Customer Engagement & Collaboration (CEC)

Well, CRM as we have thought about it for the past decade or more is 'out'. The drive to be customer-centric, and meet customers 'where they are' (rather than where we left them last), is evolving the platforms we use to engage with them. At the same time, this evolution is supercharging the way our employees access and use data to collaborate with each other, and be more prepared to offer amazing service and experiences that drive business success. Add to that the positive impact of AI in the form of Microsoft Copilot, and all of a sudden the customer engagement landscape is looking pretty exciting.

The key thing to remember with all this change is that learning is a lifelong undertaking. Staying curious will serve you well when it comes to understanding adopting these new tools and technologies to help your business.

Something just for....you!

Tools for engaging better with customers, while enabling faster, smarter, happier collaboration for staff, hold the power to deliver huge wins - no matter what area of the business you're in, or what your role is. We've captured 6 different stories to demonstrate the value of Customer Engagement & Collaboration (CEC) for a range of business leaders - if your role isn't represented here, and you're interested in finding out how CEC can benefit you, please get in touch!

For the CEO

Why predictability isn’t boring

While predictability may not delight you in other aspects of your life, as a CEO running a business, you probably find it has considerable appeal. And that fondness is likely closely followed by your appreciation of effective risk management and organisational transparency.

Your customers also value these same attributes. They want to know what to expect from your business and feel confident that your service will live up to their expectations every time.

Maintaining customer loyalty requires all data at your team’s fingertips to ensure the service ball is never dropped. It’s about making sure that you and your customers never feel your organisation is under-resourced and unable to meet the service levels your business has built its reputation on.

To improve predictability – and therefore business outcomes – using solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 in your service centre helps achieve excellent transparency of your adherence to SLAs. Especially as applied to crucial metrics like first-call resolution rates and efficient tracking of your cost to serve. With new Microsoft technologies like Copilot, you can re-define where you can make efficiency gains within your organisation, often at no extra cost to you – for example, by using AI to proactively provide your agents with relevant information so they don’t need to waste time searching knowledge articles, and to then draft the email response on their behalf with your agents simply having to verify the source of the answer and then to click send, it truly is that simple.

As CEO, you’ll have doubtless cut your teeth on the mantra of ‘doing more with less’ – and in these times, it’s even more crucial. If you’re not looking into these smarter tools, your competitors will be. And if you’re nervous using these technologies will mean your staff leave, think again. Over 89% of Copilot customers’ employees have responded their roles are now more satisfying and rewarding with Copilot in place! The truth is, you could lose valuable team members without it, as humans simply do not like doing the mundane, repetitive tasks that traditional service roles require.

By using Dynamics 365 to deliver better customer service, you also drive internal productivity and external satisfaction. For starters, first-call resolution using Copilot translates to around a 9% improvement, and by serving up the right information at the right time, the average resolution time reduces to under a minute.

You can also expect significant transparency gains in key business areas – particularly service and sales. When you're talking sales pipeline, being able to predict what will happen next month, or next quarter, is critical in this volatile economic climate. With Dynamics 365, you’ll understand very quickly if your teams are on the right track, where people use their time, and to what effect, who your superstars are and how you can use them as models to proliferate this success across the whole organisation.

So, outcomes are more controlled and predictable. And in times of challenge, when you already have your hands full, that’s not boring at all.

For the CFO

Why going evergreen with your solution stack makes financial sense

While your CIO ponders the weight of technical debt hanging over the business, you’re probably thinking about how to avoid investing in technology that costs you more to run and maintain in the long term than it returns in value.

As CFO, that requires a strategic view of how you invest and in what. That includes understanding why choosing a standalone system (e.g., a CRM) - no matter the promise of savings - without an underlying evergreen business platform will eventually stop delivering an ROI.

Driving value from today’s technology isn’t about comparing one CRM (or Sales or Marketing) solution against another, but investing in a single tech stack that will:

1. Support the business’s desire to be customer-centric and enable employee collaboration
2. Not turn into a financial millstone or a point of cybersecurity vulnerability
3. Have a committed support and development lifecycle (that goes well into the foreseeable future)
4. Grow with you (so you don’t have to reinvest all over again)
5. Cost you less than never ending upgrades to multiple, non-integrated solutions

When you compare Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement vs a single standalone CRM application, you can bank on the first option to deliver far more value and longevity.

With its underlying low-code platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is part of a broader, comprehensive add-as-you-need-it business ecosystem with unified communications and shared data, and has an evergreen roadmap. So, you’re going to reap financial and operation efficiency benefits and savings even if you just want CRM capabilities and low OPEX to start with.

