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In today’s intensely competitive, rapidly changing business environment, the need to be market-focused and customer-centric is more critical than at any other time in the past. With increased globalization and competition offering customers ever-expanding alternatives, achieving complete customer satisfaction is the only way to ensure customer retention and corporate success. Furthermore, many organizations are recognizing that there is a direct link between high performance—another critical business goal—and customer satisfaction.
As a result, optimal performance must be a core objective of every organization’s business strategy. To improve performance, companies must continually seek out new ways to empower their employees to work more efficiently and effectively. In this networked information age, the most essential component to performance is an environment that encourages workers to effectively use, proliferate, and share information to achieve better outcomes, including enhanced productivity and greater customer satisfaction. It is imperative for every organization to gather, retain, and use valuable information about their customers to enhance their business strategies, thereby offering customers faster responses, better product and service offerings, and more satisfying experiences.
Customer relationship management—or CRM, as itis popularly known—is an approach to achieving business objectives that facilitates rapid responses to customer needs, leading to healthy and profitable customer relationships. CRM solutions manage knowledge and information; they also enable the execution of activities within and across value chains while supporting all decision-making underlying those activities.
Pioneering organizations such as Centex Homes, Bombardier, and Tektronix have already made the transition to this new business-intelligence concept. For them, customer satisfaction and business performance are not isolated corporate concerns; they are integrated strategic focuses that together contribute to overall profitability.
This paper outlines the technology building blocks that will enable you to create an information-rich environment that empowers your workforce to perform at its peak and use data to its fullest—without having to become IT experts—to ultimately deliver the high performance and customer satisfaction required to compete in today’s market.
The Next IT Challenge:A Truly Real-Time Enterprise
The modern organization’s ability to produce, collect, and share information has grown faster than its ability to manage it. Global sourcing, a more connected workplace, and the need for enterprises to adopt a real-time infrastructure—these trends are driving the world toward a future in which “always-on” devices provide a tidal wave of data, forcing companies to contend with an almost incomprehensible amount of information and ensuing data-management issues while attempting to remain one step ahead of the competition. Companies know that with more knowledge should come greater advantage, but without the power to make sense of it all and apply it swiftly, they are missing the very opportunity that increased data presents.
The ascendance of the underlying technology of the “connected workplace,” in which people use always-on technologies such as PDAs, smart phones, and MP3 players, is being compounded by the trend toward globalization and the need for greater corporate transparency and accountability. This combination of factors will increasingly force enterprises to regularly transform their business operations to respond more effectively to time-based competition.
Sustaining high productivity in the face of these new complexities is a critical challenge as the culture and dynamics of work evolve. Workers are nearing “information overload,” and this has no small impact on business performance. IDC reports that workers in North America have faced a tenfold increase in the volume of business-related e-mail since 1997. Studies suggest that workers spend up to a quarter of their time on non-productive information-related activities, and analysts report that workers spend up to 30% of their days just looking for the information they need.1
Businesses need to change to accommodate this flood of data surging into and out of their walls. The key to this transformation, alongside changes in business processes, is a more agile or “real-time” infrastructure: an infrastructure that increases efficiency, reduces costs, and provides better insight into the immediate future of our businesses. It needs to be capable of capturing, storing, and analyzing millions of transactions and pieces of information, so that we can understand and use data—anytime, anywhere.
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