Eric Berridge's blog post was featured
Drivers of Business Growth: Digital Disruption and Customer Obsession
As the CRM market eclipses the ERP market as the largest enterprise software category, and, more importantly, as CRM morphs into a category that drives customer success, we once again find ourselves on the doorstep of incredible opportunities to engage with customers at levels we could not have imagined. What is behind this rapid growth?In my view, it is digital disruption. Cloud computing, social, predictive analytics, and mobile technologies have reduced market barriers, and pioneering companies are redefining business models across every industry. This rapid innovation is empowering customers with more choices, information, and power than ever before.In response, companies are focusing on customer engagement to achieve business outcomes, whether it is through new client acquisition, increased wallet share, reducing customer churn, or improving the productivity of client facing roles and processes. In Bluewolf’s latest “The State of Salesforce” report, revenue growth and improving customer experience were cited three times more often than any other business challenge.Last month at Dreamforce in San Francisco, I witnessed CRM’s technical advancements and a broadening product set across the show floor, as well as a vast cloud ecosystem that creates both opportunity and challenges as companies strive to sharpen their value to customers. And new offerings like Salesforce’s Wave Analytics Cloud and Community Cloud continue to validate that customers are the heart of digital transformation and to drive results, companies must enable a personal and direction connection to their customers.Putting customers first may seem like an obvious pathway for success, but the misconception that technology drives company strategy is still very much alive. It is my belief that technology should align to business strategy, not drive it.Companies must continually exceed rising customer expectations — and increasingly those expectations include high quality digital experiences that are smart, relevant, and frictionless. What it all boils down to is that this digital disruption informs a new business imperative; now, there is a cost to not innovating. Systems that remain the same fall steadily out of sync with the business.At Bluewolf, we have an unwavering and passionate commitment to cloud transformation, a market that originally started as a disruptive idea and is now a mainstream way of creating corporate innovation. Our mission is to help global companies realign themselves around their customers, and make ongoing innovation a reality. Companies need to be customer-obsessed, then align their technology, processes, and employees around that culture. Only then can extraordinary customer moments and business transformation happen.Eric Berridge is CEO of the global business consulting firm Bluewolf.See More