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Tag Archives: Boost

Can You Boost CRM Technology Acceptance and User Adoption?

December 24, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

User adoption of new technology has been an issue for as long as technology exists. Software is no exception. Organizations deploy new software hoping it will have a big (positive) impact, and sometimes it seems that very impact gets in the way of user adoption. This is very much the case for new CRM systems. A lot changes when they are deployed, and user adoption is often a struggle.

Tips and Best Practices For CRM User Adoption

Following the launch of CRM Software Blog’s white paper 19 Brilliant Ways to Promote ERP  & CRM User Adoption, we talked with Connecting Software’s experts and asked for their take on the subject.

User Adoption Web Banners CRM Cloud Blog Blog Post 276x398 2 Can You Boost CRM Technology Acceptance and User Adoption?

Here the tips we got for you. focusing on user adoption tactics and best practices that we have found helpful.

Don’t make the new CRM take care of everything

There are many things that a CRM can handle, but for which they are not the best option. For example, a company starting with Dynamics 365 can store the documents relating to their prospects and customers there. Nonetheless, a DMS like SharePoint is the best option because you can have team collaboration and version control. It is simply a matter of getting the Dynamics 365 integration with SharePoint provided by Microsoft working and then making sure to Protect Dynamics 365 Documents in SharePoint From Misuse.

dynamics365 crmSoftwareBlog 300x175 Can You Boost CRM Technology Acceptance and User Adoption?

Consider doing end-users training asynchronously

Asynchronous training has taken a boost with the remote work environment. This offers end users complete control over their learning, is more flexible to accommodate other tasks, and is more respectful to their own learning pace.

Increase communication before and during the process

Often user awareness and motivation are not achieved because of deadlines. Other times, the adoption of the new software feels like a trial-and-error process from the end-user perspective. The use keeps trying to find their own workarounds and solutions, which are often not aligned with what management had in mind.

Make the users workflows change as little as possible

Identify all the pre-existing workflows. This means identifying all stakeholders and all usage scenarios that existed before, not forgetting all involved software. Although you are going to change the core of it with the adoption of the new CRM, make sure you are not breaking the workflows themselves.

When integration between systems existed before, make sure to keep it

Missing features and missing integrations are the worst obstacles to user adoption. Don’t expect users to replace an existing software integration with manual data transfer, or you will get a lot of upset and reluctant users. Find a way to get that integration working in the new system. For example, a company going for Dynamics 365 online can go for tools like D365 Online Database Sync and easily keep their existing integrations with Dynamics.

Even if the new CRM has a lot more to offer, the end-user will be reluctant to adopt it if It finds a missing pre-existing software integration. A missing integration often means a break in an existing data flow. We had such a case with a supermarket chain that could not have the data in their SQL Server move into the CRM when they moved to a cloud CRM. Fortunately, they found the perfect workaround, as described in the case study.

Takeaways

Take your time to plan your CRM deployment with technology acceptance and user adoption in mind. It is worthwhile to identify all existing workflows and all end-users and stakeholders. You need the big picture not only for everything your CRM will cover, but also for anything that relates to that or that should integrate with your CRM. Trust me, this extra effort will pay up!

At Connecting Software we specialize in integrating the new CRM with whatever you determine is essential and we can do it keeping security and regulation compliance. Send our experts a quick note and they will gladly book a remote call with you to explore your needs.

xana framed.png.pagespeed.ic.cVqanoYude Can You Boost CRM Technology Acceptance and User Adoption?

By Ana Neto

Software engineer since 1997, she is now a technical advisor for Connecting Software.

Connecting Software is a producer of integration and synchronization software solutions since 2004. We operate globally and we are also a proud “Top Member 2019” at CRMSoftwareBlog.

xBadge 2019 Top Member.png.pagespeed.ic.Dzuu3HfzqQ Can You Boost CRM Technology Acceptance and User Adoption?

 

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How CRM with Outlook Can Boost Efficiency

October 16, 2020   CRM News and Info
crmnav How CRM with Outlook Can Boost Efficiency

Modern business technologies today are designed and fitted with the capabilities for multiple systems to work together. Technology advances have made it possible for business applications to work together with other business applications which result in dramatic increase in efficiencies. One of the most widely used and popular business technologies is Microsoft Outlook for email communication.  With the increase demand for business tools to accurately track leads and manage customers through CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, the integration between CRM with Outlook is natural fit.

Power-CRM ,which is built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and PowerApps Platform, is a Cloud CRM solution that seamless integrates these systems extremely well. The Microsoft Outlook Integration in Power-CRM allows you to access both systems in one application; you can work in Power-CRM right from your Outlook system and is compatible with all version of Outlook-Desktop, Mobile and the Web.

Power-CRM with Microsoft Outlook allows companies to:

  • Capture emails on both Account and Contacts Records.
  • See Activities, Opportunities and Cases.
  • Add Records to Power-CRM.
  • Even Scan Business Cards on any Device with a Camera.

