Connected marketing, sales and services: the Internet of things, people and services
Transforming operations to enable connected services
Last month, we talked about the transformation of the industrial technology platform and discussed that by connecting smart products and using big data, customer analytics, and social technologies, manufacturers are gaining a deeper understanding about how customers are using their products—from how the product is performing, to which features are most popular. This rich data gives manufacturers the insights that not only help capture new revenue, but also provide an opportunity to seize competitive advantage by selling products as a service, rather than selling only products as traditional manufacturers typically do.
It is well known that top performing manufacturing companies earn more than 50% of their revenues from services. I expect this percentage to increase significantly as we are now at the tipping point of breakthrough transformation where manufacturers move from product-centric, transaction-based business models to service-centric, relationship-based business model enabled by products-as-a-service.
IoT/P/S (the Internet of things, people and services)
Everyone today is talking about the Internet of Things (IoT). But IoT is really incomplete if we don’t consider the Internet of people and the Internet of services. You’ll want to think about the following four tenets when you are implementing your IoT strategies:
First, you need to establish connectivity and be able to securely acquire information from the physical world in order to gain visibility and access to control both equipment and processes.
Second, once you collect data, you need to store it without size restrictions, manage it quickly, and uncover insights that help you improve operations. This will help you understand the past and the present with real-time capabilities.
Third, now that you understand the past and present, you will apply sophisticated algorithms in a quick and natural way so that you can predict the future in order to anticipate operational disruptions.
Fourth, the only way in which you will be able to act when things go wrong is by improving the natural user experience for whoever needs to make critical decisions quickly. You want to enable a higher level of process automation as well as enable people to be more productive.
Bringing it all together: emergence of the customer-facing organization
To enable this IoT/P/S transformation, we are seeing the emergence of an innovative customer-facing organization. One that works as a holistic business with new, connected business models, rather than four separate business functions that typically work in silos: sales, marketing, services and the support call center. The new customer-facing organization delivers unprecedented value and growth through:
• Service opportunities that focus on enabling high-value work and automating low-value activities, such as monitoring equipment to create differentiated services; enabling condition-based service through sentiment and equipment performance insights; and gaining deep customer, product, and services insights that lead to an increased value proposition (new value-added services).
• Marketing opportunities that lead customers on a journey through brand differentiation through 1:1 experiences, improved insights from data, and customer reach through all channels.
• Sales opportunities that drive customer delight and sales automation by delivering channel rewards and incentives, put a potential end to ”sandbagging,” as well as connect machines to find upsell and cross-sell opportunities to drive new revenue streams and increase sales performance.
The Internet of things, people and services in action
To grow their business in a competitive environment, leading manufacturers need to develop deeper customer relationships to scale globally, attain breakthrough reengineering, and deliver differentiated services.
We have many examples that show this work in action. For example, see how our Microsoft Dynamics CRM Service is helping customers and partners collaborate in the design-win process in high tech. Design engineers can collaborate with the services organization to troubleshoot problems. And field service representative can seize upsell and cross sell opportunities. These solutions are examples of how Microsoft can help marketing, sales, and services organizations manage business growth more effectively with enhanced customer interactions.
Customers who are leveraging additional Microsoft assets to improve services include M.G. Bryan, who shifted its business model to meet challenging market demands with a new Rockwell Automation information system that leverages the Microsoft Azure for secure remote access to real-time information from a variety of (distributed) manufacturing assets. Krones also joined forces with Microsoft at CeBIT to formulate a concept for what an industrial communication platform, with real-time networking between the line’s owner and the line’s manufacturer, might look like in the future. These are just a few examples of this work in action.