When you invest in a Microsoft ecosystem, you may initially buy an application to offer customer service or sales or marketing. But, what you're really investing in is the underlying Power Platform - in other words, the potential to add, grow, develop and transform without having to do a complete upgrade or a costly reimplementation. And you’ll no longer have to live with the frustration of keeping budget aside to keep your business-critical legacy system up and running.

You’ll also be investing in a platform which allows your business to cost-effectively develop or add a range of enterprise applications – from secure portals and Power Pages (for websites), to ERP, without having to reinvent your technology infrastructure. As you become more sophisticated in how you want to sell, communicate, convert, transact, and report, so does your technology. And with Microsoft behind you, you know that the platform is being continually invested in, improved, and updated. So, when, for instance, you need to add a new communications channel, it can be set up with a minimal budget – usually because Microsoft has already added an out-of-the-box capability.

With Microsoft at the heart of your business, your future technology is going to be cheaper and more flexible. The cost of ongoing innovation will be lower – but not slower. You’ll be investing in a strategic platform that's going to support rather than hold you back, and deliver a better, bigger and brighter return on investment – and a whole new approach to customer-centricity.

So, our advice? Invest once. Invest well.

For the CIO

Is tech-debt stopping you from being customer centric?

Business transformation continues to be the way forward for any CIO charged with improving business outcomes. According to McKinsey, as much as 71% of the impact of business transformations depends on technology.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is a prime example of a solution which above all, champions your business’s ability to become truly customer centric as well as enabling genuine employee collaboration.

However, the excitement of investing in a technology that delivers a significantly better ROI than your old CRM must be tempered with the understanding that failing to resolve your existing technical debt will severely limit the anticipated business outcomes.

So, it often becomes a matter of first thing first. That is, getting rid of the old to welcome in the new – and have enough time, capacity and budget left over to deliver every possible gram of transformational value back to the business.

In McKinsey’s excellent 2023 article ‘Breaking technical debt’s vicious cycle to modernize your business, they aptly describe technical debt as the ‘silent killer of technology modernisation efforts’, typically accounting for about 40% of your IT balance sheet. And you can expect to pay another 10-20% to address tech debt on top of the costs of any modernisation project.

McKinsey further reports that of the CIOs they surveyed, 30% believe that over 20% of their technical budget earmarked for new products is diverted to resolving issues related to existing tech debt. And CIOs estimate that 20-40% of the value of their entire technology estate (pre-depreciation) is made up of tech debt.

So, what are the realities of your accrued debt, and how do they impact your business and its ability to realise its potential?

Tech-debt is a negative investment in every sense of the word. It consumes a huge amount of internal time and budget – and erodes your ability to compete. What’s often unappreciated by the rest of the executive team (who are keen to adopt smarter and more impactful bells-and-whistles solutions - like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement) is that accumulated technical debt inevitably becomes business debt and must be dealt with once and for all so you can move forward.

Only then, can your business take the necessary steps (or leaps) towards digital transformation and embrace all the benefits of being more customer centric and collaborative.

The good news though, is that when you chose a solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – which is built on an evergreen low-code application platform that will support your entire business with a technology base for everything you need to grow (without racking up hours of development and support time) - you’ll never go back into that dark deep hole of accumulated debt.

You’re home, clear, and debt free.

For the CMO

It’s time to declare Groundhog Day dead

While you may have looked with envy at the integrated technology applications used so successfully by your sales and financial teams, chances are that marketing hasn’t had the same advantages. Instead of a marketing platform imbedded within the core sales system, your team may rely on Mailchimp, Marketo, or other third-party products that are fundamentally separate from everything else in the business.

And therein lies the problem. When it's time to execute a marketing campaign, your executives chase down business stakeholders to supply Excel contact lists, import them into your standalone marketing solution, and manually de-dupe and clean up the data. Finally, the list is ready to use, and you can send out your latest messaging – hoping you’ve hit the right targets while avoiding those who aren’t in a happy headspace with your company. Then you repeat the cycle for the next campaign - it’s Groundhog Day all over again.

As CMO, you are accountable to many stakeholders in the business for campaign outcomes. However, instead of working smarter and more strategically to raise the bar, your team is tied to the unproductive processes adopted when forced to work with non-integrated marketing technology. And despite all good intentions, the results can be hit-and-miss, at best.

The case for a single integrated marketing platform, with all customer databases and information in one place (think age, location, communication preferences, emails opened, past transactions, customer issues raised and more), is strong.

By using a fully-fledged customer engagement platform with sales, service, and marketing embedded, executing your marketing campaigns becomes an efficient task, raising productivity and capacity. And communications to clients are more intelligently targeted, personalised, timely and meaningful – boosting conversion rates.

