'More responsive approach required in the digital era'
MICROSOFT recommends a "responsive organisation" as the business model for the digital and social networking era in which consumers are empowered to easily access information and knowledge.
Haresh Khoobchandani, managing director of Microsoft Thailand, told the AustCham Luncheon last week that now the landscape is changing very fast.
It is important for an organisation to improve itself to respond fast to customer trends, customer feedback and customer complaints in various ways.
Sometime the response is by creating new products, improving existing products and enhancing customer service. The more organisations are not responsive, the more the risk of losing customers or business, because the world is very competitive.
Organisations must become more responsive, more important in the fast changing world. The idea is to use technology solutions to help organisations react fast so they can compete and they can grow their business.
It is not just about how organisations become responsive to external factors, it is about how organisations also drive innovation internally through employees.
“How do we use technology to get the idea [in the organization] to turn around and get interaction and engagement from the customers outside?
“Now, it should be across all departments, such as marketing, sales and support. All are important. They can run the right [marketing or sales] programme,” he said.
To be responsive, an organisation needs to start from the chief executive officer. The CEO needs to turn the organisation around and set the vision on how it can become agile, nimble and responsive as well as to increase the speed to market.
“Technology is fundamentally democratising information and changing the speed that information flows,” he said.
Organisations are undergoing four transitions – hierarchies moving to networks, control changing to empowerment, extrinsic rewards turning into intrinsic rewards and customer and partners becoming the community.
Organisations should buy technology to solve the business’ problems, that is, to drive change management. But this is not the usual technology investment. This is due to fundamentally how they engage the changes. For example, an organisation buying Yammer to use it to connect to the community is not the normal way of working.
“Technology is fundamentally changing. Technology is making information easily available to everybody. Today, people can go through quick research and find out about products. Consumers are empowered to access information. So, organisations need to be able to respond to consumers,” he said.
“Every solution is to serve different needs. For Yammer, it is the platform to be able to drive engagement, conversation, within the enterprise. You they then can collaborate, dynamically share information in a fast and quick manner.
“Organisations should be more responsive by first changing their mind-set and then thinking about the technologies to enable them to be more responsive,” he said.
Microsoft has a lot of solutions to help organisation transform themselves to be responsive. For example, Microsoft CRM has the ability to listen to all the different conversations happening on social media and to pick them up and send them back to the CRM system.
CRM is another example of how an organisation can become more nimble, more agile and more responsive. And CRM is integrated nicely with Microsoft 365 and Power BI, which allow a business to take data, analyse them and turn that analysis inside.
