Each new year brings the drive to pursue new projects and, hopefully, improve business operations. Whether you’re looking to expand the breadth of your CRM system or begin migrating your company to the cloud, more than likely, there’s a new business initiative that requires resources. Determining which project gets your investment(s) can be tricky. Depending on the needs of your customers and marketplace priorities, some projects are simply more valuable than others. We want to share a few of them that caught our attention for 2020.
Upgrading Company ERP Systems
Modern ERPs (enterprise resource planning systems) can revolutionize business processes around inventory, sales, CRM, and marketing. By allowing businesses to improve day-to-day operations for employees and enhance customer experience, it becomes obvious why upgrading ERP systems is a comprehensive improvement project. It can be hard to say goodbye to the old way of doing things, but a new ERP helps break down silos and streamline business operations, productivity, and profits.
Personalized CX
People are much more likely to buy when they feel acknowledged and understood. (Isn’t it nice when Amazon greets you by name and shows you things you might be interested in?)
When a brand demonstrates sincere consideration of customer preferences, behaviors, opinions, concerns, and feedback, there is natural brand affinity and loyal customer retention. This is the big pay-off of Personalized CX (customer experience) as a now-pivotal customer engagement strategy. Using data, artificial intelligence (AI), and a deep understanding of the customer throughout their buying journey and life cycle, businesses can optimize the buying process to provide an individualized, and even enjoyable, experience at every touchpoint.
Employing Self-Service Portals
Self-Service Portals are significant to meet customers in their increasing “do-it-yourself” desire. No matter the industry, companies are turning to self-service portals to provide customers with access to issue resolution, service requests, informational chats, and customer support. The many benefits of self-service portals include reducing customer service costs, improving site traffic, increasing social engagement, sharing real-time information, and boosting personalization for customers.
Updating Legacy Systems
Digital transformation is the name of the game right now because no company can remain competitive by holding onto legacy systems and outdated processes. Legacy systems create technical debt, become difficult to integrate and maintain, cost more in staff time to service, trigger “shadow” tech purchases, and can hinder business growth. Lost opportunities, inadequate security, and islands of automation are just a few obstacles that signal it’s time to invest in your IT infrastructure.
Developing a Strong Data Strategy
Data is the backbone of any enterprise in today’s digital economy. The advantages of having a robust data strategy trickle down through every part of your business; visionary companies recognize that. Particularly when accompanied by data management and data governance as well, a strong data strategy can improve operational efficiency, business intelligence, customer experience, marketing automation, and give your business the tools to fast track success.
Leveraging the Cloud
Migrating to the cloud might top the list of the most popular business improvement projects in digital transformation. Moving your business to the cloud brings a wave of benefits, including scalability, increased storage, data mobility, cost-efficiency, security, rapid new feature deployment, the list goes on. Whether it is an “all-in” move to the cloud or a hybrid solution, most businesses see the benefits of cloud migration.
Implementing Channel Integration
Channel integration gives companies a surprising competitive edge today. Customers interact with several channels throughout the buying process, which creates numerous collections of data and potential confusion. For example, a customer might check the website and download a PDF, then call in to ask questions about what they read; without channel integration, the company may not know that’s the same person. With channel integration, companies can combine that data, use advanced analytics, create targeted campaigns based on actionable insights, and create unified profiles of their customers to improve the overall brand experience.
Investing in Emotional Engagement for Loyalty
Digital transformation is less about new technology as it is about new strategies for customer satisfaction, particularly buyer enablement and emotional engagement. Research shows that an emotional connection with a customer can produce 32% more visits and increase spending by 46%. Striving for emotional engagement isn’t just an improvement project for 2020; it’s a loyalty strategy for years to come.
Maintaining Retention for Customers & Employees
Companies with better customer and employee retention produce better profits and better satisfaction than companies that experience excessive “churn.” By improving efforts toward employee retention, businesses experience reduced turnover, enhanced efficiency, better morale, increased productivity, and more. Most importantly, there is a proportional relationship between happier employees and more satisfied customers; engaged employees create customer relationships, resulting in a 20% increase in sales. Ultimately, improving retention on both sides of your business is guaranteed ROI (return on investment).
Improvement Project Goals
All these projects have one thing in common: they aim to improve customer satisfaction with the brand. It’s not just about fulfilling their needs with a service or product; customers today expect to have an experience, they need engagement, invisible technology, and personal satisfaction throughout the entire buying process. When your improvement projects keep that goal at the forefront, then you make the right investments of time, energy, and resources.
Such improvement projects and investments are intricate with many moving parts — not just anybody can handle mission-critical data in an upgrade process. It’s best to use seasoned experts to provide exceptional installation and knowledge to carry the project from start to finish. In every scenario, XTIVIA has done just that for hundreds of clients and continues to do so. No matter the project or what we find under the proverbial “hood,” once we’re in it, our in-house experts see it from start to finish. Wherever our customers are in their transformation journey, we ensure they hit their business and performance targets in the most efficient, effective way possible. In other words, XTIVIA doesn’t just sell you a service — we become your long-term partner for digital transformation.
For more information on valuable improvement projects or the latest in technology, check out our live sessions, or visit our blog here.