The Microsoft Outlook Integration to Power-CRM is just one of the reasons companies are attracted to this Modern, State-Of-The Art Cloud CRM System.  Additional and Uniquely positioned attributes in the CRM Market include:

Affordability:

Power-CRM is designed for the under-served small-mid size business (SMB) where every dollar matters. Pricing starts at $ 25 per user/month + services.

Easy to Use:

Ease of use is critical to obtain user adoption. Our user interface is so easy to use that most users can begin using Power-CRM with no formal training.  Let’s face it; if your sales team does not find a CRM easy to use they will not utilizing the CRM’s capabilities.

Pre-Configured:

Most other CRM software requires significant configuration and customization to be useful. Power-CRM comes pre-configured with best-practice functionality designed by veterans of the CRM industry.

“Industry Proven” Business Sales Processes:

One of the top reasons for failure in CRM projects is the lack of true business process guidance. Power-CRM includes best practice, pre-configured sales and support process designed using input from top experts. Built-In Leads follow up scheduling in part of an effective sales process strategy for success.

Mobility:

With the Microsoft  Outlook integration is Power-CRM, you can be successful managing your accounts on your mobile device: mobile client for Apple iOS, Android and Microsoft based smartphone/tablets. Our mobile is not some scaled down version of the CRM system, it offers full functionality.

Go offline with our mobile client. When you are without an Internet connection, you can continue to work in Power-CRM from our mobile client. Once you have a connection, the synchronization runs seamlessly in the background.

Sales Intelligence Built-in:

InsideView Insights is built-in to our Sales & Customer Service license (a $ 95 value) Insights puts the most accurate B2B data and intelligence right inside Account and Contact records enabling your users to find more of the right prospects, backfill Account and Contact records with missing data and connect with the right contacts. Insights will also increase user adoption across your team and make users more productive and efficient.

Learn more about Power-CRM

Watch the Video on Outlook and CRM Integration

Posted by iCepts Technology Group, Inc. a Power-CRM Partner in Pennsylvania

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Facebook gamifies data collection to boost conversational AI

August 19, 2020   Big Data

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Facebook once piloted a text-based fantasy role-playing game to improve the conversational models powering things like its chatbots and smart speakers. In a preprint paper, researchers at the company describe a game that iterates between collecting data and retraining models on the collected data, with a metric that evaluates and compares models using players’ continuation rates (i.e., how long they keep playing). The coauthors claim that in experiments, they obtained data at a rate one-fifth the price per utterance of crowdsourcing and that their game provided evidence that lifelong dialogue learning is viable.

People learn to use language over the course of their lives from interactions they have with other people and the wider world, yet natural language processing (NLP) research often involves fixed data sets and frozen models. In this paradigm, models are prevented from interacting with humans at training time, a constraint that precludes performance improvements. An alternative is continually retraining the models, but this can be costly; many corpora are collected via crowdsourcing, where researchers pay crowdworkers through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk to perform tasks. Because the crowdworkers are motivated by pay rather than interest, budget overruns and poor-quality data can result.

The Facebook researchers’ game aims to iteratively learn from conversations with “intrinsically motivated” players. The core piece involves two “agents” — one human player and one AI — in one of 587 locations with descriptions, where each agent is assigned a character out of a pool of 630 with names and backstories. Agents have to role-play their character’s dialogue in the scenario while an automated dungeon master assesses the quality of the player’s role-playing capabilities, rating the likelihood of dialogue in a given context between 1 and 5 stars. These sub-scores are added up and the total score is posted to a leaderboard to compare with all other players, and players earn badges representing characters in the game if they collect a certain number of points for a dialogue.

Dialogues in the game are vetted for offensive and gendered language and consist of six turns per agent, or 12 in total. At the end of each, players are presented with three choices:

  • Choose to move to a new location, where they will continue to play this character but meet a new character to converse with.
  • Stay in the same room but wait for a new character to arrive to converse with.
  • Change to role-play a completely new pair of characters in a new setting.

The Facebook researchers ran advertisements to recruit 13,188 users who played 41,131 rounds of the game altogether, and they evaluated the quality of those players’ exchanges by training models on each individual utterance. The results suggest it was over 8 times cheaper to attain model accuracy of 80.63% with the game compared with crowdsourcing, in part because of the high level of engagement — users chose to continue playing 68% to 75% of the time.

 Facebook gamifies data collection to boost conversational AI

Players generally sought “exciting” conversations involving emotional, action-packed interactions like seeking quests, whereas crowdworkers tended to be more even-keeled and willing to discuss dry topics at length, according to the researchers. Players used more words with aggression during dialogues, like “stab” and “kills,” but also overtly friendly actions (“smiles,” “hug”) and slang (“ur,” “yo,” “dude”) as well as emojis. It’s these more “natural” exchanges that lead to models more accurately reflecting human interaction, the researchers assert, because even the lowest-quality data provides a useful signal.

