If you’re still doing business the way you’ve always done business, you’re behind the curve. Maybe you understand that already and are scrambling to get ahead. Maybe you know something’s wrong but don’t know what, or don't know what to do about it.

You know the competition is always one step ahead. You never seem to be in the know when your customer starts asking questions that you didn't anticipate. You show up to meetings with customers with whom you once had a good relationship, but you leave feeling that you’re very much outside of their team.

If you’re in that position, it could mean that you haven’t adapted to the new social landscape that is fundamentally transforming how customers buy. This means you’re not connecting with customers; you’re losing them.

You may have ineffective account engagement, and it’s killing your business.

Tear down your silos

Sales, marketing and customer service are the big three customer-facing silos, and they’re each focused on one part of the customer picture. However, the customer is the same no matter who they’re talking to. They don’t care about your silos. They’re just having a bad experience.

To fix this bad experience, companies need to break down the boundaries between departments. Nexxworks sums up why:

“…it’s about letting go of those damned useless boundaries: between channels, between digital and the rest, between departments, job levels, etc. Stop compartmentalizing everything in neat and `well-organized’ little silos. It is frankly absurd to disintegrate all your customer efforts into poorly connected departments that often speak with different voices.”

Those different voices can lead to a bad experience for everyone.

Changes in the way customers buy are forcing companies to adapt. Savvy buyers are using social and the Internet to learn everything they can about a product or service before they even speak to a salesperson. Likewise, sophisticated competitors are using social media and technology to outperform organizations that aren’t doing the same.

Therefore, companies must create an integrated customer experience, or customers walk. An integrated experience gives everyone access to a wealth of information about customers´ perspectives, goals and values. It creates an opportunity to be truly responsive to customer needs and puts the company in a position to understand what customers will need next, before they even know themselves.

So, the customer service department knows about the campaigns the marketing department is running and integrates them into service calls. Marketing sees what customers are saying to Customer Service and builds that knowledge into the next campaign. Sales gets leads from Customer Service, while giving them a clear view of the customer’s most recent buying activities.

That’s how social is breaking the silos and shattering traditional ways of doing business. An inside-out perspective is taking shape, where sales, marketing and customer service join forces to leverage every customer interaction – ensuring customers receive a consistent, amazing experience every time.

Businesses that understand this will become leaders and trusted partners.

Businesses that don’t? They become irrelevant.

Just listen to social selling expert Barbara Giamanco spell out one fundamental value in social listening:

“It works… Using an approach learned during a social selling program we conducted, a sales professional at a Fortune 500 high tech company closed a $500,000 deal in less than 30 days: after being stonewalled for 3 years.”

Investing in a strong social strategy is like investing in a crystal ball. It shows you the next purchase a customer will make. It shows you how happy or unhappy they are. It shows you how customers want to be influenced and how to engage them in the way they want.

A strong strategy maximizes customer engagement value and creates a propensity to sell more, while developing relationships with customers who view you as a trusted partner. It connects you with customers who recommend you to new customers in a way advertising can’t.

You must make the customer the heart of the process in order to succeed. Make your company’s understanding of its customers available to the people who need to understand them, i.e., right at the moment when you need to deliver the best possible customer experience.

When you succeed, you improve your ability to bring value to the table as a cohesive, aligned organization, allowing you to leverage knowledge about your customer’s goals in order to sell smarter. You build a stronger foundation for providing an exceptional customer experience: earning your customer’s trust. You position yourself to help your customer solve current challenges, while anticipating their future needs.

When you do that, you transform the way you sell, market and serve your customer. Your customers? They’ll be effectively engaged, ready to extend their trust and eager to buy.

The post How Social Strategies Can Break Your Company’s Silos appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Pet Supplies Plus wants to be America’s favorite neighborhood pet store, offering convenience, value, and a fun “neighborhood vibe.” Its growth plan includes opening dozens of new stores in the next several months, so state-of-the-art back-end systems are critical to success. The legacy systems, implemented more than 10 years ago, were geared toward supporting singular franchise locations, so they don’t have the capabilities or security levels to support a growing organization.

The company leaders spent time considering ERP systems, but the largest were overkill for a company its size while solutions geared towards smaller business could not handle the company’s planned growth. But everyone, from category leaders to the CIO at Pet Supply Plus, is impressed with what Microsoft offers: the platform and applications, processes, and roadmap for the future—especially the level of commitment. Leadership at Pet Supplies Plus believes that moving to Dynamics AX on Azure at this point in the growth curve will allow it to have one of the more streamlined applications portfolios in the industry, which is provides a competitive edge. In addition, by putting the business infrastructure in the cloud and simplifying deployments by using Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS), Pet Supplies Plus gains flexibility while lowering costs. Beyond Dynamics AX, Pet Supplies Plus is also using Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint along with Intune, Yammer, Lync, and other Microsoft applications.

