High-tech business is hot right now. In an industry flooded with news of new tech gadgets, start-ups and the next wave of cloud innovation, one thing is for sure – change is constant.
As the competitive landscape continues to shift, high-tech companies must continue to be one step ahead of the competition and their customers thinking about what comes next. Here are five ideas to help high-tech firms get a leg up on the competition using Salesforce to supercharge their business:
Digital Transformation
Technology continues to accelerate business change transforming the way the high-tech industry does business. What does digital transformation mean for a high-tech business? This involves adapting a current process or business model through technology enabled change (cloud, mobile and analytics) to prepare for the future. Where does Salesforce fit into digital transformation programs? Every product in Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform can be classified as tools to enable digital transformation.
Customers, partners and employees of high-tech suppliers have come to expect highly personalized, integrated digital experiences. This means using fully integrated systems of engagement, like Sales, Service or Marketing Cloud, to manage relationships and engage throughout the customer lifecycle.
Salesforce is not just a CRM tool. It is a platform that also allows a high-tech business to automate, connect and scale a business using technology. Companies can quickly build and deploy business applications with point-and-click ease, and use AppExchange, to capitalize on new opportunities or meet demands for CPQ, sales forecasting, renewal management or workflow automation.
Embrace Omni-channel Service
Omni-channel is no longer just a term we’re hearing in the retail industry. The lines between marketing and support have blurred and the demand for a better customer experience has extended over into the world of customer service. With the upcoming Summer ’15 release of Service Cloud Salesforce users can add social customer service to their toolbox and work on integrating mobile, live chat, email and web self-service to deliver a more seamless, “omni-channel” approach to customer service.
Power Partner Automation
Channel partners have significant influence over business growth for high-tech companies. They offer an “in-road” to quickly penetrate new markets and expand existing client relationships. Just like a customer needs to feel important and be engaged so too do channel partners. So what’s the next big way for high-tech companies to keep partners engaged and promote collaborative selling? Partner communities. Community Cloud is probably the hottest areas of investment now for our high-tech clients. The ability to bring together a multitude of partner processes – onboarding, deal registration, MDF, social collaboration, file sharing, groups, targeted recommendations (and so much more) makes having a partner community a no brainer!
Crowdsource Innovation
To gain competitive advantage, high-tech firms are gathering new ideas and using product feedback to quickly fuel customer-driven improvements and crowdsourced innovation. Speed time to market by prioritizing ideas and getting deeper insights into what customers are asking for using social collaboration tools like Chatter that are a part of Salesforce’s Community Cloud platform.
Agility in the Cloud
Imagine if you had the ability to empower your business users to explore and visualize data to uncover new insights. Now you can with Analytics Cloud. Salesforce’s new responsive analytic platform not only gives everyone the ability to create beautiful, mobile-friendly reports and dashboards, but gives developers the power to build an analytics app for any need that can be customized, connected, and deployed quickly in the cloud. In an industry where change is constant, cloud-based business intelligence tools that can help high-tech companies act quickly will become their new best friend.
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As a Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner, Perficient has extensive experience leading digital transformations for high-tech companies to support next-generation customer experiences, engagement models and enterprise collaboration using the power of Salesforce.
