Your business executives seek top line growth – 7 out of every 10 we survey state growth is their top priority. Growth requires competitive advantage, but hanging on to yesterday’s competitive advantage will doom your firm. Your technology empowered customers have more power over your brand than ever before. And today’s world of global sourcing and efficient supply chains allows your competition – old and new – to copy or undermine any move you make to compete. Technology has fundamentally changed the competitive landscape.

We believe the only source of competitive advantage is an obsession with understanding and engaging with your customers. Your business leaders across Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, and Product Development now look to technology to help them obsess about your customers. Unfortunately,  the majority of those same business leaders don’t think you and your team can accelerate their success.

You can start changing the dynamics in your organization, and build new competitive advantage, by crafting a business technology agenda. That agenda must focus on what you do with technology, systems, and processes to win, serve, and retain customers. And it starts with putting your customers at the center of your decision making. Once you do, you’ll start to reshape your technology portfolio and prioritize the technologies that help your business obsess about its customers.

Our recent report on the Top Technologies For Your BT Agenda introduces a framework – the customer life cycle – you and your business leaders can use to put the customer at the center of your decision making. The report also identifies the top technologies you need to prioritize to obsess about your customers throughout the life cycle. These top technologies fall into two categories:

  • Life cycle solutions that redefine CRM. These include enterprise marketing solutions, sales and fulfillment solutions, customer service solutions, and product innovation solutions that help your business leaders improve upon customer facing and supporting processes. Collectively, these solutions help you support continuous customer relationships, forcing a rethink of how you look at CRM.
  • Engagement platform technologies to deliver unified customer experiences. Your customers expect unified and cohesive experiences across touchpoints – from the mobile app through to the contact center. Engagement platforms support a modular, four-tier architecture to tie life cycle solutions into the experiences you deliver. They consist of interaction technologies, digital delivery technologies, aggregation technologies, and infrastructure & context technologies you use to deliver the experiences your customers demand.

While the job continues to get harder, you can change how your business leaders view you and your team. Use the customer life cycle, and focus on these top technologies. Doing so will accelerate your BT agenda and help your business leaders get the new competitive advantage they seek.

Free Report: See how technology managers must build the Business Technology agenda alongside the IT agenda in our report on empowered customers.