Read more about how Microsoft Dynamics AX is helping Pet Supplies Plus to add 30-40 stores in 2015—and is poised to maintain that pace moving forward.

About AX

Microsoft Dynamics AX is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that is simple to learn and use so you can deliver value faster, take advantage of business opportunities, and drive user involvement and innovation across the organization.

The post Pet Supply Plus prepares for rapid growth with Microsoft appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

A major challenge for enterprise CFOs today is that they must become “architects of business value.” For finance departments, this is often about enabling quicker decision making, productivity, and efficiency. No one understands this better than Microsoft’s own Venkat Bhamidipati, CFO of the Worldwide Enterprise & Partner Group. He recently discussed his perspective on technology’s influence on the role of corporate finance, his philosophy on business growth, and his favorite strategies (it might surprise you!).

Read how he what he has to say about CFOs’ unique role in ensuring that the company balances the long-term growth by focusing on the right resource allocation bets, while managing near-term results.

The post Advice from a CFO: balance short-term accountability while driving long-term growth appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today’s consumers are well informed and always connected. They are sophisticated, with high expectations about service, value, offers, and choice (see infographic).  Omni-channel is all about being connected to those channels where your customers shop. It's about providing information, along with easy and consistent shopping experiences, and encouraging customers to have a relationship with your brand. Customers move from social networks, to online stores, to in-store experiences, and they expect seamless and consistent engagement with the retailer.

Microsoft Dynamics AX offers retailers support and functionality that helps make customers happy, including:

• Centralized management and complete visibility of all aspects of commerce operations through a web client with Microsoft Azure-hosted Retail HQ offers.
• Improved security for credit card data and provide easier peripheral access for POS devices by using the new hardware profile support in Dynamics AX.
• Better retail server and data management support, with omni-channel options to cloud-enabled data exchange to rich media content support—and so much more.
• Enhanced shopping and store experiences across all channels, including more POS functionality, support for third-party storefronts, and a browser-based call center module.

The post Omnichannel takes the lead appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Norway-based Sapa Group is an international aluminum manufacturer, creating and distributing products like automotive parts and energy-efficient building materials.

With over 20,000 employees working in 40 countries, to say their operations are extensive is an understatement. Through rapid expansion and numerous global acquisitions, the Sapa Group has grown exponentially over the last 10 years. The group grew quickly through acquisitions and ended up with multiple ERP Systems spanning over 100 locations across the globe that were inefficient and costly to manage. The company was seeking a new, company-wide ERP system that was flexible and customizable enough to meet their unique and evolving needs

By implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX, the Sapa Group was able to consolidate and retire legacy ERP solutions previously used within the company. With everything running together in one place, Sapa Group is able to maintain productivity and service while providing reliable distribution of goods to customers in the building, transport, engineering and telecom industries.

Read more about how they deployed AX without any lapse in service to their customers here. 

The post Aluminum Manufacturer Sapa Group Maintains Efficiency through Expansion appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

It’s winter, the time of year when every gathering seems to be centered on sharing food, warmth, and time together. These simple traditions have been humanity’s best defense against once-lethal long nights and freezing temperatures since time immemorial. From a business standpoint, this season is a fascinating example of how effective human kindness can be.

I’m particularly interested in creating a warm and inviting atmosphere for everyone right now because in the last few years there’s been a sharp upswing in “brand switching,” or customers leaving one brand for another. Many of these customers cite poor service among their reasons for leaving.

In the US alone, this “switching economy” has increased by roughly 30 percent in the last five years. That means that 1.6 trillion consumer dollars are waiting to be won over. In India that number is $331 billion, with a whopping 88 percent of customers stating they’d swap brands due to poor service. Here are just a few ways to help make your company the inviting place customers are looking for.

Marketing:

• A personal touch can go a long way toward winning customers over. Unfortunately, simple segmentation doesn’t do the trick any more. No longer are customers impressed that you know they buy socks. Knowing they buy seasonal socks every third Thursday, on the other hand, allows you to add personalized value to your campaigns.
• No two customers are alike when it comes to shopping and doing research. Knowing which channels different folks like to frequent allows you to focus in and talk to clients on their own terms.

Sales:

• Gathering insights on new prospects shouldn’t just be about making that first sale. Forge strong connections through shared contacts and interests and you could be on your way to a lasting relationship. Remember to add these personal details to each client’s profile for the next rep or service agent down the line.
• Collaborative selling can be a great way to show customers how much their business matters to you. By adding an expert to your videoconference or coauthoring proposal documents on the fly, you’ll build customer relationships that matter.

