Why the future belongs to smart businesses?

Nowadays, businesses are not only facing a growing number of challenging working environments and tough economics, but also increasingly demanding customers. Organisations are required to make quick, intelligent choices and move with a greater sense of urgency and agility. In addition, it is essential for companies to engage in continuous innovation, both to constantly improve their business, as well as to deliver outstanding customer experiences which are superior to their competitors’ offerings. Simply put, businesses need to be smarter.

In response to the Covid pandemic many organisations have undertaken digital transformation initiatives with renewed vigour. Nevertheless, simply striving for digital change is no longer enough. It is also pivotal for companies to embrace smart change if they wish to stand out from the crowd and thrive.

Key attributes of smart businesses

For a business to become smart, it’s not just about having a greater amount of information and data readily available – but how it is actually used to think and move with greater speed and confidence. Those businesses which are smart are able to leverage their digital investments to empower and inform people in every business function and department. They also see challenges and assign accountability for customer, operational and financial success at a whole-organisation level, in addition to intelligently using their digital tools and data across the entire customer value chain. However, this doesn’t stop there, a smart business has a number of important attributes.

Firstly, a smart business must embrace continuous change, constantly transitioning from one unstable environment to another, producing new service propositions and developing smart ideas that enable it to stand out from the crowd. Ensuring that all of its departments and functions are innovative, allows the business to transform its operations and improve customer delivery in a continuous, repetitive dynamic. What’s more, these companies will also look to foster a company culture which is inquisitive and analytical – an environment in which fresh ways to elevate customer experience and improve outcomes are formed. All of this requires a workplace where creativity and experimentation is encouraged and members of staff have the freedom to operate with a can-do, growth mindset without fear of failure. But it also requires them to have the tools and the skills to ensure that these new ideas can be effectively implemented. This requires collaborative hubs where teams can openly communicate and innovate, so that suggestions can be encouraged, shared, explored, developed, tested and implemented.

Secondly, smart businesses have a clear vision of what they are aiming to achieve, so that they know exactly where to focus their energy and time in order to secure improvements. To do this, they use information and intelligence to identify areas in which the business can be improved. When it comes to supporting customer success and providing customers with an excellent experience of the brand, this shouldn’t only be for their benefit. Smart businesses embrace solutions which are capable of analysing and serving up insight on cost-to-serve and customer margin trends to cultivate the best and most profitable relationships. They also adopt advanced analytics, allowing them to deliver predictive insights such as improvements in pricing or the identification of profitable opportunities for change.

But finally, this does not come about by chance. Smart businesses rely upon efficient business processes delivering high quality, actionable data to make employees smarter. These companies are not just using data to inform decisions on specific management or functional challenges. They are also democratising the data, providing every business function and member of staff with ready access to essential corporate information, a single source of the truth. For example, having a 360-degree view of the whole customer relationship means that traditional back-office teams, such as the finance department, are equally as informed about customer relationships as those involved in service delivery. They also provide support when it comes to interacting with and serving customers regarding financial affairs.

And as a side benefit, delivering a high quality of service to customers and having a vibrant and engaging working environment will work wonders in ensuring that the top talent at the company remains engaged.

Become smarter

As businesses continue along their current digital journeys many wish to simplify, streamline and improve business functions by adopting cloud-based solutions. Many are also capitalising on the opportunities and benefits that come from utilising a common ecosystem of complementary technology vendors that all share a common platform.

One key characteristic of cloud based software is the provision of regular software updates, typically 2 or 3 times a year. These updates do not take place for the sake of it. They deliver new and improved business functionalities that exploit the latest technological advances combined with the experiences of many customers who actively played a role in the development of these products. A huge amount of energy, from an innovation perspective, is invested in enterprise solutions by those developing the tools. As a result, this provides customers with an ongoing pipeline of new improvements and the potential to regularly offer new capabilities to the company. For any organisation wanting to fully embrace the project economy and realise the benefits of continual business change, the seeds of success are readily available.

Those business leaders who put customer experience at the forefront of their business goals, in addition to developing their organisational agility and innovation, will be in the best position to build the successful enterprises of the future. They will be capable of achieving and sustaining better business outcomes. They will not simply be a digital business – they’ll be a smart digital business.

Andy Campbell, Global Solution Evangelist, FinancialForce