“We find this exciting because this approach shows it is possible to build continually improving models that learn from interacting with humans in the wild (as opposed to experiments with paid crowdworkers),” the coauthors wrote. “This represents a paradigm shift away from the limited static dataset setup that is prevalent in much of the work of the community.”

The researchers plan to make the training code, models, and data sets publicly available in the future.

Notably, the work builds on LIGHT, a research environment in the form of a text-based game within which AI and humans interact as player characters. In November, data scientists at Facebook, the University of Lorraine, and the University College London investigated an approach to creating game worlds similar to those described in this latest preprint paper. Using content from LIGHT, they designed models that could compositionally arrange locations and characters and generate new content on the fly, showing how machine learning algorithms can learn to creatively assemble different elements.

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IBM adds noise to boost AI’s accuracy on analog memory

May 18, 2020   Big Data

In a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications, researchers at IBM’s lab in Zurich, Switzerland claim to have developed a technique that achieves both energy efficiency and high accuracy on machine learning workloads using phase-change memory. By exploiting in-memory computing methods using resistance-based storage devices, their approach marries the compartments used to store and compute data, in the process significantly cutting down on active power consumption.

Many existing AI inferencing setups physically split the memory and processing units, causing AI models to be stored in off-chip memory. This adds computational overhead because data must be shuffled between the units, a process that slows down processing and contributes to electrical usage. IBM’s technique ostensibly solves those problems with phase-change memory, a form of non-volatile memory that’s faster than the commonly used flash memory technology. The work, if proven scalable, could pave the way for powerful hardware that runs AI in drones, robots, mobile devices, and other compute-constrained devices.

As the IBM team explains, the challenge with phase-change memory devices is that it tends to introduce computational inaccuracy. That’s because it’s analog in nature; its precision is limited due to variability as well as read and write conductance noise.

The solution the study proposed entails injecting additional noise during the training of AI models in software to improve the models’ resilience. The results suggest it’s successful — training a ResNet model with noise achieved accuracy of 93.7% on the popular CIFAR-19 data set and top-1 accuracy on ImageNet of 71.6% after mapping the trained weights (i.e., parameters that transform input data) to phase-change memory components. Moreover, after mapping the weights of a particular model onto 723,444 phase-change memory devices in a prototype chip, the accuracy stayed above 92.6% over the course of a single day. The researchers claim it’s a record.

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In an attempt to further improve accuracy retention over time, the coauthors of the study also developed a compensation technique that periodically corrects the activation functions (equations that determine the model’s output) during inference. This led to an improvement in accuracy to 93.5% on hardware, they say.

In parallel, the team experimented with training machine learning models using analog phase-change memory components. With a mixed-precision architecture, they report that they managed to attain “software-equivalent” accuracies on several types of small-scale models, including multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, long-short-term-memory networks, and generative adversarial networks. The training experiments are detailed in full in a study recently published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

IBM’s latest work in the domain follows the introduction of the company’s phase-change memory chip for AI training. While still in the research stage, company researchers demonstrated the system could store weight data as electrical charges, performing 100 times more calculations per square millimeter than a graphics card while using 280 times less power.

“In an era transitioning more and more towards AI-based technologies, including internet-of-things battery-powered devices and autonomous vehicles, such technologies would highly benefit from fast, low-powered, and reliably accurate DNN inference engines,” IBM said in a statement. “The strategies developed in our studies show great potential towards realizing accurate AI hardware-accelerator architectures to support DNN training and inferencing in an energy-efficient manner.”

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5 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Engagement

February 11, 2020   CRM News and Info

In a world where individuals are accustomed to having the information we need at our fingertips, social media has become an essential marketing distribution channel.

One reason social media is so effective is that it makes it fun and easy to consume and share information. Individuals can share ideas, pose questions, and have meaningful conversations with peers from all over the world without even having to leave their desks. And thanks to the rise in mobile usage that has occurred during this past decade, individuals now have access to social media pretty much everywhere they go. 

Social Media Blog Hero 5 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Engagement

Because social media is the place to be, however, it can be very easy to get lost in the crowd. To avoid having your target audience breeze through your posts, you need the perfect recipe to make your followers stop scrolling, check out what you have to say, and take action. 

While it will take some work to fine-tune your social media strategy, the process is easier than you think if you have the right tactics in place. Today, we’re sharing 5 ways you can boost your social media game to earn more clicks, shares, and conversions.

1. Lean Into the Power of Employee Advocacy

Creating an effective social media strategy is not a one-person job. If you want to get in front of your target audience and improve engagement, it helps to have as many people as possible sharing your content. 

Getting your followers to engage with your content is the ultimate goal, but that can only do so much if you only have a few followers to start with. That’s why encouraging employee advocacy is a great way to build your social media presence. Having your employees engage with and share your organization’s recent posts on their own social channels can help you secure better placement on social feeds so you can reach more prospective customers and grow your audience. 

Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module makes it extremely easy to mobilize your employees to share your content. The tool allows you to use boards to organize your post by topic, making it easy for your employees to find and share posts that are relevant to them and their followers. 

