Creating the future, one customer at a time
- Summary:
- Next-generation businesses are being built around agility and customer centricity. NetSuite CMO Fred Studer outlines the defining characteristics
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
− Abraham Lincoln
Speculation abounds over what the next-generation business will look like. Agile, disruptive and customer-centric, some will say. Others may call out innovative, data-driven and future-proof. In fact, these characteristics are already present in some of today’s leading companies as next-generation business begins to unfold.
Yet history has shown it’s not easy to predict the future. Two decades ago, few if any envisioned smartphones and social media and how they would reshape the way we communicate, make decisions, and buy goods and services. Farther back, in 1977, the founder of Digital Equipment Corp., Ken Olsen, famously missed the mark when he said, “There’s no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home.”
It’s actually easier to create the future within our own businesses than it is to predict it. Today’s highly digital global business environment has introduced new challenges. So has the proliferation of customer channels and choices. But at the same time, those dynamics have opened new worlds of opportunity for leaders to create the future, one customer at a time.
Creating the next-gen business
We’ve entered an era of surround-sound disruption. In virtually every industry, innovators are up-ending conventional business models and carving out new markets and generating new demand for products and services. Companies like Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, Lyft and Netflix are the poster children of our disruptive age. Yet those well-recognized names are hardly alone.
In retail, manufacturing, high tech and software, distribution, services and other verticals there are many hundreds of other companies moving aggressively to meet the emerging challenge: “Disrupt or be disrupted.” Not every next-generation company will be based on a brilliant idea, like making it possible for people to socialize on the web. More often, next-generation companies will be those that can gain competitive advantage by embedding agility and customer centricity into every fabric of their business.
So what does the next-generation business look like, and what does it take to create it? My crystal ball shows it playing out in two main areas — a blending of front-office marketing, sales and service functions, and seamless synchronization between customer-facing systems and back-office financials, inventory, and order management.In any industry, in both B2C and B2B, I see those areas as crucial to building a next-generation business that excels at customer centricity in a frictionless ecosystem geared for agility and growth.
Customer-centric marketing
Customers have shifted to an entirely new buying cycle. By the time they interact with your brand, most have read product reviews and sought feedback from others on social media. Smartphones and tablets have made information available anytime, anywhere along the customer’s path to purchase. That means a diminished opportunity for marketers to engage with customers in traditional ways.
Marketers need to zero in on those engagement opportunities and make every interaction valuable and memorable, whether it’s over an ecommerce site, in a store, via mobile devices or social media, or through a call center. Marketing needs to function more as a concierge service, and it needs to be perceived as authentic. It needs to reflect integrity and true value in helping guide the customer to the right decision.
The key to elevating marketing performance and overall brand perception is to blend marketing, sales, and service into a cohesive whole. Traditionally, many organizations have run those functions separately, with standalone applications. That’s a recipe for trouble. A shopper may love your products, but a bad service experience can hurt loyalty and trigger unflattering reviews on social media.
Many next-generation companies rely on a unified platform that makes possible a real-time, 360-degree view of customer interactions, regardless of channel. Marketing, sales and service can share the same information to nurture customers across the full lifecycle. Business transformation depends on the ability to synchronize processes and deepen collaboration across all customer-facing business units to meet rising expectations for a seamless omnichannel experience.
Frictionless ecosystem
The second part of the next-generation equation is to apply the same principles of coordination and cohesion across the full array of front- and back-office processes. Leading companies recognize that optimizing back-office demand planning, inventory management, order processing, and financial reporting offers distinct advantages in building a true customer-centric business. Consider an example.
Retailers want to satisfy customer expectations to be able to buy, receive, and return anywhere. Doing so effectively requires real-time information on inventory, orders and customers at every point, from a warehouse to a brick-and-mortar store. Those capabilities are conspicuously lacking in traditional retail environments of siloed systems. As a result, flawless execution remains a pipe dream for many retailers.
Organizations have a competitive edge with an integrated suite that unifies the front and back office and delivers on-demand visibility into any order, any customer and any interaction. They’re equipped to optimize supply chains for greater cost-efficiency, speed and flexibility around the goal of delivering attractively priced goods and services when, where and how the customer wishes.
A customer-centric supply chain can be called an omnichain, with new transparency, scalability and control across a distributed environment of internal and partner facilities and processes. Linked together tightly in the cloud, these innovators are positioned to maximize customer satisfaction and outpace the competition while channeling time and cost savings into further innovations and customer service. This aids new and expanding business models such as manufacturers opening a direct-to-consumer webstore and distributors winning new business with B2B commerce.
I believe that managing the business through cloud-based applications will be a defining characteristic of the next-generation business. Tomorrow’s leaders won’t be shackled by archaic and inflexible legacy applications, in-house servers and small armies of IT professionals. In the cloud, they have the tools and agility to recreate their businesses — not only to adapt to change, but to drive it.
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