The address, delivered by Wayne Morris, corporate vice-president MBS, focused on how people and businesses can reimagine the way they engage with customers, build brand relevance, and collaborate to stay ahead of the ever-changing market and business environments.
"This is truly the era of the customer where people are more informed and better connected than ever before. Technology has the power to unite and empower people at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most," said Kethan Parbhoo, business solutions director of Microsoft South Africa.
As the world grows smaller and more complicated, technology is looked upon to enable better connections with business, customers and suppliers. Businesses urgently need solutions to unite and empower their people so they can best serve and nurture their customers.
"Microsoft is positioned to deliver agile, integrated business solutions that will help organisations in this new era by delivering amazing customer experiences," said Parbhoo. He explained that traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions focused only on assisting companies in automating their sales, service and marketing.
A new aspect that CRM solutions also need to address in the era of the consumer is social CRM and enterprise social networking, with Microsoft's numerous acquisitions in recent years, enabling the company to fulfil this new need.
Dynamics provides businesses with the ability to stay pervasively connected to customers and resources by delivering the right social tools in the context of what people are doing, meaning that clients are quickly able to comment on posts or start contextual conversations, for example.
Furthermore, users have access to embedded real-time company and contact info in order to help marketing, sales and account management professionals engage more effectively with prospects, which will result in them win more deals as a result of less time spent researching and, more crucially, more time selling.