Service:

• When asked, 32 percent of customers said they switched brands due to being handed off to too many different agents. While you can’t always avoid transferring these folks, you can make sure they don’t have to repeat their basic information each time.
• Keep detailed customer profiles, and make sure new notes are added to these after each call. You can also use the data in these profiles to match customers with agents that share their interests.

Brand switching is a massive force for change, and lots of customer dollars are at stake. Give customers a warm, inviting environment however, and you may find that this winter of customer discontent is your favorite season after all.

If you’re looking for more tools designed to help your marketing, sales, service, and social teams keep the customers you have and welcome those you don’t, take a test drive of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

[cta-crm-guided-tour]

The post Putting people at the center of everything we do appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Watch how Metro Bank and Microsoft Dynamics work together

Since its 2010 debut, London-based Metro Bank has been obsessed with creating the ultimate experiences in customer satisfaction. So much so, they prefer to call their customers “fans.”

Harnessing the powers of modern technology and instant communication, Metro Bank is blowing the lid off the traditional bank paradigm. “Fans” use Microsoft Surface tablets to provide information, rather than fill out paperwork. This expedites wait times, saves paper and saves Metro Bank money.

Debit cards and checks are printed immediately on-site. Open early and late, 7 days a week, 362 days per year, customer accessibility is at the forefront of Metro Bank’s priorities.

Metro Bank is able to maintain the start-up feel as it grows into a much larger organization by personalizing communications to their customers’ needs.

Cultivating brand loyalty and respecting their customers’ time and needs is what sets this rock star of a company apart. And keeps its fans coming back for more.

Learn more about how Metro Bank is revolutionizing the banking world with an emphasis on customer-facing service.

The post Innovative London bank wants fans, not customers appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

World Animal Protection is a global charity, with agencies all over the world. Microsoft Dynamics provides an effortless business solution so WAP can focus on the animals, not the office.

The relationship between animals and mankind is vital. We rely on them and they depend upon us. For over 30 years, international nonprofit World Animal Protection has had a vision to nurture this relationship and to end animal cruelty.

Dedicated to ethical animal treatment, WAP works to educate communities on the importance of vaccinations, to provide disaster relief, to promote humane farming practices and to discourage unnecessary capture of wild animals.

Past and present campaigns include efforts to end dog culling in China, banning bull fighting in Spain and France, prohibiting bear dancing in Greece, Turkey and India, as well as emergency veterinary care and food to animals displaced by Hurricane Patricia in Mexico.

In August of 2015, Peru experienced its heaviest snowfall in a decade, with devastating effects on the small, rural communities of the country’s southern region. Thousands of animals have been lost, leaving local farmers destitute. WAP has mobilized aid to these little communities, helping both humans and animals alike to recover.

Actions like these demonstrate how truly significant World Animal Protection is in the movement for global animal welfare.

Read more about World Animal Protection and Microsoft Dynamics here.

The post World Animal Protection Seeks to Inspire Global Change; End Animal Suffering appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

“Technology should be used to engage people and that’s what we do at Metro Bank. It’s all about our colleagues and our customers. It’s all about creating fans. It’s really that simple.” Craig Donaldson
CEO, Metro Bank

The Visionary Awards recognize Microsoft customers who achieved notable accomplishments with their Microsoft solutions. The 2015 Visionary Awards, which are presented in 9 categories, recognize and celebrate Microsoft customers that have achieved notable accomplishments using Microsoft solutions. This year’s winners were chosen from nominations of Microsoft customers across EMEA, including 34 showcase customers for Convergence 2015 EMEA. Established in 1997, the Visionary Awards are awarded each year at the Convergence conference.

To learn more about Metro Bank, read their customer story on the Microsoft site.

The post Metro Bank Wins Convergence EMEA 2015 Visionary Award for Financial Services appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

“We’ve replaced static data with interactive information, modernized the way we work together, and made it easier for our wholesalers, retailers, and franchisees to provide customers with unrivaled experiences.” Phillip R. Kennedy, Director of Information Technology, PANDORA Jewelry

The Visionary Awards recognize Microsoft customers who achieved notable accomplishments with their Microsoft solutions. The 2015 Visionary Awards, which are presented in 9 categories, recognize and celebrate Microsoft customers that have achieved notable accomplishments using Microsoft solutions. This year’s winners were chosen from nominations of Microsoft customers across EMEA, including 34 showcase customers for Convergence 2015 EMEA. Established in 1997, the Visionary Awards are awarded each year at the Convergence conference.

To learn more about Pandora, read their customer story on the Microsoft site.

The post PANDORA Jewelry Wins Convergence EMEA 2015 Visionary Award for Retail, Consumer Products & Services appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.