As an ISV partner who provides 3D visualization and a powerful configurator, we were proud to sponsor last week’s Salesforce World Tour in Boston. Overall, the event was a great way to hear directly from manufacturers, industry experts and other partners helping this industry grow. After a week of reflecting on our experience, we wanted to share our key learnings and how they can help manufacturing (a main focus at the show).
Here are our top 3 takeaways.
1. Digital transformation is a competitive advantage
The majority of our conversations with event attendees and the content of several breakout sessions revolved around the importance for manufacturers to digitally transform. Seeing digital transformation as a competitive advantage is critical for them to succeed in this fourth industrial revolution. They can use new tools to meet the rising expectations of their customers, attract a quality workforce, and connect their products with systems to increase their efficiency.
2. Customers have more power and greater expectations
The successful business focus has shifted from product- to customer-centric priorities, especially in the manufacturing world. The product-centric manufacturer of yesterday is focused on internal operations and thinks of customer interactions as individual, transactional sales — this older perspective leads to a minimal level of customer engagement and limited product connectivity.
These days, there’s an emerging number of customer-centric manufacturers. These companies focus on delivering an awesome customer experience by understanding the many ways customers interact with their brand, and by owning the relationship with their distributors. Their engagement spans the individual transactions of yesterday to consider an “always on” range of products and services that continually help the customer. They deliver a B2B2C experience where every type of company needs to know and think about the end consumer.
3. It’s urgent to deliver a unified experience NOW
Delivering a unified experience is a constant challenge. Traditional business processes and tools have led to siloed technology platforms, especially in the manufacturing space. The internal sales team, dealers/distributors, data-driven services, field services, operations and IT are often completely disconnected. This leads to a fragmented customer experience.
At the Boston World Tour, industry experts and attendees communicated a sense of urgency to digitally transform — right now. A successful manufacturer must adopt new digital tools to grow their business and increase their customer engagement.
KBMax is one of those new digital tools. We help manufacturing companies liberate their complex configuration logic from unwieldy manuals and overworked experts to a scalable, responsive platform that customers love to use. By seeing a 3D representation of the custom product change before their eyes as they select different options, customers are engaged with the product, and begin to have a sense of ownership before they’ve even reached the buying stage. Our integration with Salesforce.com helps companies extend their salesforce data, without creating another silo.
Let us know if you have any questions about our takeaways, how we can help you with your digital transformation or even our experience sponsoring the event. We’re happy to help!
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