While you can’t force your colleagues to be active on social media, you can definitely encourage participation by giving them some sort of incentive. For example, you can create a leaderboard and give prizes to the employee advocates who share the most posts or generate the most engagement per month. 

2. Be Consistent and Tell a Story 

We often hear about posts that have “gone viral.” For many social media creators and influencers, those 15 minutes of fame are the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, businesses can’t expect one noteworthy post to lead to long-term social media marketing success.

If you really want to drive ROI from your social media marketing efforts, you should tell compelling stories that keep your followers engaged and coming back for more. If your followers know what to expect from you, they’ll be more likely to notice and interact with your content when it pops up on their feed. And, if they really love what you’re doing, they might even take the extra step to visit your profiles on their own. 

But what do I mean when I say that you should tell a story? What I’m getting at is that your social media content should be curated to support campaigns highlighting certain customer pain points and topics of interest. Another important piece of this is that your social media efforts should align with the rest of your marketing efforts so that the messaging your audience is seeing is consistent wherever they go. So, for example, if you develop an email campaign aimed at top-of-the-funnel contacts in the manufacturing industry, you should create content that opens the door for this segment to continue to engage with you on social. 

Adding another marketing activity to your day is probably the last thing you want to do. However, investing in an automation tool that allows you to schedule posts ahead of time, will allow you to easily deliver timely content that aligns with the rest of your marketing efforts. 

3. Take Advantage of Current Events and Trends

Timeliness is key when it comes to getting your audience to engage on social media. Creating  or curating content that is “trending” can also improve your chances of appearing at the top of social media feeds — making sure your audience sees your posts in the first place. So, latching on to current events and trends is an excellent way to get your content featured and capture the attention of your target customers. 

That doesn’t mean that you need your eyes on social media at all times to take advantage of every potential opportunity. Instead, you can set up Google Alerts for terms related to your target audience and industry. You can also monitor relevant hashtags to see what your audience and competitors are posting. Then use their content as inspiration that informs your overall social media strategy.

4. Fuel Demand Gen By Leveraging Social Media as a Content Distribution Channel

A good portion of your social posts should direct your audience to a webpage or asset that will motivate them to keep progressing through the customer journey. 

Using your social media channels as a content distribution platform is a great way to direct your audience to resources that provide the information they need to move to the next stage in the sales funnel. For the best results, we recommend that you use a mix of gated and ungated content.

Ungated content, such as blog posts, is a great way to get potential customers on your website so they can start browsing and learning more about your products or services. Conversely, gated content — such as eBooks that your contacts can access by filling out a form — allows you to collect important contact information that you can use to inform your marketing strategy and create more compelling customer journeys. 

5. Use Data and Analytics to Optimize Your Efforts

While social media provides you room to get more creative with your marketing efforts, you still want your work to generate results. If you’re not already keeping an eye on your data and analytics and optimizing your social media efforts accordingly, you should definitely start.

A few social media KPIs to measure include: 

  • Impressions: Knowing the number of people who see your posts allows you to understand if your content is getting prominently featured on social feeds.
  • Follows and Unfollows: You want to secure an audience that is eager to view your content and hear what you have to say. Tracking how many followers you gain week over week can provide you with an idea of whether your efforts are attracting new potential customers. 
  • Clicks: As I mentioned above, you should create opportunities on social media for your audience to engage with you through other marketing channels. If your social media posts are not motivating your audience to download an eBook, sign up for an email newsletter, or perform other actions that advance them along the sales funnel, you need to re-think your efforts. 
  • Shares: A share shows that a follower not only found your post interesting enough to stop scrolling but also to share it with their audience. On top of that, having followers share your posts helps you get more eyes on your content and improves your chance of showing up on social feeds. Keeping track of which posts are getting the most shares can help you see how to continue to enhance your social strategy for maximum engagement. 
  • Attributable Conversions: Social media should play a key role in your demand generation and customer acquisition efforts. Being able to trace conversions back to your social media efforts is a good way to gauge if your strategy is working. 
  • Attributable Revenue: Speaking of conversions, the ultimate goal for any company is to gain new customers and increase ROI. You should also keep track of revenue generated by specific campaigns and posts, and use your findings to optimize your efforts to help you meet your revenue goals. 

Having access to these metrics will show you where you stand and where you can improve so you can continue to grow your audience and reap the rewards of this powerful medium. 

Act-On Helps You Easily Tie Your Social Media Efforts to Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Investing in a robust marketing automation platform will help you align your social media strategy with top-notch execution and reporting. Act-On equips you with the tools you need to automate your marketing efforts, streamline processes, and measure results. Even better, the time you’ll save on tedious manual processes will allow you to focus your energy on innovating and growing your strategy. 

If you’d like to take a peek into Act-On’s Advanced Social Media module and learn how we can help you implement your entire digital marketing strategy, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They can show you what makes our platform so unique and walk you through a variety of use cases related to your needs and interests.

