Create a unified vision for your organization to meet the demands of the modern Marketplace
A common problem for any organization is falling into a “silo mentality,” where departments and smaller groups can’t effectively share information with each other or uncover critical business insights. Instead of functioning as one team, these businesses often lack visibility into other areas of the organization and operate less efficiently, which translates into a poor, disconnected experience for their customers.
Breaking free of silos empowers people to do their best work by eliminating the barriers between customer relationships, processes, and data.
On the following pages, we’ll share four strategies for breaking free of silos by connecting your data and unifying your entire organization to help meet the demands of the modern customer.
Three key benefits of working without silos
Benefit 1 / Faster decision making
Organizations that work free of silos have greater flexibility and speed. By using comprehensive data drawn from both internal and external sources, you can bring workers together from different levels, functions, and locations to solve problems and make decisions in real time.
To streamline operations and boost efficiency, global facilities management company Sodexo replaced its standalone and siloed computing systems with Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365. Now, by unifying access to field service and customer service data through a secure, cloud-based portal, Sodexo personnel, executives, and clients have anytime, anywhere access to rich reporting tools to inform real-time decision making and drive optimization.
Benefit 2 / Seamless collaboration
With more organizations than ever operating across multiple locations, it’s vital for your business to extend your virtual team and coordinate faster with an all-inone view of team members, their activities, and their responsibilities, no matter where they are.
Eastern European iron ore and steel producer Metinvest is working to eliminate silos by leveraging the power of Dynamics 365 to create its own internal IT service. The company is on track to transform its IT infrastructure by standardizing cross-group project delivery, while also enhancing collaboration and providing greater visibility into business processes
Benefit 3 / Deeper connections
The world is full of customer data. From tracking internal sources to accessing social media, it’s important to understand your customers better and have the ability to respond more quickly.
After expanding globally, datacenter maintenance company Park Place Technologies needed to modernize internal systems to give salespeople tools that could keep up with rapid growth. Microsoft Relationship Sales combines Dynamics 365 for Sales with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to streamline relationship selling efforts—providing a comprehensive view of customers that includes LinkedIn profile data—and improve personal engagement, at scale. Now, your business’s salesforce can sell smarter, leading to lower costs and higher close rates.
Four strategies for breaking down silos and unlocking value
Strategy 1 / Accelerate growth with unified operations
Get a complete view across customers and all your operations
In today’s marketplace, you need total visibility into your business—from the sales pipeline to inventory management—while also effectively engaging customers and employees who are always on the move. When your customers are everywhere, your business needs to be too.
Know your organization
Get better visibility into your organization and make more informed decisions. By connecting different areas of your business, you can provide a higher level of service to customers by having more visibility into areas such as inventory, fulfillment, and delivery. Conversely, greater visibility into your sales pipeline will allow you to more accurately forecast demand, efficiently plan resources, and optimize operations.
Streamlining your business operations also provides a much more seamless experience for your customers. Dynamics 365 keeps your customers updated on their orders from sale to delivery and helps streamline time-consuming processes like generating quotes and invoices.
Know your market
With Dynamics 365, you get access to realtime insights into customer and market demand, so you can plan more accurately and make more strategic decisions for your business. Insight into social media and market activity can also help sellers uncover new sales opportunities.
Know your customers
Advanced machine learning models, backed by the reliability and processing power of Azure, can give you predictive insights on customer buying patterns. When engaging with customers directly, relationship insights give sellers up-to-theminute intelligence so they can understand the health of sales opportunities and effectively prioritize sales activities. Staying ahead of your clients’ needs with realtime intelligence is crucial when building customer trust.
Unify operations with Dynamics 365
Strategy 2 / Innovate with proactive service
Field service delivers more when it’s connected
Improve customer satisfaction, first-time fix rates, and resource productivity with connected field service. Dynamics 365 delivers advanced scheduling, resource optimization, and mobile enablement capabilities that set organizations apart by keeping the customer at the center of the business. Connected field service, including advanced analytics, machine learning, mixed reality, and IoT capabilities, allows organizations to move from a costly breakfix model to a never-fail service model.
Deliver better outcomes with IoT
In the past, when something broke, a company would send someone out to repair it. But now, with sensors being ubiquitous, your business can proactively troubleshoot problems before customers even know there’s an issue. With predictive maintenance and repair, you can transform your business by doing away with costly scheduled services.
