes beyond the technology it uses as a tool.
In this post, I want to share with you why a robust CRM implementation strategy should be at the heart of a company’s Digital Transformation process and what a CRM should enable for a company to succeed in this venture.
Let’s take a step back and analyse first what Digital Transformation is. I particularly like how Enterprisers Project defines it: Digital Transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how companies operate and deliver value to customers. Beyond that, it’s a cultural change that requires organisations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment often, and get comfortable with failure. This sometimes means walking away from long-standing business processes that companies were built upon in favour of relatively new practices that are still being defined. (1)
When talking about why digital transformation matters, it’s said that a business may take on digital transformation for several reasons but, by far, the most likely is that they have to: it’s a survival issue. And I couldn’t agree more on that, this long-term process helps companies to keep pace with emerging customer needs and enables them to become a significant player in a challenging environment that continuously changes as technology evolves.
But as I mentioned before, this article is all about why a CRM implementation strategy matters in digital transformation. So, you might ask yourself, what does CRM have to do with this?
A mature CRM implementation strategy must be at the heart of every successful digital transformation initiative because digital transformation begins and ends with the customer.
If we think of the goal of any company, I’m sure most of us will think that the most fundamental and common one it’s to deliver value to its customers to make money. Thus, every digital transformation initiative must place the customer at the centre of their digital efforts to succeed, and that’s what a CRM is ultimately all about.
CRMs should enable companies to break down technology silos between departments, so no matter if employees are working in sales, marketing, service, commerce, or IT, they share a single customer view that enables a deeper understanding of customers, on a single platform.
Moreover, well defined CRM implementation strategies should help companies move towards profitability by identifying processes that can be improved, shortened and made more efficient.
Everybody is aware that there are multiple CRMs out there, but I now want to highlight how Salesforce is positioned to enable their clients to succeed in digital transformation processes. The reason I’m focusing on Salesforce is because, apart from being the CRM par excellence, it’s the CRM I know the best after working on the implementation of it for several big accounts in IBM.
Salesforce contains the holistic profiles for all the customer types and those contain relevant sales, marketing, and customer service information. On top of that, it enables companies to add social media insights, which is ever increasingly relevant to understand customers thoughts and preferences and, through identity resolution tools like Audience Studio (DMP), they can help companies identify anonymous digital visitors to leverage their customers’ profiles to have the maximum impact on several business KPIs like conversion rates.
But Salesforce not only provides companies with structured data about their customers, which enables them to have a clearer and unique view and understand customers and their preferences, it also makes all this data actionable so that companies can perform better and deliver better experiences to their clients.
Let’s dive into that. A company’s improved performance can be understood with a wide range of examples: companies are able to sell more to their current customers, they convert more leads into clients, they reduce costs because they are now wasting less time to understand the issues of clients, etc.
And it’s the same when we talk about delivering better experiences to clients. It can go from personalising purchase recommendations based on customers purchase history and maximising opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling, to reaching out to clients proactively when they detect a customer is having an issue before the customer gets annoyed enough to pick up the phone and call customer service.
But how does Salesforce enable all these improvements? In the following part of the article, I would like to focus on some of the key must-have’s that a CRM should offer to their clients to drive digital transformation.
1Understand better its clients. With the convergence between online and offline media, understanding the customer journey still depends on a 360° view of interactions across all company platforms. In this sense, analytics, social listening, and an outstanding CRM strategy are essential to accompany the end-to-end sales funnel, at all points of contact with the company.
Moreover, understanding customers out of the company context through exploring social media is nowadays essential for a company to have a complete customer view and make this information actionable to provide a better and personalised customer experience.
2Provide an omnichannel and personalised experience. It’s essential for companies to build up a connected platform that enables customers to connect with them through the channels of their preference. For example, we know social media wasn’t invented to take the place of call centres, but it has become an additional channel and opportunity for companies to offer better customer service. But having more channels available is something customers already expect from companies.
The next level is for companies to provide an omnichannel and seamless experience so that their customers can start a service request or a purchase in one channel and finish it in another in a transparent way. Companies need to manage different channels in an integrated way, providing a fluid, consistent and differentiated customer experience.
In addition, as CRM allows companies to continuously capture data and insights about their customers, market, and industry, they should also provide the tools for companies to create more relevant and personalised messages, both in manual and automated campaigns, as Salesforce does through its different Marketing Cloud studios. It provides tools to, for example, identify a specific segment of your customer’s audience that share important similarities and set up a series of automated communications for them that are triggered by a group of specific actions.
3Accelerate results through AI. Artificial Intelligence is no longer an experiment and it’s already transforming customers’ expectations. There are several examples of how Artificial Intelligence can be articulated inside a CRM. Salesforce, for example, does that through Einstein, a layer of intelligence that brings powerful AI technologies. Einstein, in this case, not only provides tools to improve and personalise customer experience but guides employees through actions to allow them to focus their efforts on more strategic activities, which allows companies to scale savings by setting free resources for other activities.
Some common examples of these CRM and AI combinations are to use predictive scoring to have opportunities or leads prioritised on the most likely to convert into clients or to make recommendations either to clients on which products to shop or to employees on which white paper employees should email a lead to optimise the chance to close a deal.
On top of that, in IBM we add additional cognitive capabilities provided through Watson that are designed to be combined with the Salesforce platform, bringing AI to the point of interaction, and creating intelligent experiences for employees, customers and partners. With IBM and Salesforce, you can seamlessly connect real-time insights found in unstructured data from IBM Watson to discoveries from customer data delivered by Salesforce Einstein. Our motto is that together, Watson and Einstein provide a full customer view.
If you’d like to explore further on how Watson & Einstein work together I recommend you this article from Marc Nehme, CTO from Partnerships & Customer Success for IBM Watson AI.
4Provide security on Cloud. The Cloud may seem like an open bank vault just waiting to be robbed as it’s a massive database of precious information. But the Cloud is quickly becoming the most trusted data solution for all organisations and CRM providers set security as one of their main priorities.
This includes demonstrating trust and transparency as a crucial part of implementing cloud security. That’s why we can see on some providers such as Salesforce, how they provide live data on system performance and updates on phishing, malware, or intrusion attempts so that clients can know the state of their data at any time.
5Empower Innovation. CRM should not just enable but accelerate innovation for companies. That’s why solutions like Salesforce empower organisations to innovate fast taking, combining, and stacking low-code builders together to build solutions and apps that best fit business and users’ unique needs.
Moreover, Salesforce launches three annual product innovation releases that include on-demand improvement requests. Users on Salesforce can propose new and vote for other’s ideas so that Salesforce can consider the most asked ones and develop some improvements on that so that technology evolves on user’s needs.
The features above are a group of main capabilities I considered as relevant when analysing different CRMs and in which Salesforce has proved outstanding results on them, but I want to highlight that I’m aware there are much more than these and this is a personal prioritisation I made.
Anyway, the three important messages I want to conclude this article with are:
1. Digital transformation begins and ends with customers,
2. CRMs provide companies with data they need to improve the value they deliver to its customers,
3. Salesforce it’s not just a CRM that provides data about customers, it’s a platform that drives and fuels innovation through the actions it enables for companies to transform their businesses.
Thank you for reading me, hope you enjoyed it!
(1) https://enterprisersproject.com/what-is-digital-transformation
IBM Services for Salesforce is the only global strategic partner connecting customer-centric Salesforce products and clouds with IBM’s industry-centric approach and solutions. We co-create innovation and drive digital transformation with speed to scale.
If you’re interested on how IBM provides solutions for clients through Salesforce solutions, please check out our specific website on that.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, so feel free to contact me through here or on Linkedin.
