Modern technology has equipped the average consumer with a greater level of choice than ever before. The connected nature of the world we live in has fundamentally changed the way in which we interact with the products and services that are available to us, as well as the expectations we place on the organisations responsible for creating them, says Craig Leppan, business development manager for boutique consultancy firm Ovations.
Now more than ever, the nature and level of demand is set by the buyer. Today, the average man or woman on the street has the power to dictate how and when they wish to be approached when making purchasing decisions, and are quick to disregard businesses that are unwilling to meet these wishes.
In response, organisations across the globe are rushing to adopt new mobile and social trends in the hopes that consumers will respond positively. Engaging with customers via social media platforms and applications, with the intention to broaden the scope of customer service beyond a simple offering, has become a major focus for enterprises in almost every sector.
This has resulted in a fresh approach to customer relationship management (CRM), which is aimed at comprehensively servicing the customer throughout the sales process. Organisations are now focused on actively feeding information to consumers in a manner that best suits their needs.
Although a fresh and constantly evolving customer service and retention strategy is vital to continued success, ensuring that organisational systems and procedures are correctly provisioned is equally important.
This demands a re-imagining of internal business processes in two distinct areas.
The first relates to the internal foundation, which underlies new consumer retention and acquisition tactics such as mobile applications and social media engagement. Although many large enterprises are currently investigating these services, few understand what is required to ensure that they function smoothly.
Prior to rolling out dynamic outward-facing services, organisations must ensure that robust, agile processes exist to handle the load. This often requires the restructuring of customer request execution at a very high level.
Business process management systems, which clearly map out the enterprise processes, ensure that human-based tasks are allocated correctly, marry technical resources and technical systems with people on the ground, and offer management a broad view of the business as a whole, are often vital to securing strong internal organisation.
This encourages a departure from a siloed approach with internal processes, in which each department is regarded as a standalone entity, towards a more enterprise environment, which favours collaboration and communication across business units.
Businesses without a solid process management system should be wary of adopting new customer-facing strategies, which demand considerable resources. In almost every event, the inability to execute customer requests effectively is more harmful than sluggishly embracing emerging trends.
The second focus area lies within empowering a distributed workforce. Although mobile applications hold numerous benefits for customer retention and acquisition, this technology can also contribute towards refining internal processes and improving on an organisation's overall service offering.
Location-based applications, in collaboration with a robust business process management framework, have already proven effective when managing dispersed workforces. These systems allow instructions to be delivered directly to a mobile device while feeding back that the task has been completed.
Before engaging with the public through mobile and social platforms, organisations should investigate how to equip internal personnel with the same tools.
In conclusion, a comprehensive business process approach and mobile empowerment are vital support structures that underpin new systems such as customer relationship management-based applications and social media engagement.
Although this may seem a complex road to navigate, there are groups that focus on guiding organisations towards the right path. Ovations is able to aid businesses in their journeys from chaos towards process automation - one which ultimately results in customer-focused excellence.
Issued by: Meagan Cooke, Text 100 Public Relations
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