Becoming customer-centric has never been more critical—or attainable.

The days of growth through product differentiation alone have passed. Customer experience is increasingly replacing the traditional differentiators such as price and product quality. How well your employees know your customers and work together with your partners to give them a rewarding experience can determine your business success.

In the changing world of business, product commoditization fueled by global competition and outsourcing has left many manufacturers dependent upon after-market services for up to 30 percent of their revenue. This creates a challenge to companies that have traditionally organized themselves around products. To survive, businesses must evolve toward an increasingly customer-centric model. They must listen to their customers, not only to maintain a consistently high quality of service, but to identify unmet needs that represent new revenue opportunities-before their competition does. To address the growing complexity of the value chain in a global market, companies must increasingly rely on partners, suppliers, and outsourcing to manage segments of the customer experience. This creates its own set of potential problems, including inconsistency, lower quality, and lost visibility to some customer interactions. Businesses need to extend their customer management programs to collaborate across the value chain and involve both suppliers and partners in improving the customer experience.

It is essential to foster a culture where customer experience is the top consideration of every team member. This requires not only the right tools and processes, but also recognition of the importance of collaboration and communication with customers and partners.

Leaders across industries, from large to midsize organizations, are seeking to empower their customer-facing people and partners with tools that improve customer insight and simplify how these parties work together. They want Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technologies that are simple to use, adapt to their existing workflows, and are designed not just to capture a pre-selected list of transaction details but to help companies:

• Collaborate with customers and partners and resolve incidents through satisfaction surveys, online customer self-service resources, wikis, and blogs.
• Work with customer feedback and partners to drive innovation from concept to commercialization by enabling people to work together on the research, design, and development of new products.
• Share information, tools, and infrastructures among employees, suppliers, distributors, business partners, and the customer in a closed-loop network.

Companies that demonstrate comprehensive collaboration across the extended enterprise can enrich the customer experience. The positive effect on the customer experience can generate more loyalty, retention, and demand, and help the business better manage its costs and improve its products and services.

At Microsoft, we believe the differentiator for successful companies is their employees. From product innovation to responsive customer service, it is people working together who shape the customer experience. Our goal is to help your company achieve results by providing tools that help you interact with your customers at a higher level, in four key ways:

• Simplify how customer-facing teams work together and collaborate with partners and customers, while safeguarding confidential information. Tools include group workspaces, automated alerts, integrated messaging, and Web-based meetings.
• Enhance the ability of customer-facing employees to respond effectively to customer opportunities and needs with integrated communications and quick access to people and information. Features include enterprise search, portals and presence awareness, and messaging capabilities that unlock the value of isolated information.
• Enable sales, marketing, and customer service professionals to work more efficiently and deliver better and faster results for customers, by creating high-impact sales proposals and other documents.
• Integrate communications technology to make it easy for people to stay connected, with a consistent way to manage their communications across multiple channels, applications, and devices-anytime, anywhere.