The health crisis has highlighted the importance of connectivity within companies. To increase their productivity, maintain their competitiveness and gain in efficiency, they must get rid of silos and create stronger connections between their business processes. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this is a daunting challenge. In its latest guide, CRM solutions specialist Salesforce looks back at the obstacles that stand in their way and reveals valuable recommendations for making these changes.
Connectivity: where do SMEs stand?
Within a company, employees must be able to organize and carry out their work easily. This involves having functional processes and operational workflows that allow them to perform their various tasks efficiently. Faulty processes and the use of disconnected tools can impact team productivity: according to a study carried out by Planview, organizations lose twenty hours a month because of this problem. This represents seven weeks of work per year.
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To deal with this, the implementation of business process management and automation strategies and the improvement of the organization’s connectivity with the exploitation of data is essential.
However, maintaining accurate, recent and centralized data is a real challenge for SMEs. Salesforce reveals that 70% of data generated by companies is unusable due to its lack of reliability and credibility.
The lack of connectivity impacts all parts of an organization, including the customer experience. Since the beginning of the health crisis, consumers’ purchasing journey has been mainly online. For companies, this change means becoming familiar with their new needs, habits and preferences. To help them achieve their customer engagement and sales goals, they have a variety of low-cost technology solutions at their fingertips. Nevertheless, many obstacles based on preconceived ideas prevent SMEs from taking advantage of it. In this white paperyou will discover how to overcome them to become a connected and successful company.
The connection of business processes, a considerable advantage
With fewer resources than larger corporations, SMEs need to exploit every lever of competitiveness at their disposal, including streamlining and connecting business processes. These elements provide many useful advantages to stand out from the competition.
In its guide, Salesforce reveals several, starting with the creation of a more homogeneous customer experience. The connection of business processes and the unification of data allow each employee to access the history of interactions with a customer. He then has access to all the data necessary to meet his needs, namely the immediacy and personalization of interactions with a company.
For an organization, easy access to this type of information is a considerable advantage. The sales and customer service teams thus have a complete view of consumer preferences and habits and can offer them an experience that meets their expectations. This offers different opportunities, including making more relevant up-sells and cross-sells.
For data to become a central element of its future strategies, however, it is necessary to develop a culture of data within its company. As Salesforce points out, this is a significant challenge: according to a study by Accenture, only a third of organizations trust their business data enough to take advantage of it. Connected processes and centralized data play a key role in addressing this issue. They make it possible to improve the transparency of information, and thus convince employees of their relevance, and to simplify their sharing between the different departments. Five additional benefits of connecting its business processes are to be discovered in this white paper.
In a final part, Salesforce discusses the success of Abr Idéal, a company specializing in made-to-measure pool enclosures, covers and protections. The SME wanted to strengthen its competitiveness, the relationship with customers and ensure its sustainability. This concrete case is essential to understand the challenges of connectivity within a company and to learn about existing solutions.
To learn best practices for managing and connecting business processes and becoming a connected company, don’t forget to download the salesforce guide.