As customers become more digital, social and mobile, small and mid-sized businesses have significant opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through a differentiated customer experience, just like their enterprise competitors.
However, those who are unwilling to invest in solutions that embrace the needs of today's marketplace will most certainly be left behind. Consider these facts:
• More than 2 billion consumers are online, spending more time online than watching television, and only 28 percent of consumers prefer to resolve service issues on the phone.
• 96 percent of Gen Y has joined at least one social network, and, in 2010, they outnumbered the Baby Boomer generation.
• By 2015, mobile Internet will surpass fixed Internet, and 40 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds use their mobile devices to make purchases today.
As these new realities shape customer management strategies, many small and medium businesses are scrambling to find solutions that meet customer needs without onerous investment and infrastructure requirements. Unfortunately, many of these decision-makers have been focused on less robust down-market solutions, based on the assumption that integrating a full-service cloud solution requires complex relationships with multiple service providers. Thankfully, that's just not the case.
