Viewpoint
While we can’t claim all of the credit for the current revolution in companies embracing software platforms to run their businesses, (Amazon, Salesforce, and a few others may have had something to do with it), Nordis was an early platform innovator with our Expresso® customer communications management system.
Companies are increasingly moving to platforms like Expresso to break down silos, enhance customer journeys and improve business performance. The payoff is amplified when they link multiple platforms to share data and build more cohesive operations. Productivity grows from cross-functional collaboration and eliminating different versions of documents and data. Most important of all, the customer journey becomes more efficient and agile, resulting in a better experience.
That’s what motivated us at Nordis to adopt a platform model to run our business operations.
Platform advantage
Nordis provides a powerful enterprise platform to our clients, and we use Expresso, too. To complement that, we transitioned to Salesforce to help manage our customer’s journey from the first touchpoint to customer service. We are better than halfway toward our goal of having one definitive record of each customer, in one place, available to everyone in our organization.
In 2020, we’ll transition our financial and enterprise resource planning systems to Salesforce’s FinancialForce. Our plan is to integrate all systems to eliminate our own data silos, improve business performance, and critically, to continue to build on our promise of delivering world-class service.
Doing it right
It takes ongoing commitment and engagement of senior executives to change an organization’s operating model from one relying on a variety of unconnected systems and processes. Even then, it takes a long time to make this fundamental change in how you run your business.
A few lessons in moving to a platform operating model:
- Know what you want to achieve. Determine how you want to operate in the future.
- Take the opportunity to rethink and streamline your processes rather than simply replicate your current processes. Don’t automate existing inefficiencies.
- Divide the project into manageable phases. Don’t try to do everything at once.
- Invest in training and staff buy-in. It’s key to making sure the platform delivers the hoped-for productivity, collaboration, insights and operating improvements.
To learn more about software platforms, please read our Industry Insights article on the differences between CCM and CRM.
No matter where your company is on the road to a platform operating model, you can capitalize on the power of platforms with Expresso and our integrated solution suite including ExpressoPay, ExpressoWallet and ExpressoVote. Please let us know how we can help you on your platform and digital transformation journeys.