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Recurly raises $19.5 million to boost subscription revenue with machine learning

September 27, 2019   Big Data

Subscriptions are big business. McKinsey & Company estimates that 15% of online shoppers have signed up for one or more product subscriptions within the past several years, and it pegs the growth rate of the recurring ecommerce market from 2013 to 2018 at over 100% a year. A separate report by cloud-based subscription management platform Zuora, meanwhile, found that the subscription economy ticked up more than 300% between 2012 and 2018.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that startups like San Francisco-based Recurly are raking in the venture capital dough. The developer behind the recurring billing service of the same name today announced that it’s raised $ 19.5 million in funding led by F-Prime Capital, with participation from Polaris Partners, Greycroft, and Silicon Valley Bank. The fresh capital brings its total raised to nearly $ 40 million following previous raises totaling $ 19.6 million, and CEO Dan Burkhart said it’ll fuel product research and development in addition to the expansion of Recurly’s sales and marketing divisions.

As part of this latest round, Recurly brought two new executives onto its team. Former platform and architecture engineer Tony Allen steps in as chief technology officer, and Shane Oren joins as SVP of sales after stints at NetSuite and Nice Satmetrix.

“The subscription commerce market is undergoing a dramatic shift as consumer purchasing behaviors are quickly evolving to expect flexible, pay-as-you-go models from their favorite brands,” said Burkhart in a statement. “We are excited about the role that our company plays in helping these high growth brands to innovate with subscriptions in a way that delights their customers while delivering breakout results against their competitors.”

 Recurly raises $19.5 million to boost subscription revenue with machine learning

For the uninitiated, Recurly taps machine learning algorithms trained on hundreds of transactions to improve billing continually, driving a claimed monthly revenue boost of 12% on average. From within its cloud dashboard, clients can create plans with a variety of billing models (e.g., fixed, seat-based, hybrid, and usage-based) and frequencies, and extend to subscribers the ability to purchase single or multiple plans and combine them with one-time products or services.

Recurly automatically prorates billing changes that result from subscriber upgrades, along with those arising from downgrades, refunds, or service credits. Moreover, its automated tools generate invoices and provide data supporting monthly close processes, all while automatically delivering emails to subscribers regarding charges and changes related to their subscriptions (including expired payment methods).

Recurly supports over a dozen payment gateways including Amazon Pay, Stripe, PayPal, Chase, Braintree, and CyberSource, and it calculates and collects sales tax, VAT, or GST (along with compliance documentation) for any charge in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and South Africa. It additionally supports things like discounted price promotions and special offers, plus gift subscriptions that subscribers can purchase for friends and family.
Where security is concerned, Recurly ships with several permissions groups preconfigured. Only administrators have the ability to manage user roles and permissions or allow read-only access to databases. And on the customer-facing side of the equation, Recurly’s fraud mitigation models automatically identify and address potentially illicit transactions, minimizing chargebacks and preventing card-not-present, account takeover, and account creation fraud.

Recurly’s analytics suite provides an overview of subscriber, plan, and revenue data, along with KPIs and short- and long-tail trends. The date ranges, intervals, and even currency can be customized, as well as the prominence of metrics like net billings, subscriber retention, monthly recurring revenue, recover revenue, and average revenue per customer.

Helpfully, this and other data collected by Recurly can be scheduled to export automatically into third-party business systems.

Speaking of integrations, Recurly plays nicely with a range of customer management platforms and accounting suites, including those from Salesforce, Netsuite, Intuit’s Quickbooks, Xero, Avalara, Kount, Vertex, and Okta. As for services that aren’t natively supported, it offers a robust API and full-featured developer hub.

 Recurly raises $19.5 million to boost subscription revenue with machine learning

Recurly says that since its launch in 2010, it’s deployed subscription billing for thousands of companies across 42 countries, including AMC Networks, AccuWeather, AllTrails, Asana, Asana, BarkBox, CBS Interactive, Canary, Cinemark, FabFitFun, Insightly, JW Player, Loot Crate, Pipedrive, Quizlet, Showtime, Signpost, Sittercity, Sling TV, Sprout Social, and Twitch. To date, the company claims it’s recovered over $ 450 million in revenue and facilitated billions of credit card transactions.

Recurly competes to a degree with the publicly traded Zuora, Chargebee, and ReCharge, which offer comparable subscription management solutions. But F-Prime Capital senior VP Shervin Ghaemmaghami argues that Recurly’s momentum can’t be beat.

“Recurly has provided the billing automation platform behind the success of thousands of major subscription success stories,” said Ghaemmaghami. “We see a tremendous opportunity in building upon this leadership to power the success of the rapidly growing subscription commerce market.”

Recurly currently has 175 employees across offices in San Francisco, Boulder, and New Orleans.

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How To Improve Customer Experience And Boost Retention Rates

August 22, 2019   BI News and Info
 How To Improve Customer Experience And Boost Retention Rates

Great customer experience (CX) leaves a lasting impression. It can make you feel more positively about the brand and encourage repeat purchases. While this is often conflated with customer service – which refers to the direct assistance and advice provided to customers for a product or service – CX goes several steps further. It’s about the interaction between a brand and its customer for the duration of the relationship, taking in customer care, product and service features, advertising, and social media engagement.