Give customers more
Proactively reaching out to customers increases transparency and builds trust. With Dynamics 365, you can seamlessly share a quote, contract, and schedule details. And customer portals make it easy to track service activities and schedule appointments.
Empower your technicians
Give your technicians the power to ensure on-time appointments with turn-by-turn directions and work orders you can update in real time, on any device. Technicians also have access to customer preferences and history, so they can tailor every interaction for their customers.
Optimize your resources
Streamline inventory management with real-time data, so you can track your inventory down to the last delivery van. Empower dispatchers with an interactive, drag-and-drop schedule board. And automated scheduling ensures that technicians with the right skills for the job can fit in more appointments per day and improve your bottom line.
Modernize field operations with mixed reality
With heads-up, hands-free video calling on Microsoft HoloLens, technicians can collaborate with any remote expert on PC or mobile to troubleshoot issues in context. Experts can also create rich, intuitive maintenance guides that provide a realistic view of maintenance issues.
Strategy 3 / Turn relationships into revenue
Build relationships at scale through more personalized customer engagement
If your sales organization’s customer engagement efforts aren’t bringing together data from CRM, productivity tools like email and calendars, and social networks like LinkedIn, you may be missing out on valuable opportunities to connect with buyers.
The Microsoft Relationship Sales solution combines the power of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 for Sales to help your sellers foster relationships with buyers through authentic and personal engagement. Embedded intelligence empowers sellers to find the right decision makers and influencers, offer recommendations and insights based on actual customer needs, and build personalized one-on-one relationships at scale.
Find and focus on the right customers
The customers your sellers need to connect with are out there—do they have the tools to reach them effectively?
With the Microsoft Relationship Sales solution, sellers can identify key decision makers from over 500 million LinkedIn members, make warm connections through personal introductions, and go even deeper to build strong relationships with multiple members of the buying committee to improve sales results—even if a key champion leaves in the middle of the deal. Prescriptive lead scoring in Dynamics 365 AI for Sales helps sellers determine which leads are the most likely to convert and empowers salespeople to invest time in cultivating the right relationships.
Recognize risks and opportunities
Do you understand what drives your customers? Microsoft Relationship Sales enables your sellers to develop trust with buyers by providing relevant insights and recommendations based on their needs.
Sellers can get a window into buyers’ interests and even be alerted if they change jobs with data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Dynamics 365, and Office 365. And with relationship health scores—built from customer content, transactions, and CRM interaction data—they’ll get a clear picture of each customers’ risks and opportunities, enabling them to deliver more personalized attention.
62 percent of B2B buyers respond to sellers who share relevant insights and opportunities. (LinkedIn Sales Solutions, “What Is Social Selling?,” accessed October 8, 2018.)
Synchronize and streamline data
What’s the next best action? Microsoft Relationship Sales provides the proper context to understand how customer data—synchronized across LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Dynamics 365 for Sales, and Office 365—can lead to stronger and more sustainable relationships with the right buyers. And with a unified view of their relationships, sellers can easily see what steps they need to take to move those relationships forward.
Strategy 4 / Engage every shopper, everywhere
Deliver insightful customer experiences at every touchpoint
When you can offer a seamless customer experience from in-store to emerging digital channels, across devices and at any time, you’ll create a modernized shopping experience that continues to drive growth and brand loyalty for your business.
Drive customer loyalty
Deliver consistent shopping experiences across channels to drive increased revenue and allegiance to your brand. With Dynamics 365, give customers the convenience and flexibility to buy in store or get home delivery, as well as earn and redeem points and use gift cards and promotional coupons across channels.
Upgrade your store experience
Optimize your store operations through automation and business intelligence dashboards. Give customers what they want with tools that access real-time inventory. With advanced analytics, you can offer more product selection and recommendations to provide the best of both online and in-store shopping.
The global retail automation market was worth $10.43 billion in 2017 and is projected to reach $18.99 billion by 2023. (Mordor Intelligence, Global Retail Automation Market, March 2018.)
Manage your merch
Centrally track product information, categories, assortment, and pricing. Streamline sourcing and replenish stores based on season, market demand, and competitive pressures. That way, no matter what, you can amplify sales and promotions to impact your bottom line.
The path forward
Dynamics 365 unlocks the potential of your business by removing barriers around data, processes, and solutions, allowing you to make deeper, more valuable connections with your customers. The time for investing in digital transformation is now. By unifying every part of your organization, you can fully realize its potential.