Don’t know where to start on your Power Platform journey?
Microsoft’s Power Platform offers businesses great opportunities to serve customers better, reduce costs, solve challenges and make processes work better. Ideas are developing into reality at accelerated rates. When equipped with the right technological capabilities, these ideas can equip you to overcome existing business challenges. They even have the power to create new value and position your business at the competitive forefront.
There are exponential benefits of automation, but getting started can feel daunting. To ensure growth, however, it’s necessary to go outside the comfort zone. The time of pandemic has shown us that we should expect to adapt as new business opportunities and technological advancements appear; the next normal is to expect change and move in front of it. Fortunately, Power Platform lowers the bar of entry for success with technology by offering a low code / no-code solution.
The best way to get to success is to start small with provable success. In this post, we’ve collected together our essential list of 7 ‘C’s to help give you a quick start with Power Platform solutions.
Let’s dive in to get inspired!
Customers
During the pandemic, it became very clear that customer-focused organizations are the ones that will survive. The first thing a customer-oriented business will ask is: How can you make things better for a customer? That’s a key question. In reality, many organizations do not understand their customers very much at all. Here’s an example: If your boss asked you, who is your most profitable customer? Would you know? Would they know, and would they agree with you?
It used to be the case that people simply evaluate customers in terms of the amount of turnover that the customer produced. However, it is very clear now that customers bring value in different ways. For example, you might find that there is an influencer talking about your products and your services on social media. How could you calculate their influence? The influencer may not be spending that much money with you in comparison with other customers. However, they may be enticing other customers. Not only that, they may be helping other customers to remain your
customers instead of looking at the competition. So who is your most valuable customer?
And how can you serve them better? If your business does not know the answer to this, then the business needs to find out. Customers like faster service, and that’s one possible area of innovation.
The Power Platform offers UI-based robotic process automation (RPA). With RPA, businesses automate applications by teaching Power Automate to mimic the mouse movements and keyboard entries of a human user. The process appears as if a robot were using the computer. For the actual customer, RPA can expedite the process. The Power Automate Desktop is easy to use for people who do not know how to program code. The process is simple, with the Power Automate flow replicating and recording the task to copy later.
If the business is not talking to its most valuable customers and making things better for them, the leadership can be pretty sure that their competitors are aiming to do just that. This brings us to our second ‘C’; competition.
Competition
Competition involves directing attention away from one organisation and shining it onto your own business. Attention spans can be very limited, however. What can you do to make your customer interactions more interesting? Have you considered, for example, having a chatbot on your site. The industry is now showing an emergence of C-commerce, which is a subset of e-commerce. C-commerce is becoming much more prevalent, and chatbots are one way of staying ahead by including c-commerce as part of the customer communication channel.
Businesses could be able to set up completely automated situations to n orchestrate the customer conversation through the chatbot using Microsoft’s AI services and Power Automate along with RPA. For example, your customer to come to your site to interact with a chatbot. The chatbots could automate the whole process from interaction, to purchase, right through to delivery of the product and ensuring payment. A chatbot is more than simply a few sentences on your website. C-commerce interactions are increasingly becoming more popular and a great way to personalize customer service. Looking at your competition and the future of technology can help you to compete.
Capitalize
How can you improve a process and reduce costs by saving time? One of the costs in an organization that is not always readily recognized is the cost of lost productivity. It’s sometimes easier to discover it in manufacturing sites for example. However, if people are constantly working through bad processes, and the knowledge worker industry, then it may not be so clear how to measure, calculate and understand The impact of bad processes Improving processes helps us to reduce cost by saving time. To save time, we have to understand the next C – challenge.
Challenge
What are the challenges in the organization that you could improve through automation? What problems with your data can you solve? When we think of capitalizing on existing processes by improving them. Challenges mean addressing new problems. People are incredibly adaptable, and they are very creative about finding workarounds. Traditionally, however, the problem has been that the workarounds become the process itself.
Which challenges would you consider automating in your organization? These challenges could, for example, involve collecting useful employee feedback on how to make things better. The Power Platform can certainly help you with that, through the provision of Microsoft Forms, Logic Apps, Power Automate, and even using some as your databases. Meeting these challenges is within your reach, using Power Platform technologies. Enterprises could even automate something as simple as saving email attachments automatically so you can find information easily later. How can you know if the business efforts are making a difference? This brings us on to the fifth ‘C’, which is ‘Calculate’.
Calculate
How can we make our data work better? We can use the Power Platform to help us to understand and smooth out processes better, we can collect better data. Then, we can visualize that data using Power BI. Power BI will help the business to listen to the customer voice better.
So far, we have five C’s, customers, compete, capitalize, challenges and calculate. However, all of these concepts require one crucial asset to be impactful: collaboration.
Collaboration
The old ways of thinking about work are very outdated. Particularly with the advent of the COVID pandemic, the conversation has turned to the future of work. How can we help people t collaborate, imagine and spark ideas through virtual and remote meetings and communication? Enabling collaboration has been such a key topic for discussion throughout the whole pandemic, and the debate is very much here to stay.
Collaboration is a crucial part of any business success. Fortunately, the Power Platform offers very many different ways of increasing collaboration. As a simple start, it is possible to set up Team Flows so that automation is shared between team members.
There is another key ingredient that will help businesses to go even further: community.
Community
One key item that will help you to facilitate collaboration is community. By participating in a community, you can help your organization to consider all of these ‘C’s when they are starting on their journey with Microsoft’s Power Platform. The community can help you to learn, connect and network through your interactions with others.
It can spark ideas, introduce you to people in our network, help you solve problems and help you to grow. It could also help you in your own career as well. For example, you could be a mentor to other people. Mentorship and coaching would grow your leadership skills.
.By participating in the community, you can grow your leadership skills in a variety of different ways. Perhaps you might consider presenting or mentoring small groups of people. You could participate in roundtables, you could run user groups, or support other people who are taking responsibility for these community efforts. To summarise, there are so many different ways that you can really build a career for yourself and others by the community. You can also really increase your reputation by helping others while helping your business to succeed at the same time. The more power we give away to other people, the more influence we have in our communities and in our workplace. The secret to collaboration is to help other people.
Also, it’s great to be able to meet people who have the same passions, and the same problems that you do. Community is a place for people to meet and interact, share, learn and connect. These industry links can turn into friendships through shared experiences, and learnings.
We do hope that we will see you in Summit NA. This is an in-person event, which is a great way to start your Power Platform journey. By attending Summit NA, you will be able to start your career journey supported by the community.
Using community is a way of interacting with other people is such a great way to help you on your career journey. Not only that, it’s also a good way of supporting your business to be successful on the Power Platform journey. The community will help you to see ways that you can support your business as well as accelerate your own career growth.
Community helps to underpin all of the ‘C’s discussed here. By participating in the community, you can help your business to think smarter about your customers, your competition, ways to capitalize and how to solve challenges. It can also help you to support your business by better reporting and education. So why not join us at Summit NA? We look forward to seeing you there.
So why not join us at Summit NA? We look forward to seeing you there. If you use the promo code Stirrup10, then you will get 10% off. To register, click here and please do remember to use your promo code.
When: October 12-15, 2021
• Where: George R. Brown Convention Center | Houston, TX
• Why: Because You Deserve to Get Back to Business and Back to Community
See you there!