It cannot be overstated just how important this is to a company’s success. A study by the Temkin Group found that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great experience. As such, CX can have a major impact on your business’ retention rates and, in turn, your bottom line. In fact, the report found that companies can expect to see a whopping 70% increase in revenue within three years of investing in CX.

But as CX is such a broad concept, how exactly can your brand improve on the experiences you provide?

Understand your customers better

The first step to improving CX is learning as much as you possibly can about your customers. If you don’t understand their preferences and priorities, it will be difficult for you to connect with them and provide the experience they’re looking for. Effective market research is particularly useful to bolstering retention rates, with 54% of consumers more loyal to brands that demonstrate a deep understanding of their needs and desires.

One way of better understanding your customers is by creating personas and giving them each a name and personality. Doing this helps you recognize different sections of your audience and determine what they want from your brand. However, you shouldn’t just rely on demographics like age, profession, and location to create these personas. Use analytics tools to give you real-life insights into your audience, like where your site traffic is coming from. Apply this information to your personas so you know where and when to most successfully reach them.

You can go even further than this with analytical tools to better understand audience preferences. From clicking on a link to reading through a Web page, every customer action provides useful insight into their behavior when using your site. As such, these tools are crucial for gathering and organizing behavioral data on customers; for example, analyzing your website performance, such as what visitors are searching for when they access your site and what the bounce rate is on certain pages.

These details can help you ascertain elements that your audience doesn’t understand or like about your site and create a better overall user experience. For instance, if people are struggling to navigate certain pages, you’ll know you need to be work on them. Another option may include five different cloud solutions that can be used for CX purposes. For instance, a customer data cloud solution helps companies streamline data they’ve gathered on their audience into one app, while a marketing cloud solution can be used to create in-depth customer profiles.

Produce a defined CX vision

The next step to improving CX is to create a clear, customer-focused vision for your company. The simplest way to do this is with a vision statement that can act as a guiding principle for employees. For example, Nordstrom’s mission statement is: “To give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible.” Although clothing choice, quality, and value are all encompassed in the statement, it’s evident that customers are the main focus. By creating a similarly definitive vision for your company, you ensure that employees are all on the same page and motivated to deliver an exceptional experience to customers on your behalf.

To create your mission statement, you’ll need to take into account whether there’s a gap between the needs and wants of customers and what they experience when interacting with your brand. You will also have to think about how your brand can gain an advantage against its competitors and which points on the customer journey require particular attention.

It’s therefore essential to create a customer journey map, outlining each step your customers go through when interacting with your brand – including pre- and post-sale aspects of their experience. By mapping out each of these interactions, you can make it easier for employees to visualize the customer journey and improve their understanding of customer needs at each point on it. Combining this with your CX vision helps employees to pinpoint exactly how they can influence it and improve on their current performance.

Create emotional connections with your customers

The best customer experiences foster a connection with brands on an emotional level. In fact, a study by Forrester and FocusVision shows that 93% of retailers believe customers are more likely to spend money on a brand they’re emotionally linked with. As such, creating these encounters can significantly improve a customer’s brand experience.

There are numerous ways you can foster this connection, with perhaps the most obvious strategy being to make your customers feel like they’re being cared for. This can include anything from paying close attention to their feedback to keeping them in the know (such as letting customers know the exact progress of an order). Another method is weaving user-generated content (UGC) into customer journeys, such as reposting customer pictures on Instagram (always crediting the original account, of course) or encouraging them to produce video content for advertising campaigns. This can spark a greater sense of belonging among your audience, which in turn helps to create feelings of loyalty and affinity. In fact, UGC has been shown to increase online sales by up to 15%.

Even something as simple as using certain colors when it comes to things like your logo, advertising, and office or store layout can help create an emotional CX. Different colors evoke different emotions, so make sure to use colors that are in line with the emotions you want to elicit among your audience.

Next-Generation SAP Business Scenario Recommendations report provides you a bird’s eye view of your business and identifies the potential value from SAP S/4HANA. Want to learn more? Join our webinar on September 26th.

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Leveraging Finance Technology To Boost Enterprise Agility

August 6, 2019   SAP

The relentless introduction of new technologies and innovative business models has accelerated the velocity of change in the business environment. To survive and thrive, companies must be attuned to shifts in market conditions and ready to make decisions fast – and implement them quickly – to alleviate their impact.

At The Hackett Group, we call this capability “agility.” Enterprise agility has been getting a lot of attention lately, and it’s no wonder. Our 2019 Agile Operating Model Performance Study identified a strong positive correlation between greater organizational agility and financial outperformance. While we see a lot of writing about what agility looks like, there’s a lot less, if any, about how to create it. Our view is that to achieve enterprise-level agility, companies must improve the dexterity of individual functions. And finance must do its part.

