Midsize consumer product businesses encounter unique challenges when it comes to establishing resilience and seizing opportunities in the future. One of these challenges is meeting the growing demand for personalized products and services that contribute to sustainability and social responsibility. These companies must also have a transparent supply chain and the ability to adapt to market changes to satisfy the need for safety, traceability, and trust. In addition, midsize organizations in all industries face their own set of difficulties. Their size can sometimes provide them with more agility than larger competitors, but it can also make them vulnerable due to limited cash reserves, reliance on complex supply chains, and insufficient redundant resources. Finally, attracting top talent remains a persistent issue.
Midsize businesses faced significant challenges in 2020 due to the pandemic, including disrupted supply chains, remote work, and widespread business closures. However, some midsize businesses were able to successfully navigate these challenges by prioritizing collaboration, data-driven decision-making, agility, and cross-business insights. These businesses are called “interconnected businesses,” and they are well-positioned to offer exceptional customer and employee experiences, build resilience, and adapt to rapid changes in the market. By following best practices in areas like consumers, employees, insights, and processes, businesses can become more interconnected and better equipped to seize new opportunities and pursue growth in the future. In this blog our consultants share their tips and best practices to guide and support businesses looking to become more interconnected.
Engaged Customers – Boosting Customer Experience
Enhancing customer experiences ranks as a high priority for midsize consumer goods companies for the next three years, only superseded by business growth. This aligns with the growing demand from consumers for personalized and innovative experiences. Furthermore, consumers expect manufacturers to showcase sustainable practices and are prepared to pay more for brands that resonate with their values.
Gaining an understanding of consumer needs is crucial for ensuring product availability in the correct channel and at the appropriate time. However, around 40% of midsize consumer goods companies report that adapting to changing consumer demands presents the biggest hurdle to achieving this objective, possibly due to a deficiency in real-time data or the ability to analyze it effectively.
Customer service plays a significant role in enhancing the customer experience, yet evidence suggests that midsize companies may overlook the contribution of other departments in supporting exceptional experiences, such as sales and marketing, operations, finance, and IT.
For instance, if a supplier fails to provide a crucial component for your product on time, it results in a pause in the production line and delays in delivery. Similarly, any failure in the coordination between the marketing and sales teams on new prospects may lead to losing them to a more responsive competitor.
Better business connectivity to boost collaboration, especially regarding data, will enhance your capability to meet these expectations.
In the new era of success, advanced technologies are becoming increasingly accessible to midsize businesses through cloud solutions.
To improve customer experience, Altivate’s consultants advise to consider these best practices:
- Audit your processes and identify barriers. For example, is your website difficult to navigate or order fulfilment slow? Every team has a role to play in Customer Experience (CX.)
- Improve collaboration between departments. Set up ashared databasethat teams and systems can access to manage information centrally instead of in silos.
- Be available. Serve customers wherever and however they prefer—online, mobile, social media, etc.—and deliver consistent experiences across channels. This builds trust and loyalty.
Technology can help and here is how?
Tools like CRM software, chatbots, and e-commerce solutions improve communication, understanding of needs, and reduce data silos.
Cloud-based customer experience solutions with machine learning and AI like SAP Customer Experience are now available to midsize businesses. They spot inefficiencies, identify unmet needs, and integrate with systems like supply chain, finance, and inventory management.
Empowering Employees
In both prosperous and challenging times, companies require a flexible and resilient workforce – employees who feel secure, engaged, and productive. That’s why enhancing the employee experience is a top priority for midsize businesses.
To achieve this, HR and business leaders should pay attention to employee feedback and strategically distribute resources to meet the company’s needs. Yet, accomplishing this can be more complex than it sounds.
While you might have tools dedicated to particular HR functions such as scheduling or monitoring attendance, this compartmentalized method doesn’t provide a holistic view of the entire workforce and business operations. Consequently, vital business strategies aimed at addressing issues like skill shortages, high employee turnover, and low productivity might fail.
