Chapter 5: How You Embrace Technology

For most businesses, this flip starts with a simplification program that reduces the number of apps, and moves as much as possible into the public cloud. You build capabilities once well, with the intention of infinite reuse. 

Teams can then leverage shared data, processes, apps, and APIs to create capabilities quickly. Development is agile, leveraging “devops” teams who deeply understand the business. Low-code and no-code tools empower business analysts to build the capabilities they need.

The next step is to define a governance model that underpins the digital operating model. In many companies, the core challenge with simplifying their technology is that different departments have wildly different levels of understanding and comfort with technology solutions. This results in teams working in silos, without a “single source of truth” for customer data, and running multiple initiatives across the business that don’t reuse apps or or other development components.

Our most successful customers structure a governance model that includes a Digital Transformation Office to oversee program management and ensure alignment across multiple tech initiatives. This team focuses on three strategic objectives: 

• Empower teams to create more seamless and frictionless customer experiences
• Maintain the company’s overall technology architecture and create visualizations to assess the value of initiatives in the strategic investment plan
• Provide technology expertise to help business leaders understand how to maximize shared processes, APIs, and data, and reuse them across the company

In a recent Salesforce-commissioned study of nearly 500 business leaders, Forrester Consulting found 80% agreed that a single source of customer truth would create “significant” or “indispensable” value for their company.

For many companies, not having a single view of customer data across touchpoints makes it impossible to deliver personalized experiences. 

Imagine a customer calls support to ask about a back-ordered item. The call center agent can’t see the actions that customer has already taken online,  only a static customer record. So the agent misses a chance to give the customer confidence in one of the alternate items sitting in their cart. And these missed opportunities just continue to pile up if call notes require logging in to another app. No one gets a full picture of what the customer is trying to achieve and can’t take action that could deepen the relationship.

Here, your CRM platform plays a critical role. That’s because it:

• Consolidates the number of tools needed for your workforce to do their work
• Empowers employees closest to customers to deliver the right experiences at the right time
• Delivers insights and recommendations, not just data
• Makes customer data easily shareable
• Keeps you flexible and connected in an age of APIs, IoT, and the platform economy

Be deliberate about building an ever-deeper customer profile. Map the journeys you want customers, employees, and partners to take. Then figure out how to find the data that can help you achieve specific outcomes along those journeys. Connect the islands of data living in different departments through reusable APIs. Purposefully design the experiences employees have inputting data so they are easy and friction-free. This increases people’s comfort level and  adoption of new solutions. Last, determine data access by considering  similar roles across the company, rather than department by department.