It’s no secret that manufacturers must provide a robust, customer-centric eCommerce experience, and you’ve heeded the call. Because your in-house IT team lacked the expertise to build the proper experience, you hired a team of crack professionals, and now you have a shiny new website, a personalized portal experience, a nicely flowing customer journey, a marketing plan, and everything you need. Your internal teams can take care of things going forward. Right?
Not so fast. Customer demands and technology both evolve, and often manufacturers lack staff with the precise digital and marketing skills required to move the dial and continue meeting growth goals. Competition is fierce, and today the beating heart of manufacturing is digital.
There’s a decision to make: Build an in-house team or hire experts. Building an internal team is tough, especially today when there’s a shortage of skilled IT talent, not to mention the great resignation adding upward pressure to wages. Then there’s your marketing. Is it helping your growth? Do you know what needs to be tweaked and when to get the most out of your efforts?
As a manufacturing executive, you know things are rarely one-and-done. There’s always something to be adjusted – oil added to squeaky gears, so to speak – and you know band-aid solutions just create further headaches down the line. You need expert digital services for the long haul with the right mix of talent that really understands your unique industry.
The digital challenges
We know you’re smart. You wouldn’t be a leader in your industry if you weren’t. And you know that putting people with the right skillset in the right position is imperative to run an efficient operation. This matters a great deal in every aspect of manufacturing. Inefficiencies and missteps mean more than lost revenue today; they can have a ripple effect for months and even years to come.
You make a great product and have a great reputation. But reputations can be damaged quickly by a poor eCommerce experience, a glitchy app, or a poorly designed website that leaves customers scratching their heads when they want to find something. There’s a lot at stake as technology continues to innovate and customers want more bells and whistles.
It’s imperative you keep up. But again, it’s that issue of the right person or team for the job. Your IT team may be great at fixing local network issues and managing your ERP. But it’s more than likely that they have little expertise in your digital customer journey, with its many moving parts and nuances, and bandwidth limitations that prevent them from focusing on cloud-based front-office applications.
You’ve spent enough sleepless nights scrambling to catch up because of COVID and the massive move to pretty much all-digital commerce. You spent good money, and it would be a shame to see it go to waste as you fall behind once again. You need the right team to run and operate the digital customer experience, and it’s likely not found on your shop floor or in your IT department, so you’ve come to the realization that you need an outside partner. But not just anyone will do – you need and want a company that knows the manufacturing business intimately, and those are a rare breed.
Make the shift from building it to Run & Operate
You built it, and they came. But face it, you don’t have an in-house team who can maintain applications or deploy necessary enhancements and fixes on an ongoing basis. Your in-house marketing team also needs help planning digital marketing campaigns and generating analytics that will guide the way to your desired business outcomes: Growth with profitability.
Shift7’s Run & Operate services are the perfect solution:
-Keep the technology team and talent that built your application. Even if a big next project phase is months down the road, we can help after you go live and transition to sprints against backlog features to enhance functionality over time.
-Run & Operate your online business with strategic growth goals in mind. We can further enhance your customer experience, improve traffic, increase adoption and conversion rates, and help you boost online revenue and profitability.
We offer Run & Operate packages at different sizes, and we’ll partner with you to identify your needs and put together the expert team to meet your goals. Reach out today.
TL;DR – Key Takeaways:
-Launching your website, app, and customer experience isn’t a one-and-done job – technology and customer experience demands all evolve, and you have to keep up
-Your in-house team likely has skill gaps that are impossible to fill between a dearth of expertise and the great resignation
-To grow, evolve, and prosper, partnering with a team of outside experts is imperative, and they must have manufacturing industry knowledge to be a real asset
-It’s more than just a matter of having the right people for the job – external experts can make the difference between stagnation and growth