Transformation d'entreprise

The topic of empowering your customers so that they become an extension of your marketing isn’t new. Transforming people into a surrogate sales force is the dream of any service organization.  The difference today is that the landscape has shifted to the point where good customer service is no longer the minimum ante to play the game.

Over the next decade, customer service will fuse with marketing to become a holistic inbound, outbound campaign of listening to and engaging with customers that will rewrite the rules of the game.  And, most importantly, the lessons learned in the field will be fed into the marketing department to create and run more intelligent, experienced, and real world initiatives across all forms of marketing, PR, sales, and advertising.

Over the last year, Social Media has intrigued and even inspired companies to engage in the communities where their brands and products, as well those of competitors, are actively discussed by the very people they want to reach, aka the new influencers. Participation is no longer an option as Social Media isn’t a spectator sport.

Whether you believe it or not, these conversations are taking place with or without you, so ignoring them only eliminates you from the conversation and also removes your company from the radar screens of your customers.

Marketing-savvy corporate executives are working with PR, Advertising, and Marcom teams to explore options and strategies on how to participate in relevant online conversations. This represents a shift in outbound marketing as it creates a direct channel between companies and customers, and ultimately people. It starts to look a lot less like marketing and a lot more like customer service.

Imagine the leading companies of the future. They will have externalized many of their core functions so they can draw on the best talent, wherever it can be found. They will be highly adaptive and able to acquire new competencies as soon as they see new opportunities.

These companies’ decision making will have a kind of fluidity; they’ll swap resources in and out of long- and short-term goals as needed. They will be Darwinian in the sense that their core mission will be longevity: They would be built to thrive for a long time in contrast to today’s S&P 500, which can expect a lifespan in the Index of only 15 years.[i]

In fact, these kind of companies exist today. They are all around us at differing stages of development. With colleagues from the Apigee Institute, in particular Institute director, Bryan Kirschner, we set out to examine how those companies make decisions about innovation and transformation. We interviewed, in-depth, 29 executives and surveyed over 300 more. Here are some of our key findings.

Surprisingly, some of the new generation of enterprises have old and familiar names.

Intel is renowned for chip manufacturing but is about to launch a new open-source 3D printed consumer robotics project, and recently invested substantially in consumer heads-up display maker Recon Instruments. These moves take Intel deeper into consumer products. The chipmaker is climbing out from its “ingredient” status to become a more integrated company, connecting to all kinds of customers.

Philips, formerly a leader in consumer electronics, is creating lifestyle experiences that combine hardware, software, services and connectivity. In the process, the company is transforming how it secures revenues. Instead of just shipping products to the shelves of retailers, Philips is building long-term customer interactions where it hopes to draw revenues and engagement from user-communities. It is doing that via developer communities and by opening up APIs to its products (like lighting).

Of course, they are far from alone. Companies like Google do adaptive processes very well, too. Amazon is a master of new enterprise processes. And smaller, growth companies like Box are reconfiguring how senior executives relate to the internal “crowd” that is their employee base.

At the core of transformational change are feelings, nothing really changes unless people’s behaviours change and they must feel a certain way in order to (Our latest blog post on the role of transformational #leadership in facilitating change