Today, I would like to introduce Jason Cremins, chief executive officer of Remote Media, the company behind ‘signagelive’ – the cloud based digital signage platform – to talk about the benefits of business collaboration and some of the steps organisations can take to transform themselves into social enterprises.
Established in 1994, Remote Media is a world leader in the design and development of digital signage software and services.
The company’s decision to implement the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud from salesforce.com has enabled it to boost sales productivity and enhance customer service delivery. Since migrating to the new solution, Remote Media has experienced a 100 per cent increase in sales productivity and a ten-fold increase in digital signage trial requests.
Remote Media is using a blend of social media tools and cloud-based solutions to drive its transition into a ‘social enterprise.’
“The key is making yourself accessible as a business,” says Cremins. “I recognise that we need to be there for our customers whenever they need us. However, we also need to be able to communicate with them across their chosen platform. In a growing number of cases, this means social networking tools – so we use these on a day to day basis to engage with customers.”
“Where a cloud-based platform can play a key role is in providing a collaborative environment, either internally or across an extended project team, often based in a range of locations around the world, to ensure the services we provide customers are of the highest possible standard,” he continues.
“Using collaborative tools in the cloud, our sales teams share information informally amongst themselves about the status of leads in order to reach a consensus view on each opportunity. Our senior sales engineers make particularly active use of these kinds of tools to keep everyone updated on leads they are working on.
“We also believe in spreading the word about business collaboration to distributors, resellers and other business partners,” adds Cremins. “We encourage them to use the same cloud-based platform so that they can share knowledge across the team, (including information about data trials), register leads and opportunities and produce relevant reports.”
“The ability to access this kind of information from anywhere, ‘all-in-one-place’ in the cloud, is critical to driving the success of the company,” says Cremins. “I can get a comprehensive 360º view of all the key performance indicators (KPIs) – including new trial numbers, how many resellers have been signed up, total revenues; licence retention rates and the number of people renewing beyond the initial period.”
From our perspective at salesforce.com, Remote Media is typical of many forward-looking SMEs today that understand the potential of the cloud and social media tools to provide the foundation for their migration into social enterprises and help drive business advantage. Increasingly, SMEs need to follow their lead and tap into the business benefits that this new approach provides.
Fail to do so and they will increasingly risk being left behind by their more far-sighted competition.
For further information on Remote Media go to: www.signagelive.com
