Best of February: Check Out Our Favorite Reads

Each month brings enlightening and inspiring new content to the startup world. At WalkMe, we like to compile a list of our favorite articles published each month in order to share the wisdom with our readers.

This Month, give your company a makeover with this excellent list of articles containing insights to help improve customer satisfaction. This list details innovative engagement, CX and marketing tactics, as well as in-house improvements for increased productivity.

We hope you find these articles as useful as we did!  

CEN Member Chat: The Intersection of Digital Marketing & Sales Effectiveness

The companies that gain and maintain their customer’s attention do so by serving the customer’s needs or interests in a personalized and customized way.  Cindy Zhou, Constellation Research VP & Principal Analyst, discusses topics from achieving successful digital marketing results to sales effectiveness by utilizing key marketing trends.

Digital Transformation Has Forever Changed IT Measurement

Significant metrics that matter within a business context become the driving force for behavioral changes within an IT organization. The way in which metric effectiveness has changed as technology evolved has left an impact on how companies utilize key data.

Bill Keyworth Vice from IDC Research focuses on IT Operational Excellence and explains the advantages of applying IT metrics to successful IT organizations in order to measure the efficiency of the company’s business goals.

Balancing Enterprise Innovation with Business and IT Goals

With innovation, “positive thinking rules,” which is exactly the trait which executives seek out in their potential hires. Free-thinkers are a goldmine of innovation and creativity. Joe Pucciarelli from IDC outlines steps with which IT execs can take in order to ensure the type of innovation within their organizations that leads to technological success.

Top Trends for CRM in 2017- It’s All About Differentiated (Digital) Experiences  

While customer-centricity was once solely determined by company executives, it is now dictated mostly by the customer. In the generation of AI and IoT, the customer is the one who decides how successful their experience is with the company by expressing their need to easily interact with them.

Kate Leggett from Forrester research outlines the top CRM trends in her annual report, which provides a compass to understanding the user experiences customers expect and desire.

Drive Revenue with Great CX- and Math!  

Forrester’s Customer experience analyst Laura Garvin shares her secrets to linking revenue to CX for increased levels of success. Garvin discusses the methods which she uses to improve customer experience in order to see the results in revenue.

By utilizing unique data models to determine the relationship between CX and revenue potential, she discovered three main predictive models which she implemented to increase success. You too can accurately predict how a revamp in your customer experience will impact your revenue with these useful models.

Salesforce Einstein Promises AI Applications that ‘Just Work’

In this article from last month (I wanted to share this month), Doug Henschen from Constellation Research discusses Salesforce’s recent announcement of Salesforce Einstein. The implementation of their Einstein artificial intelligence is part of the company’s two-plus-year strategy, Salesforce hopes to craft an automated data management system like no other. The goal of the Einstein app is to help direct users’ attention to what’s most important. This is the beginning of a venture to release even more advanced apps for the average user.

Simplification, Complexity, and Complication 

Simplification is a quest in the era of complexity. Achieving true simplification takes great dedication and perseverance – according to Gartner analyst Hank Barnes.  Barnes believes that a marketer’s job is to “make it easier for customers to buy and for sellers to sell,” although obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of successful marketing requires an extensive process.

Dive in to Barnes’ guide on how to execute a simple marketing method in order to ensure ultimate selling success for your company, and a smooth ride for the customer.

 Customer Engagement: Does it Mean What You Think it Means?

According to Gartner analyst Craig Borowski, many small businesses simply miss the real meaning of the word “engage.” Engaging with your customers may seem straight-forward and simple – as engaging with people is innate to human nature. However, it takes so much more for companies to institute a successful engagement. It takes dedication, preparation, and research. Often companies don’t invest the necessary resources to ensure success.

Borowski takes a look at an optimal engagement scenario to discover the difference it makes when companies actually invest in customer engagement.

Great Companies Obsess Over Productivity, Not Efficiency 

There is a fine line between productivity and efficiency, however that line is pretty significant. Too often, businesses group productivity and efficiency together, assuming they are synonymous, which means that neither one receives the necessary attention.

In this fascinating read, Michael Mankins from Bain & Company provides useful statistics to prove the significance of each concept, and why companies should be focusing on their employees’ productivity over their efficiency.

How 98% of WalkMe Employees Completed Self-Evaluations…on time!

What better way to improve productivity than by using your own company’s software to improve employee performance!? Well, that’s exactly what we did here at WalkMe last month. By utilizing the benefits of WalkMe’s technology, 98% of employees finished their self-evaluations on time, and by the following week 100% were completed. Now, that’s a productive system worth investing in.