In a situation where everything from employees’ workplace to pay structure is uncertain, even the most comprehensive contingency plans can become irrelevant. Nowadays, HR and business leaders must formulate plans based on real-time evaluations of existing resources, immediate needs, and long-term strategy.
To meet these demands, midsize businesses require robust platforms for gathering and analyzing employee data, complemented by a management that not only listens but also acts on employee feedback.
To improve Human Experience, Altivate’s consultants advise to consider these best practices:
Key areas of best practices include empowering your employees, fostering open communication, and knowing your purpose. With the recent shift to remote work due to the pandemic, a majority of millennials and Gen Z employees expressed a preference for more remote work options. Trusting them to manage their productivity, including their learning and development, motivates better performance.
Engaging in continuous dialogue with employees and gathering regular feedback, for example, through surveys, ensures they feel heard. It’s also important to communicate the company’s mission and highlight the broader objectives employees are working towards.
How can Technology help?
Technology plays a significant role in creating an engaged and productive workforce. Employees satisfied with their company’s tech are more likely to have a positive overall employee experience. Modern cloud-based human experience management (HXM) software, like SAP SuccessFactors, harnesses technologies such as automation, chatbots, and machine learning to empower HR professionals and employees. It provides personalized learning suggestions, notifies managers of met KPIs, and connects HR strategies to tangible business outcomes.
Actionable Insights
Insights are vital for every business, regardless of size. They help predict and meet consumer demands, ensure employee satisfaction, and foresee potential disruptions. Businesses that had a clear understanding of their supply chain or could predict increased demand for certain products prior to the pandemic would have managed the disruption more effectively.
However, data and analytics pose a challenge for many midsize organizations. 18% of midsize consumer goods companies identify a lack of sufficient data as a significant obstacle in achieving strategic priorities, and 28% report difficulty in deriving insights from their data.
One of the primary challenges in transitioning to a data-centric business model is securing employee acceptance. Data should be viewed as an essential part of decision-making, not an inconvenience or an afterthought. Furthermore, if your company lacks the infrastructure for cross-functional teams to share and access data securely, valuable insights can become compartmentalized and overlooked.
Another hurdle to becoming a data-driven organization is finding skilled workers capable of processing and analyzing vast amounts of data. Moreover, even if your business has an analytical solution in place, not all employees might possess the necessary data literacy to interpret it.
To gain better insights on your business performance our consultants recommend the following:
Optimize your organization’s data management, consider implementing the following practices:
- Create a “single source of truth” by consolidating all your data in one place. This will not only break down information silos but also improve productivity and streamline processes by giving teams access to accurate and up-to-date information.
- Expand your search for data sources beyond the usual suspects. Look into the built-in analytics dashboards of tools you already use, like CRM and accounting software. Also, explore external channels such as social media platforms to gain a broader perspective.
- Increase data literacy by educating employees on how data can inform decision-making. Combat resistance to data culture by providing training in basic data visualization and analytics and consider using visualization tools or hiring outside consultants for assistance.
How can Technology help?
Leverage technology to manage and analyze your data more efficiently. Cloud-based analytics software can retrieve, analyze, consolidate, and democratize your data across teams and functions. For example, SAP Analytics Cloud provides a comprehensive solution for gaining insights and making data-backed decisions across your business.
To get the most out of your analytics tools, it’s imperative to host and manage your data properly. This ensures compliance with data governance, protection, and privacy requirements while also enabling you to compete with larger rivals. Solutions like SAP Data Management solutions are designed for this purpose.
Businesses that successfully optimize these three fundamental pillars – Consumers, Employees, and Insights – leveraging best practices and robust technologies are better positioned for agility, employee-focused approaches, and data-informed decisions.
This eventually fosters standout experiences and resilience, setting your consumer products business apart in the future and enabling competition with larger firms. As seen by over 250,000 midsize SAP customers, Altivate will continually support you in maintaining connectivity and propelling your business forward.