Now can you automatically create dynamic marketing lists based on target age, location, and more, but with emerging AI technologies like Microsoft’s new Marketing Copilot (starting to be released as we speak, with new features coming each month, check out the release plans here) – your marketing outcomes will improve dramatically.

With Copilot, preparing a list requires nothing more than a statement of intent, e.g., “I want to drive more interest from customers aged 18-25 who are already interested in X type of product and live on Australia’s East Coast. Go find!” Copilot will analyse everyone in your contact lists and suggest who to target to achieve your campaign objectives as well as recommend other regions to consider if there’s a general sales decline in that area. It can even spot individuals or groups who are experiencing negative sentiments about your brand and need extra love and incentives.

If a customer is unhappy with your service or support, Copilot will give you the option to exclude them from a campaign list. And it will let you know which customers are experiencing marketing fatigue (for example, they’ve received eight emails from your business this week alone – all from different departments and teams) and remove them from the list before they opt to unsubscribe totally. With bounce backs, unsubscribes, opens, did-not-opens, and more collected and automatically applied to a customer’s CRM record, Copilot can even prompt your sales team into action based on customer behaviour.

With powerful AI technologies like Copilot and a single integrated marketing platform, you can drive better outcomes through targeted, efficient actions, and leverage a complete view of everything that's going on with your customers. It’s goodbye to Groundhog Day, forever. And hello to marketing on steroids.

For the CXO

Why silos can stymie a great customer experience

As CXO, you’re all about the experience. It’s up to you to ensure that your customers (and employees) experience such positive feelings about your brand that it results in long-term loyalty.

But when your data is in segregated silos, that can be a challenge.

Let’s imagine that you're not across your service incidents – through no fault of your own. You simply have zero transparency of what’s happening in your service centre. But in the meantime, the business has a product ready to push out to market despite not really knowing how effective it is and how customers will respond to it.

To give a simple example: You’re a manufacturer who has decided to make a branded power bank. Everyone needs one, so theoretically, success is assured. You’re just making one version which supports a USB 2.0 plug. However, as you don’t have access to customer feedback and can’t see what other devices they’ve purchased, so you’re unaware that they want power banks with USB Type-C. Subsequently you invest time, materials and effort into a product that virtually no-one wants. And to boot, your customers question your relevance in the market.

If you don’t have your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, feedback, and purchasing history, you’re operating in a dangerous vacuum. From a CXO perspective, you need to make sure you can track if your (new, established, and upcoming) products are relevant, uncover where and why they're not doing well, and what the real-time customer service experience is when there’s a problem.

Irrelevant or ill-conceived products, disgruntled customers who are waiting too long for a response to their service issue and have no way to escalate a problem outside of normal business hours, are all signs that you’re not providing an experience that will have people clambering for more. Your service centre agents are probably none too happy either.

If you don’t have visibility of these issues because the data that reports on customer interactions and history aren’t available to you, you’re stymied. Well and truly. And your customers will remain less than impressed with the overall experience.

With technologies like Microsoft’s Dynamics 365, you can not only exit a world of silo pain, but champion the customer (and employee) experience:

Step up your customer service. By going omni-channel you give your customers round-the-clock access to your business through the channels they want to use when they want to use them. Not the channels you dictate and only during your business hours.
Give power to your people. By investing in sustainable transformation and bringing your data silos together on one intelligent low-code application platform, your marketing, sales, and service departments can leverage and share information for greater impact. So, you can ensure that the new service, solution or product you introduce is relevant and resonates with your customers’ needs, identify and market to prospective buyers based on their interests and purchasing history, and rapidly pick up on and resolve solution or product issues ensuring no nasty surprises.

And as CXO, it’s going to be easier to deliver on the experiences that make a tangible difference to your business.

For the HR & People Leaders

The power of new technology to make your people happier (and stay longer)

Yuval Noah Harari - historian, philosopher, and bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - observes (and we paraphrase) that the number one job skill of the 21st century will be the ability to continually relearn and reinvent oneself, due to the speed at which technology is evolving.

As technology moves at light speed, says Harari, career lifespans will surely shorten. And to stay relevant, we will all need to adopt new technologies and evolve. For example, while ChatGPT may appear to be a threat to many, it’s the person who masters it who will come out on top – and remain employed.

The same can be said for those who work in organisations who are technology-forward. In adopting technologies like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to not only do (much) better business, there’s also the opportunity to equip employees with the knowledge and skills to stay relevant and valuable – and in turn drive even more value. With low-code application platforms within fingertip reach, and employees having a ready path to upskill in these, the old line “don’t dream it, be it” has a whole new meaning. Low-code opens new pathways between business users and technology; Innovation and iterative enhancements reduce in cost, while a lack of old-school coding skills is no barrier to turning ideas into reality.