The role of technology

Our research shows that there is no single way to enable executives to make decisions more quickly and expedite their execution. To achieve a higher level of agility, finance organizations need to address multiple elements of their digital service-delivery model (SDM) – for example, streamlining organizational structure, increasing talent versatility, and adopting a more customer-centric mindset. However, when we asked finance executives where they focus the most attention, the response for both top performers and peers was technology. Overall, 88% reported that they are targeting technological advances, compared to the 65% who focus on analytics and service design – the next two most-often addressed SDM elements.

This choice makes sense when we take into consideration what finance executives say about the biggest obstacles to becoming more agile: organizational, process, and system complexity. Automation, particularly modern applications and digital tools like robotic process automation (RPA), disentangle the spaghetti-soup nature of most system landscapes and promote the use of best practices.

Deciding what to do first

We can learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t by plotting the adoption rate of agility-enabling, technology-related practices against their level of effectiveness.

We illustrate the results in the quadrant below. (Note that the X-axis shows adoption levels above 30% and the Y-axis shows effectiveness levels of over 60%.) The two most effective practices are consolidating business applications and deploying smart automation technologies. The first is widely adopted. The second is still an emerging practice; however, finance functions that have begun implementing tools like cognitive and modern data-management platforms are seeing great results. The upshot is that finance must continue to leverage already well-established approaches like system integration while accelerating the adoption of new solutions.

July 2019 blog Leveraging Finance Technology To Boost Enterprise Agility

Measuring agility

Finance executives like hard data to measure progress. But agility is a more abstract concept. Coming up with performance metrics is a formidable challenge that companies are only now beginning to explore. In our study, we experimented with several KPIs. In some cases, we saw a significant difference between typical finance functions and agility top performers. For example, while 41% of top performers have adopted cloud-based applications, only 21% of peers have done the same. There’s also a big contrast in the use of self-service tools, which provide users with access to information and analysis and empower them to make decisions a lot faster. A total of 74% of top performers have implemented self-service tools in suitable processes, compared to only 27% of peers.

The pace of change won’t let up. If anything, it will become more frantic. Thus, the pressure to evolve finance’s agility quotient is growing. While this is certainly the general consensus, there’s less agreement, or even information, about the specifics. It’s imperative that finance organizations establish a foundational framework to assess how long it takes them to respond to different changes in business conditions (e.g., an acquisition, the rise of a new competitor, or the launch of a whole new business segment). They should consider the role and importance of different agility enablers, and be creative in identifying ways to measure their progress.

For more insight on financial technology, read “Bringing Next-Generation Technological Intelligence To Finance.”

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Boost Your CRM With IaaS

July 25, 2019   CRM News and Info

CRM systems are the lifeblood of many businesses, and the volume of customer data within them keeps growing as companies digitize more processes. That data often is not being used to its full potential, beyond basic reporting on sales metrics and marketing campaigns.

With the advent of mainstream machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, this is all changing, and quickly. There is now a bevy of third-party machine learning systems that can hook into your CRM.

Machine learning can bring great business value to CRM users today in a number of scenarios. Intelligent algorithms can analyze website visits and produce faster, more accurate lead scores.

True personalized marketing is possible by matching the most appropriate content and offers to prospective buyers in seconds.

A company can use machine learning to analyze sales calls for best practices or improvements, or even provide tips to new sales reps using AI.

AI can help in the call center too, by applying past successful ticket resolutions to existing tickets, automatically prescribing the best steps for resolution, and by understanding customer sentiment through voice analysis.

In general, by applying AI to the task of discovering and combining unstructured and structured data about customers and trends, sales and marketing teams can be more proactive and predictive with offerings. They gain a better understanding of which marketing tactics work and which don’t, and how to improve online and offline processes for a better customer experience.

The CRM-IaaS Advantage for Advanced Analytics

While IT departments are starting to customize CRMs to achieve these functionalities through development or integrations, there is another approach: leveraging the public cloud.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft offer rich machine learning environments in which developers can use templates and tools to build and deploy AI plugins to front-end apps like CRM. They also can build entirely from scratch, developing the specific use case that’s most valuable for their customer base or R&D efforts — and that’s the real competitive advantage from AI.

A properly integrated IaaS and CRM platform provides a more comprehensive view of data across the entire organization — from customer interactions to logistics. CRM is just the beginning. Pulling data into the mix from other systems, such as inventory or financials, brings broader insights to your machine learning engine.

There are also get the benefits of scale, performance and optimization from IaaS and Platform as a Service technologies, which are important for extreme data crunching.

Tips for Getting Started

1. Develop the business case. IT leaders and marketing and sales execs should work closely to determine the business need and use cases for integrating CRM into the cloud infrastructure. Set measurable and realistic goals, e.g., to increase click-throughs on social media advertising through intelligent targeting.

2. Define integration needs. Determine which areas of your CRM should connect to which areas of your IaaS to help achieve your goals.

