Quadra

The challenge. A survey says that small and mid-sized businesses using a sales management solution see a boost revenue by about 86%.

Nearly 80% of sales people report that implementation of a CRM solution increases in customer satisfaction levels and one every two enterprises see significant improvement in customer retention and satisfaction.

The reality. Acquiring new customers has always been a big challenge for enterprises. Marketing teams that are launching out to new markets and customer segments need to gel well with their sales teams to come up with successful campaigns to successfully penetrate an already saturated and competitive ecosystem. A scalable and dynamic collaboration model that can collect inputs form the field needs to be in place to make such strategic moves.

Businesses have realized that it is much costlier - nearly 7 times - to acquire a new customer than to retain one. Some also dole out additional discounts and design personalized offers to an individual or a group of individuals who satisfy some simple criteria to create stickiness and increase brand loyalty. This again requires enough data containing the purchase history and preferences of the customers. A seamless customer bond needs to be built with them if we are looking at a long-term relationship. Profitability of a business in directly related to the success with which a business can retain its customers.

Modern enterprises need to create more touch points and improve interaction with customers in order to analyze their sentiments towards their products. What they feel about the usability, price and quality is to be collected as feedback so that the product or service that the customer consumes undergoes the required correction. This feedback mechanism closes the loop in the interaction between the enterprise and the customer.

Designing sales campaigns and personalized products would require data about the customers. This can be achieved internally by implementing a sturdy Customer Relationship Management solution that can gather and maintain not only basic data but also updated information about the customer.

Automation of the sales processes and streamlining of customer data to effective channels for dynamic consumption would be essential. Teams that interact with customers either from remote locations or face to face require this information so that the discussion can be healthy and product pitch perfect. When there is an effective collaboration atmosphere for the marketing and sales teams, productivity is bound to increase, and sales outcomes would turn out to be positive and predictable.

The challenge. The sole driving force of enterprises to transform digitally is to put the customer at the heart of every activity in the business.

Customers determine the success and leadership of an enterprise. And customers are now becoming tech savvy rapidly with the availability of cheaper devices packed with digital power. What was a distant mirage for the common man has landed in his hands with little effort from his side. Apps that span from e-commerce to health monitoring to entertainment apart from official collaboration are available for free or at an affordable rate. Most of these apps are provided by sellers to increase touch points for gathering data and feedback from their customers. Valuable inputs from customers can help enterprises design a very personalized experience for customers. Targeted marketing campaigns can be created for very special category of customers to promote stickiness and to improve brand loyalty.

The reality. With the increase in complexity in organizations due to rapid growth in staff and exponential growth in information, there is a need to create a conducive atmosphere for seamless communication and collaboration. Today’s business scenario requires enterprises to remain agile to changes mandated by customer behavior. And customer behavior is unpredictable and highly volatile. Empowering employees with the right kind of platform and tools to collaborate and connect better is essential to address this challenge. Establishing more channels to bring people and information closer in an enterprise will pave way for better decision making and customer retention. Anywhere anytime access to the enterprise resources through any device will improve mobility. Democratization of information with actionable insights will place seamless power in the hands of the relevant people to cater to the need of the customer dynamically.

Enterprises have organically grown internally but not all functions and departments are well knit together as a fabric to function in unison. Ad hoc projects and committees that mushroom time and again result in horizontal expansion that operate in silos creating real challenge for effective governance and control. Enterprises might lose focus on customers and their needs when firefighting happens internally to contain the challenges in running the organization. Teams that function in geographically separated locations are prone to remain isolated from the overall functioning of things in the enterprise unless there is an efficient collaboration mechanism. Optimizing these operations would result in functional and operational teams working together to pay increased attention to the customers’ needs.