Today’s CHRO or CPO has the opportunity to foster a technologically empowered workforce – or at the very least – a team with the power to help the business evolve, as well as their own careers. By focusing on employee growth by offering training, certification and opportunity, not only can a business upskill employees, it has the ability to significantly improve retention.

And we’re not just saying that. According to Forbes, “a joint study backed by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Epignosis found that 76% of employees are likely to stay with a company that offers them meaningful learning and development training. Upskilling your workforce can give companies a competitive edge over organizations that aren’t investing in their employees, financially or otherwise.”

Forbes goes on to observe in this related article, that “55% [of employees] say they need additional training to perform better in their roles, and 44% say they are pursuing training on their own because they want to stay competitive in the job market.”

A low-code trend report (2022) from Microsoft reports that “82% of low- or no-code users agree that the technology helps provide an opportunity for software users to improve their development knowledge and technical skills. In addition, the use of no-code or low-code platforms or apps is shown to have led to an 83% positive impact on work satisfaction and workload by users, and an 80% positive impact on morale by users.” And to top it off, “More than 80% of users and potential users of low-code or no-code platforms report that they would be more willing to work for a company that invests in their technical upskilling.”

While investing in new technology may appear scary, the reality is that it has the potential to empower and engage your employees as they seek to continually reinvent and relearn. While in turn, you live the dream of reduced recruitment and retention costs.

Spotlight on... Customer Engagement & Collaboration

Traditional CRM technology has evolved significantly in the past 5 years, along with how businesses engage with their customers, and collaborate internally. The pressure to create personalised, meaningful and timely experiences for customers is huge. And yet, the amount of information, from an ever increasing array of platforms and systems, that customer facing employees need to access and stay aware of makes it difficult to deliver those experiences.

Customer Engagement and Collaboration services and practices, supplemented by Artificial Intelligence (such as Microsoft Copilot) are changing the game, whether you're on the 'selling' or the 'buying' side of the equation. What does this mean for businesses, and how can you take advantage of these new tools to stand out from the crowd? Customer Engagement and Collaboration specialists Kristy Brown and Jonathan Rickard from Fusion5 answer these questions and more in the latest in the 'Spotlight On' series.

0:18 What is 'CRM' and where did it come from?

2:00 What's the difference between 'old school' CRM, and Customer Engagement solutions we have today?

5:48 How do Customer Engagement insights help business leaders and decision makers?

16:15 Should we be worried that AI might make humans redundant in the Customer Engagement equation?

16:56 What is Fusion5 doing to help our customers to be ready to work 'with' AI?

19:06 How have you seen businesses use AI to genuinely change the game?

25:04 If anyone is considering making AI part of the way they do business, what advice would you give them?

Upcoming events

We regularly host online and in-person events to help people stay aware of the latest innovations and opportunities that exist to improve your business.

Please check the AU and NZ events page regularly as we'll post these events there when they are open for registrations, or let your Account Manager know that you're interested.

Latest news, insights, and resources

Blogs, eBooks, videos... we publish interesting, entertaining, and educational bits and pieces all the time — here's a selection of our latest offerings.

Blog

BlackLine real-time visibility on financial close

Visibility is key to a smooth and speedy financial close.

Blog

Dear John, why did you opt for on-premises over cloud?

The gap between the business benefits of on-premises and cloud ERP systems has grown exponentially in the last few years. So, in case you’ve not caught up, here’s a quick guide to cloud vs on-premise.

Blog

Are you (mis)managing your assets?

Blog

Why change fails in local councils

Explore why local councils struggle with change. From culture to communication, here’s what really holds back successful tech transformation.

Resource

Business Service Package - ESM 4me

Find out how streamlining service delivery at Fusion5 has improved reporting, efficiency, and user-experience, and decreased delays and errors.

Resource

Seamless integration from NetSuite to your bank is finally possible

Resource

Warehouse Management Demo

Improve efficiency in your wholesale distribution business, NetSuite offers a cloud based ERP designed specifically for wholesale distributors

Resource

NetSuite Printing Plus

Event

Resource

How to navigate reinvention for manufacturers

Find out what the early warning signs were that business as usual couldn’t continue.

Event

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Orchestrator

Event

Resource

Hyper automation in IT support and cyber security

Hyper automation is vital in an organisation’s ability to scale in the face of the ever growing demands of corporate directives, regulation compliance, employee experience and retention.