In the past I referred to how video conferencing was an idea that never reached its potential. This is where application versus adoption becomes glaringly obvious.
When video conferencing was first introduced, many of the manufacturers and resellers wanted to sell the enterprise on how video would save them money, specifically travel and business expense.
Where the manufacturers missed the mark was that the users didn’t want to stop traveling and visiting their clients. Video was more useful to augment real life interaction, not to replace it. With the technology early on being hard to use, people found any reason they could to continue doing business the old way and were resistant to adopting the new technology.
As video and collaboration platforms have become more affordable, adoption has been easier. However, to this day many organizations only augment their travel with video, as it has never truly been a replacement for real-life engagement.
In the future adoption is and will continue to be key to being seen as value added or differentiated as organizations will continue to need to improve the expediency by which new products, services and ideas are adopted.
Continuous Improvement: The final driver for supporting client innovation is an organization’s contribution to the continuous improvement of use and the aforementioned adoption of the products and/ or services supplied.
In short, rapid proliferation is shortening the product lifecycle of just about everything a business consumes. However, when you help an organization to maximize their investments you are aiding their ability to innovate. This can be finding ways they can more strategically allocate funds or ways they can integrate new solutions into their existing ones.
One industry that does this very well is the cloud CRM industry. Salesforce, the market leader, offers an Application Exchange where users can further expand the capabilities of their investment in Salesforce by bolting on best of breed applications for supply-chain, social listening, finance and other business process automation areas.
This type of flexible innovation allows the users of Salesforce to maximize their investment in the platform. This also builds interdependence between salesforce users and the solution making the likelihood of defection very low since so much of a user’s business is on the platform.
Make no mistake. SaaS vendors like Salesforce and others do this on purpose to hook their customers in on the solution.
When a strategy has your business tightly integrated to your client’s business and you focus on providing top-notch customer experience you are in the strike zone for unparalleled customer retention.