Trends are changing today with consumerism calling the shots in enterprises. Established businesses are finding it difficult to keep up with the changing behavior of customers. They are just one mouse-click away from losing a customer forever. Flagship products are losing their relevance in this changing world of varied customer preferences. Startups are ruling the day with their innovative products and enterprises are forced to package their products as services to remain competent and retain customers. Airplane engines are replaced by air times. Capital goods are offered as subscription services. Real estates are let for rent rather than being sold. Taxis are hired instead of cars being bought. Banks operate with literally no physical presence; room-stays and holiday packages are available with no property owned; content is proliferating while nothing is originally created; Food lands on the table from virtual kitchens. Customers want all of these in the comfort of their homes and work-spots and in their familiar devices that they carry day in and day out.

The challenge. The economic environment is undergoing the 4^th industrial revolution with the advent of new technologies brought about by the nexus of forces – Social media, mobility, Information pattern and the Cloud-  as Gartner puts it.

What started as an internal networking tool for students at Harvard 13 years ago has grown into a $525 B enterprise called Facebook. It has more than two billion (two hundred crore) monthly active users as of June 2017 – nearly one third of the world population. Twitter has nearly 280 million users and it is only growing by the minute. Instagram has 150 million users sharing their updates and photos every day. Social media is here to stay and becoming more powerful by the second.

More and more hours are spent online by people as there is proliferation of devices, availability of internet connectivity and usage of apps for everything – from official work to personal use, social networking and entertainment.

Availability of data connectivity almost everywhere has resulted in people accessing the internet from anywhere anytime through any device. Mobility of employees has increased manifold as people have started using multiple devices in contrast to a desktop being shared by more than one person some years ago.

The arrival of the public cloud for enterprise consumption has turned the game against investing for technology in millions upfront. And the huge resources that the cloud can now bring to the enterprises has resulted in increased use of digital technology for business purposes like never before.

The availability of huge resources on the cloud has also favored the exponential growth of data – not just in the form of files, mails and structured data but also in the form of continuous inflow of digital data from various embedded devices called the Internet of Things – the emergence of web 3.0 that now captures data from every user and device connected to the world-wide web.

The challenge. The third industrial revolution flooded in the digital technology and pervaded every desk with a desktop or a laptop. However, this took nearly a quarter of a century to make a man’s dream come true. But here is the deluge – the fourth industrial revolution that tries to bring digital in every realm that man has set his foot on. The volume and pace with which this has invaded this planet is unprecedented.

While technology promised a lot triggering huge investment by enterprises over long periods, the results had always remained a mirage for decision makers. A major reason for this might have been because of a lack of a unifying vision across technology deployments. Another reason might have been the lack of seamless information flow for businesses to make intelligent decisions. Data kept flowing in in bits and pieces, from various silo systems and in disparate forms that contributed little to the enterprises for sustenance and growth. Various functions in the enterprise could not harvest actionable insights from business data that had been accumulating over the years. The data just remained dead in systems for enough time that it had only increased the cost of safekeeping day by day.

 IT and digital had remained a supportive function with limited business role for quite long but has now quickly moved to a state where it is currently playing a transformational role spreading an all pervasive intelligent mesh touching and transforming all aspects of business.

The reality. Now, there is a realization that technology infrastructure should talk to each other and work in unison to produce value for the enterprise. Data that has been lying fallow for years should be harnessed to show reality and predict the future for the enterprise to device its course of action. There is valuable IT infra in the enterprise datacenters and a rich collection of data that contain a wealth of information for executives to strategize their approach for expanding their business, reaching potential markets and increasing their revenue and profits.

All industries have started investing heavily in digital transformation as they realize that digital business is intelligent business in the current state of IT affairs. The top ten highest spending industries are expected to spend $151 billion (approximate Rs.10 lakh crores) in the next two years capitalizing on this unprecedented opportunity. Financial services lead the pack with the highest intended spending during this transformation journey. Manufacturing and Retail business have also jumped into the bandwagon so that they don’t want to be left behind by the startups and digital leaders that rely heavily on digital for their success and leadership.