From Retainment to Genuine Advocacy. Managing Successful Customer Relationships in IoT

Are You Meeting Customers in Real-Time?

Contact between customers and the enterprise are changing quickly as real-time decisions become more necessary for successful relationships. There is still customer dissatisfaction as long lead times, fragmented infrastructure and the very information necessary to do a great job for customers is not always easily available.

Many organizations are treading on two levels, simultaneously trying to understand IoT while silently keeping old systems afloat. This can feel very contradictory to customers. What business dynamics need to be addressed?

Digitalization & the Consumerization of IT Ecosystems

Digitalization and the consumerization of IT ecosystems puts further demands on expectations and environments to which enterprises must react.

20 years ago, MRP systems put great effort in to connecting supply and demand and improving communications between sales and operation in order to produce the most efficient and timely inventory. Today with the rise of the internet of things and more device connectivity everyday, we see in products and product and service offerings, there is a stronger pull from market compliance from both businesses and customers.

There are business dynamics that can be addressed:

• Identify what your customer values in the market you play, not just from your company. This becomes the total offer. You might be adding value to the relationship that is not clear, not understood or even missed.
• Identify the difference between those experiences that retain customers and what builds true loyalty. Meeting existing KPI’s are great ways to retain customers. Helping them figure out what they need next can get them to share the word and become advocates and fans.

Developing feedback loops for capturing future expectations and negative experiences

Negative experiences need to feed into a continuous improvement process. Successful cross functional processes and tools need to support strategy, but also of day to day operations. These responsibilities need ownership at the most critical contact point with customers, wherever they reside in the organization.

The greatest challenges to a sales and marketing organization arise from executing the processes, positioning technology resources and maintaining pace.

The Pivotal Empowered Employee

Empowerment for employees must place a crucial role in creating the necessary velocity. Hierarchical command and controls structures struggle to obtain the necessary agility. Technology, traceability and automation provides the necessary visibility to management and the ability for action-oriented customer response at the line level.

Struggling in the Internet of Things? If the new sales and operation archetypes are of interest please check out our Good Sign Solutions whitepaper. It discusses the trends successful service businesses need to address to move from basic KPI's to a strategy based on loyalty.

You can download it here: