Manufacturing customers complete over half of the buyer’s journey completely online before even engaging directly with a company. Because of this and many other increasingly digital trends, manufacturers are turning to more customer-centric strategies. Operations and technology that support these leading manufacturers include tools for rebate management, B2B relationship management, field service, and self-service portals. But to succeed with any of these technologies, your organization first has to clearly understand the shift from a product focus to customer focus on a cultural level. 

In this blog, we’ll take some time to review three key solutions manufacturers are after when they shift to a customer-focused approach. Thought leadership and training sessions that explain the importance of these solution areas are crucial for manufacturers making major technological changes and transforming the way business has always been done. Once the value of these solutions is understood by everyone, adoption and successful results are just one implementation project away.

Unified processes across front and back offices

Crucial to becoming a truly customer-centric organization is ensuring your front- and back-office processes are in sync. Manufacturers with the systems, operations, and employee buy-in to support this harmonization are flexible and able to quickly adapt when new ways of buying products or services come about. In our own experience, we’ve worked with manufacturing clients who established more flexible contracting processes in part because their front and back offices were on the same page more than ever before. All of this is made possible by ensuring your data model is unified across the front and back offices and your products/services are structured in a way that allows for flexible contracting and selling. 

Sharing and working off of the same information, front-office departments like sales and customer service can update account and contact information without worrying about the same information getting lost on its way to back-office finance or billing departments. Better yet, the customer quickly notices how easy and seamless these interactions are with the company, building long-term loyalty and years of repeating revenue. Additionally, when back-office departments have changes to product structures or contracting terms, these changes will…

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