“Tangibility, not just fancy slideshows or consultant demos where everything works out perfectly.”
“New ideas on changing our way of working!”
“Could we learn to do things differently from what we’re used to?”
These were some of the expectations our customers had for their visit to the first Dynamics 365 Experience Room in Finland, located at Innofactor’s Espoo Campus.
Talking and pondering replaced by tangible action
When an organization is thinking about ways to digitalize its processes, I often give the customer a vision of the future where the various teams of the organization can cooperate without silo mentality, the customer enjoys a seamless customer experience and the new operating models for sales make the work much more efficient. But how to give each customer, sitting in a room lit by fluorescent lights, the feeling that the work of their organization might actually soon reach an entirely new level? How to inspire them and make them believe in the power of change as an opportunity instead of a threat when their e-mails are bursting with clients asking about delivery times and their phones are ringing as their vendors ask the same question?
Inspiration requires tangibility
Many customers already ask about the chance to try and test the systems in situations corresponding to their needs. We have received excellent results from various PoCs and MoCs over the years and used them to reach entirely new ways of working after starting at a conceptual level.
But what if the organization finds it hard to specify the idea of what they truly want and need and what is actually possible? Customers can explore various systems using the free 30-day trials available for download on Microsoft’s website, in addition to which there are lots of excellent videos on YouTube supporting technical use. These tools are, of course, useful but they do not help us clarify how the organization actually benefits from all this, how the operations can be enhanced with the deployment or how to ensure that the system is adopted as part of everyday work.
What does digital transformation look like in practice?
A light on the table started to flash, causing some sort of an alarm, a notification of a deviation.
“There, you see, deviation detected!” laughed the CEO of a public company, winking at a colleague on the other side of the desk who, after a moment, exclaimed enthusiastically yet in slight astonishment, “Really? Is that what the alarm was about? I want one of those right now!”
An efficient digitalized process was able to surprise a customer in the middle of the Experience Room by using an automated action. During the morning, we had already started to test how the information collected at various stages of marketing, sales and field service and the real-time communications between the customer and the supplier can be effortlessly conducted. A story that was imaginative but created out of real situations and examples was a natural path to extensive testing of the new, effortless Dynamics tools. If something felt challenging at first, my colleague Juhani confidently guided the group onwards. As in projects, we train people and ensure that each person knows how to use the system in a manner that supports everyday work.
Several Experience Room visitors have been convinced after being allowed to personally experience the new working method. The visitors have been particularly impressed by how the opportunities of social sales can be utilized when forming a 360-degree view of customer relations. After visiting the Experience Room, one sales director immediately expressed their enthusiasm toward utilizing the opportunities of the Sales Navigator in their own organization. One week later, all the salespeople were using the value-adding function. The immediate benefits in the everyday work of B2B salespeople were evident this quickly, as the organization was already using Dynamics Sales which is currently seeing a great deal of development.
Consequently, the first steps of the Experience Room have been effective, allowing organizations to tangibly see how they can enhance and streamline their processes. If you have questions about supporting core business processed with digital solutions, we warmly recommend exploring the Experience Room and signing up for our free-of-charge session directed at the decision-makers of organizations.
