Microsoft has identified four major pillars as the core drivers for digital transformation. Leading digital change requires leaders to have a vision of how to transform their company for a digital world. For most businesses, the place to focus first is the customer. The first pillar we will be exploring is engaging customers. By building natural, tailored experiences by harnessing data, companies are able to gain a complete view of their customer. Using this data, companies can draw actionable insights that can deliver personalization at scale and achieve a segment of one.

Customer engagement starts by understanding customer behavior. Intelligence plays a critical role in understanding and dissecting massive amounts of data to recognize patterns of sentiment and behavior across a customer base.

With the rise of mobile and social technologies, customers are now more powerful than ever. Their always-connected status and ability to find information in seconds puts them in control of their own experiences, and this trend has forced business of all sizes to rethink how they engage and connect with customers.

We are no longer focused on “touching points” during the marketing, sales, and customer service process, but instead find a need to engage in meaningful, ongoing relationships that involve frequent online and real-world interactions.

Tips on How to Engage Customers

• Customer centricity integrated across the business: Get everyone in the organization to be customer obsessed, focus on satisfaction, align customer experience and strategy, create seamless service experiences, and act based on customer insight.
• Creating fans and segments of one: Go where your customers are, personalize based on customer insights, and turn customers into engaged advocates who love your products.
• Data-driven customer insights: Take advantage of high-quality, data-driven insights and create experiences that customers really want.
• Marketing leaders as technology decision makers: Partner with IT on technology decisions and tools needed to get ahead of the competition.

Customer engagement starts by understanding customer behavior. Intelligence plays a critical role in understanding and dissecting massive amounts of data to recognize patterns of sentiment and behavior across our customer base. The roadmap for a digital-first business translates into these key priorities:

• Build the infrastructure to enable customer engagement, such as telemetry, a 360-degree view of the customer, and modern commerce systems.
• Drive viral find, try, and buy opportunities that help cross-sell and upsell, and build these capabilities into our product services.
• Ensure core services are API (application platform interface) enabled to allow simpler integration.