RESOURCE CENTER

Audit Technology and Process — Where are your Gaps?

Determine where technology holds teams back from delivering on customer centricity, and how to move forward.

Time to Read: 5 minutes

By this point in your transformation, you have started the process of working collaboratively with a cross-functional team of stakeholders to decide what customer and employee experiences need to change, and how.

As you build your innovation roadmap and prioritize the customer and employee experiences to optimize, you will need to audit current business capabilities and the tools each department is currently using. This will help inform where you may be able to consolidate solutions or offer alternatives to future-proof the company from point solutions that don’t connect.

Map out use cases.

A critical part of this effort is identifying where current business capabilities are falling short in delivering the desired experience for your customers. By auditing process, information, and capability gaps, you can align on what technologies you may need to sunset, consolidate, integrate, or adopt to make it possible.

As the saying goes, start with the end in mind. We recommend mapping desired customer and employee scenarios, or use cases, and outlining the people, process, and technology required to make those experiences possible. Your current tech stack may serve some pieces of the journey, but prohibit others. Understanding these gaps will then help you identify potential solutions to incorporate into your strategic roadmap.

As part of this process, you will also want to identify business-critical legacy systems that need to be accounted for. They may not be going anywhere soon, so you need to think about integrations to connect critical legacy tools with modern CRM to create a single, shared customer view.

(More on that in the next chapter.)

Think shared, not siloed.

As you map out use cases and review capabilities, it’s easy to evaluate new solutions in silos. Traditionally, departments have pursued initiatives in an ad hoc way in silos — such as modernizing sales, customer service, or existing applications, often with a variety of different solution providers. While this is the norm and can’t always be avoided, it can create greater difficulties down the line. Choosing different solutions or platforms for each team means you’ll spend a lot more time integrating and maintaining data in the pursuit of more connected customer experiences.

Tip: Put a process in place to ensure IT is involved in all technology decisions before new solutions are purchased so they can assess ease of integration with other tools. IT should have a bird’s-eye view of technology across the organization and should support systems governance.

As discussed earlier in this guide, it’s not uncommon for CRM decisions to be made tactically, department by department. That approach no longer needs to be the case as the right CRM system can be a powerful solution that actually helps to bridge silos — enabling all your teams to build and manage customer relationships across every phase of their journey with your brand. Think about the potential benefits of having your sales, marketing, commerce, and service teams using the same system and accessing the information they need from the same dataset.

See the value of a connected CRM in action here:

A shared view of the customer will empower all your employees to respond faster to customers’ needs and engagement opportunities. It will enable you to implement a holistic, customer-centric roadmap and provide truly connected experiences for customers.

Read on to see how one of our valued customers, Spalding, has used the power of a connected CRM to build their technology roadmap.

Customer Story

Spalding

“A really great customer experience is about 90% operations and 10% front-end experience. If you can use all the data available to you to improve operations, then the front-end experience becomes significantly more impactful.”

Matt Day
Head of Brand Communications, Digital, and Ecommerce, Spalding

Spalding, a sporting goods company and the world’s largest basketball supplier, knows a thing or two about designing a customer-centered technology roadmap — with incredible impact. In fact, its commitment to digital innovation helped the company quickly pivot after COVID-19 stay-at-home orders went into effect, connecting customers at home with basketball equipment to “Bring the Arena to the Driveway.”

Before kicking off its digital transformation with Salesforce back in 2017, Spalding had a singular goal: to make it as easy as possible for customers to discover products, convert, and engage with the brand. Spalding designed an innovation roadmap to deliver on key customer pain points and the business use cases it wanted to solve.

Customer Priority #1: Optimize the customer experience across digital commerce, marketing, and customer service.

Commerce

Provide consumers and business buyers alike with a fast, smart, mobile-first digital commerce experience. Deliver relevancy to its customers and increase conversion through AI-driven product recommendations, predictive sort, and search dictionaries.

Marketing

Engage customers with at-home campaigns and exclusive discounts through email and the MVP loyalty program.

Service

Make customer service a cornerstone of a seamless customer experience. Using data coming from Commerce Cloud, service agents can pre-populate carts during real-time conversations from Service Cloud. This comes in handy when a customer’s basketball hoop is broken and they need to order a custom kit of replacement parts.

Customer Priority #2: Build advocacy and drive conversion from loyal customers.

Commerce

The Spalding MVP loyalty program engages customers with first access to new, limited-edition basketball drops.

Sales

Spalding’s B2B sales team has a single place to manage all customer interactions with arenas, sports teams, and other customer organizations – to continue to grow these relationships.

“We’re not aiming to have a best-in-class experience in sporting goods. We’re aiming for a best-in-class digital experience, period.”

Matt Day
Head of Brand Communications, Digital, and Ecommerce, Spalding

Now that you’ve seen Spalding’s story, try out our solution finder to build a solution that’s just right for your top challenges.

Customize Your Solution

When building a customer-centered tech stack, picking the right solutions that help to bridge silos, is important, but you can’t achieve a single, shared view of the customer without a focus on data and integration. It’s a critical piece of your innovation roadmap that we’ll cover next.

Chapters

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