Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise, recently shared his thoughts on best practices in the software industry.
Tell us about your firm.
For over 25 years, Casewise BPA & EA solutions have assisted over 3,500 global organizations to understand and optimize their business operations. Our main mission is to enable companies to have a comprehensive understanding of their processes and information systems.
The Casewise Suite provides the integrated, adaptable, and flexible framework you need to align our clients IT and business strategies to obtain desired business outcomes. Casewise’s featured EA solution leverages social communication technology to enable collaboration that delivers true end-to-end best practices, governance and compliance driven process improvement within our client enterprise so it becomes part of their corporate culture and DNA.
Casewise is based in 9 locations, 8 countries, represented by over 120 employees
Tell us about the challenges facing software companies today?
Digital business has grown in the last 3 years, representing around 30% of our revenue by end of 2013; and expected to represent around 75% by end of 2016.
The percentage of online business is a B-to-B environment is still low, compare to a physical one; but we should be in no doubt that online commerce is the new standard.
The major difference between these two types of sales is the recurring revenue. The physical sale generates a one off revenue, when the online one will ensure a long recurring revenue – subject that we can retain your client over the time. One of the biggest hurdles for the digital economy!
The online business model offers a few issues:
Customer information:
- The digital world is all about data! Data is the foundation for any performing client retention strategy – following and engaging with your clients.
Customer retention:
- The “passive opt-out”: clients with insufficient funds in their bank account
- Credit cards expire and merchants do not have the updated details
Constant evolution:
- The online economy is evolving and requires organizations to adapt their sales strategy and themselves very quickly – agility is now mandatory.
What is your firm doing to overcome these challenges?
Digital has changed the game! Our customers have become cyber customers, and are expecting different ways to communicate and interact with their suppliers. They have also become sophisticated and informed buyers, influencers and potential advocates for brands.
Their expectations are high and precise: social, personalized and interactive service with a unique user experience (Design doesn’t just make things beautiful, it makes them work).
It is why a clear digital strategy is needed to be successful in this new era:
- Unique, interactive and personalized user experience
- Consistency and real time
- And finally a strong engagement with your customers through social & viral strategies
At Casewise, we strongly believe that the Digital world resonates with sustainable and long term relationship with our clients. It is why we have been shifting to a subscription mode, known as Software as a Service, in the last 3 years
In this dynamic & digital business model, the ability to optimize and personalize the end to end customer experience, from content to multiple funnels and check out options, is changing the game.
What do you consider to be the best practices in your industry?
First, we need to ask ourselves “who is the leader in this market, and why?”
With no hesitation, I would mention salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing leader with their social and mobile cloud technologies—including its flagship sales and CRM applications.
With $3.0 billion annual revenue in less than 10 years, we can say that sf.com has defined the standards for any businesses going to the cloud and proposing software as a service.
Their offering is crystal clear: scalable, cost efficient, customizable and user friendly.