With the recession starting to disappear behind us we have seen a radical shift in customer interaction and revenue interactions and we now see the classic post recession acceleration of some niche solution providers who can really make a difference in your overall goto market strategy and allow your revenue and profitability levels to grow dramatically. Many of these providers plug easily into your major marketing, sales and service platform commitments of SFDC, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Genesys, Cisco, Avaya, Verint or Nice.
Never let it be said we were late so here are our top 5 for 2012. Just a few areas you should take a hard look at as you enter 2012 and where we are spending much of our time. In each of these areas there are some fascinating emerging global solution providers we will be making some more noise about as we enter 2012.
Customer Experience Quality Assurance – How are you testing the performance of your multi-channel customer experience? When your customers arrive “at your door” you have only one chance to serve them. With online retailing in the USA forecast by Comscore to grow 15% 2011 over 2010 (to over $250b in online retail sales and an but an amazing amount of that reliant on a customer visit to a brick and mortar operation and a massive growth in customer Chat interactions prior to purchase you need tools and people to verify every piece of your customer experience from stress testing telephony and chat etc to ensuring alignment of your messaging across your channels.
Multichannel Customer Interaction Including Social – Social and Chat are growing dramatically and the solution providers are moving equally quickly to provide innovative solutions to bring personal and intimate solutions to further drive the world of one-to-one personalized marketing and socially driven buying support and long term customer relationship. Have you thought about how you are going to let your customer interact in a private community and how that will affect your own control of your customers for example.
It’s All About Mobile – with $6.7b in mobile ecommerce sales in 2011 of over $250b in online sales according to Forrester and eMarketer forecasting growth in M-commerce sales in the 90%+ range in 2012 and 75%+ in 2013 the need for mobile commerce capabilities in your customer strategy are obvious but have you really thought about how you mobilize everything in marketing automation, sales force support, sales activity to customer and service management and customer service. Oh and make it social and mobile while you are there with a sprinkling of video chat. One of our clients is wrestling with how to have a mobile customer chat with a mobile executive through their enterprise platform with video on capability.
Personal Is Multi-lingual – As business becomes more and more personal and global at the same time and in the USA many businesses are “HQ’d here but profitable over there” to succinctly summarize the stream of Wall Street Journal articles in the past 2 years. To do both local and global you need multilingual and multicultural. Social media and interaction media are perfectly positioned to enable both and there is going to be a wave of demand as the harder to acquire customer currency puts ever more power in customers hands to demand they are treated in the way they want to be treated.
Platform Virtualization Especially In M&A – One of the key symptoms of economic recovery is M&A and we see the rate of Mergers and Acquisitions picking up tremendously. And companies need quick hits in standardization in marketing, sales and service platforms. If you run SAP and you buy a company that runs Salesforce.com and another one that runs MS Dynamics and a fourth who runs Saleslogix and a sprinkling of Avaya, Cisco and Genesys in the contact centers and 50 different enterprise application you cannot spend the time to wait for platform standardization, you need to move fast to create common Salesforce.com tools and common service tools. There are companies with amazing platforms to provide that and those who grasp that opportunity quickly will be able to gain positive returns on their acquisition investments, those who don’t won’t.
Visibility, Dashboards and Analytics – There is so much data out there that unless you package it up in a way to make it instantly manageable and actionable it is pointless. The number of solution to provide high powered analytics and dashboards in the full historic experience across all channels in marketing, sales and service is growing by leaps and bounds and heavily promoted by the new wave of data owners in financial transaction processing (everything I buy), mobile telecom (everywhere I go) and social networking (everyone I communicate with).
Did We Mention Cloud / SaaS / Managed – no we didn’t .. we don’t have to .. so we won’t .. it is #7 of the top 7 though.
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