For instance, you might need to look at customer churn and get in front of any big losses before they happen. Marketing can do that by analyzing past churn metrics, overlaying that analysis with customer data, and predicting which customers are in danger of churn based on the actions they have taken, or other factors that would influence their behavior.

Get outside expertise on the integration plan. Seek guidance and partner referrals from your cloud provider, which has a vested interest in extending its platform for new, innovative uses. You will need to determine platform and network technical considerations, such as the following:

  • On-premises or SaaS connectivity; (Consider that you’ll be limited if integrating with an on-premises system, since you’ll have to manage updates on your own, and the CRM functionality won’t keep pace easily with advances in cloud and AI.)
  • New security and privacy requirements for exchanging data with your IaaS partner;
  • Availability of resources for AI development expertise; and
  • Integration with other systems.

3. Build a progressive cloud business strategy. The beauty of SaaS is that you can start immediately to realize the cloud benefits. Many of those benefits revolve around automatic updates and enhancements and constantly evolving technology.

For an organization to get the most from being cloud native, IT leaders should ensure that all parts of the business are connected to the cloud infrastructure. For example, integrating your warehousing and logistics systems with your CRM adds a lot of value. Issues with delivery and inventory directly affect your customers. Tying these core systems together makes predictive modeling much easier so you can keep customers happy and coming back.

Looking at expansion? Think about how your CRM can help you. Data on localization needs and currency fluctuations can and should be tied to your CRM.

Foggy Future

What’s exciting about infusing ordinary business applications with AI is that the future is still quite unclear. We’re just scraping the surface of knowledge about benefits to both employees and their customers from letting machine learning play with data.

Most companies want to know more about what their customers are doing today, their interests and frustrations, and what they would most likely purchase tomorrow. By exploring the possibilities of connecting a CRM system to a cloud back end, companies can gain a competitive edge in a saturated global marketplace.
end enn Boost Your CRM With IaaS


Eran%20Gil Boost Your CRM With IaaS
Eran Gil is CEO of
AllCloud.

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How to Boost CRM User Adoption in 4 Easy Steps

July 23, 2019   CRM News and Info

Are you looking forward to implementing a new or updated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM? Or maybe you have just recently done so.

It can be discouraging to hear that many CRM projects fail to provide the benefits that the technology promises. But you might be surprised to know that the majority of failed CRM projects are not a result of faulty technology or incompetent installers. Most times, the cause of the problems is a lack of user adoption. Yes, the very employees that the CRM system is supposed to help are not using it.

So how do you get your employees to not only use the new CRM software but to adopt it and appreciate its benefits fully? Here are four best practices to guide user adoption of your CRM software:

Set expectations

Setting expectations starts early, and it’s up to management and team leaders to set them. Be sure your team understands why you are implementing a new CRM and what your goals are for it. Show them how it will help your business grow. Help them think beyond just technical capabilities such as progress reporting, forecasting, workflow triggers, and business intelligence. Describe how the software will benefit individuals in their jobs by improving the processes they use every day. For instance, your sales team should appreciate how CRM will improve their sales process with prospects and clients—better communication, shorter sales cycles, visibility into previous activity, etc. The CRM system can be oriented to the specifics of various roles within your business.

Connect expectations to both profitability and purpose by describing how CRM will help your company be its absolute best.

Create a plan

Plan for CRM implementation success by breaking the project into bite-sized pieces. Begin by prioritizing project expectations according to profitability. Then link the completion of each objective to specific tasks, on a scale of most important to least important. Metrics for each task must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound).

Assign individuals to specific tasks. Define stages for the project and organize the work into short-term phases that contribute to the long-term plan. Successful CRM adoption is a continual process, so be sure your plan is flexible enough to adapt to growth and change.

Let your employees know that the CRM solution is going to benefit them and benefit the company, and that adoption is not optional. Having a plan to follow and to refer back to will keep everyone on track.

Identify early adopters

Counter potential resistance by getting users on board right from the start. Identify those employees from each department who will be affected by the changes that come with the new CRM system, and involve them in the project planning process, from software vetting to preparation for implementation. Analyze user interactions to gain insights about product usage, integration with workflow, and limitations of the product.

Appoint CRM ambassadors whose role is to evangelize the benefits of the system and help their teams understand how it will meet business needs while making their jobs easier. These early adopters help to influence culture by infusing CRM expectations into company values, behaviors, and communication.

Invest in a team

A well-trained project team is essential to successful CRM adoption. The project team’s job is to anticipate and resolve problems that arise during the planning and implementation phases. The team should include senior leaders as well as internal stakeholders in IT, marketing, sales, and customer service, as well as your software installation partner.

The people guiding CRM deployment are more critical to its successful adoption than the technology itself.

The potential of your CRM is realized through strong user adoption. Resources invested in product planning and launch are wasted if stakeholders do not use the system to meet its intended expectations. Happily, you can plan ahead for successful CRM adoption.

If you’d like to know more about Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM and how it can benefit your business, contact BroadPoint’s Microsoft gold-certified consulting team today

By BroadPoint, www.broadpoint.net

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