How digital transformations are helping businesses adapt to the changing workplace environment.
On 15th June, CloudShift & Salesforce were delighted to sponsor the BisNow webinar on ‘Transformative Technologies – Navigating the New Workplace’. During the event, Abi Chan, Head of Customer Solutions at CloudShift, explained how the need for digitisation and automation has become increasingly more pressing for businesses as their customers needs and workplace is constantly changing.
Abi explained that having taking many customers through digital transformation journeys in the past 18 months, we have identified three key strategic themes that drive our customers to invest in technology. These are: ‘making operations more efficient’; ‘improving the employee experience’; ‘improving the customer experience.’
Making Operations More Efficient
Improving the Employee Experience
Secondly, we are seeing an increased use of ‘customer facing’ tools as a way to ensure that the employees ‘return to the workplace’ is as smooth as possible. Feedback and survey tools through clouds such as Marketing Cloud and Surveys, provides companies with the opportunity to gain intel gauge employee satisfaction. Features can also be used to track office spaces and ensure that the transition to working in the office is a safe as possible.
Improving the Customer Experience
Thirdly, a push to improve the customer experience has also seen much digitisation. For example, in the real estate industry, there has been an increased demand for marketing processes that are personalised and highly targeted to each customer. On the sales side, there has been a recent surge for technology that allows documents to be sent electronically, such as E-signatures. On the customer service front, there has been a drive for online portals and remote booking services. All of which aim to make the customer’s transition back to the workplace as seamless as possible.
Developing a Single Source of Truth
A key theme for the event was having a single source of truth for customer data to drive value in each of these three areas above. There has been a rapid rise in customers driving a data centred cultural change through embedding insights, reports and dashboards within their internal CRM. This ensures relevant customer information and insights is presented to their employees so they are empowered to make data-driven decisions. The majority of customers are driving more proactive behaviours through actionable insights, such as alerting teams when there is a change in the process of their customer engagement. Additionally, customers who want to create more data-driven culture across their organisations have really driven the use of AI technologies.
How Fora have adapted to periods of rapid change
Alongside Abi, Judith Kleine Holthaus, Head of Data & Insights for Fora Space, was also on the panel. As a resident of Fora office spaces at CloudShift, we were excited to hear how Fora has adapted to this period of change as a workspace provider.
Fora has recognised that hybrid spaces are going to become a necessity, as people begin to transition back into the office. After over a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, most office workers now possess the resources necessary to be able to work from home. This has increasingly led to the awareness that the emotional desire to work in the office is just as important as the functional desire. Workspaces have to be desirable places to work in order to incentivise people to come in, rather than remaining in the comfort of their homes.
Despite these challenging times, Fora have been able to experiment more than ever with space and think about new ways to use it. Fora has realised that in every business there are different needs, therefore an office space needs to be adaptable so that a business can cater for all of its employees’ needs. Not only will each industry have different office space needs, but each team and each individual within that business will also have different requirements.
In addition to the physical office space, Fora also explained how they use Salesforce to maintain and build relationships with their residents during the pandemic, including tailored content to support their wellbeing and return to the office, as well as creating a Customer 360 and central view for everyone at Fora to gain the latest customer insights to have personalised, relevant conversations.
A key takeaway from the BisNow event is it is clear to see that the future of the workplace looks exciting with a hunger for tech and a hunger to return to the workplace.
