Trend 2: The Marketing Tech Revolution
It?s a perennial complaint in the business world: We need toincrease marketing. But that sentiment is not usually connected to a clearsense of the return to be gained for each dollar invested. So it?s usually upto business and finance managers to perform the calculations and either put onthe brakes or open up the purse strings.
If our survey is any indicator, the purse strings areopening up?at least for marketing technologies, which have been demonstratingpretty strong support levels in finance. In last year?s survey, for example,only about 5 percent of midsize and larger organizations indicated that socialcommunications initiatives were getting significant support from finance orbusiness managers; this year, the number is more than 12 percent.
Republic Services, a nationwide waste collection anddisposal firm based in Phoenix, has made new communications technologies afoundation of a much-improved customer relations system. This was essentialbecause, as Director of IT Doug Saunders puts it, ?Trash is a very localbusiness.? There is only so far bricks-and-mortar centralization can go inwaste disposal, leaving Republic with many distributed communications centers.
To break down regional and departmental walls and providebetter customer service, Republic adopted what Saunders calls an ?all of theabove? approach. The company uses a Cisco suite that includes voice, video, IM andCisco?s Quad social software bound together with the Cisco Customer VoicePortal.
?We want the customer to dictate how they communicate andinteract with us,? says Saunders. ?It?s not just phone calls anymore; it?svideo. And they want [to get] analytics back in a real-time fashion, just likethe banks and airlines [provide].?
Click here to read Baseline’s Top 10 Business Trends for 2012.
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