It appears that we are now on the backend of the economic reset (recession), but for many of our clients it has been a struggle and an increasing number of them have turned to IT to make their business outride the recession and has seen them grow and be in a stronger position than when they entered into it.
IT and Business objectives are commonly misaligned with IT typically being seen as a cost centre. So a key question is can I make my IT department more strategic in winning me more business and the answer is – absolutely.
Technology can help in numerous ways mainly around automation, providing access to information, analysis of information, specialist systems and improved collaboration.
There are a number of logical groupings that can be arrived at when looking at technology to win business.
Customer
Satisfied customers can and do defect. They are often seeking more than a service and want solutions that are innovative, add value and remove their pain points.
In order to achieve this I believe we need to understand not just the process that we use to deliver service but also the customer’s process and to involve them in this analysis. This will help us to seek out where value may be added.
Some key areas in this are:
- Providing the customer with improved process
- Giving more transparency with direct access to information
- Improving the customers experience and ensuring relevance
- Demonstrating security and data leak prevention to install confidence.
Analysis
Knowledge is power and analysis of your data may highlight some interesting results. Your company will have a mass of data, sometimes buried in different systems, but if this can be harnessed and analysed, often known as Business Intelligence, then it will assist in the decision making process and hopefully guide you on where to concentrate your new business activities.
Business Intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean expensive data mining exercises with expensive backend systems doing the number crunching. Most of us have a very effective BI tool on our desktop – Excel.
Marketing
Supporting the marketing message are numerous systems with Web sites and the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) as the prime marketing database. The march of social networking technologies continues and not just in the personal communication market. This is a brand new set of technologies that can be exploited in your marketing campaigns and the power is integrating these new technologies with the existing core CRM products which could open up new prospects, markets as well as providing better data on what your customers are doing.
Key areas to look into are:
- Using social networking for lead generation and qualification
- CRM systems to maintain relationships and information about prospects
- CRM integrated with social networking site contacts
- Web analytics
- Web sites that sell your services and allow easy contact
Internal Business
The remaining area is about using technology to improve internal processes which would not only enhance the client experience and support the business goals but also free people from unnecessary tasks so they could be more productive in marketing and selling.
Key areas to look at here are:
- Innovative businesses models/Streamline/ automate to reduce costs and make product/service more competitive
- Use of technology to free up people time
- Support business goals and expansion plans.