AIOPs: why sales leaders should care

At a time when consumer confidence is volatile, and easily dented by health or employment concerns, sales leaders know that it’s never been more important for companies to offer an excellent customer experience (CX). 

But a 2021 study by global strategy firm McKinsey finds that while nearly two-thirds of respondents ranked the ability of their organizations to act on CX issues in near real time as among their top three priorities, only 13% expressed certainty that they could achieve that today using existing systems. 

At Avantra, we know that the fault often lies not with the systems themselves, but with the way they are configured and monitored. And that’s hardly surprising. A complex sales process that supports available-to-promise or configure-price-quote capabilities has many moving parts. 

At companies that run SAP, that process can span multiple applications that cover customer relationship management (CRM), field service, finance, inventory, manufacturing and supply chain operations. Any issue occurring in any one of these diverse systems can make it difficult for sales teams to:

• Quickly assess product availability
• Offer accurate pricing and customization options
• Stay up-to-date on customer decision-making
• Answer customer questions and resolve issues

When sales teams are struggling, they typically turn to the IT department for help, which of course has its own KPIs to consider. 

This is where Avantra can help. Our technology is designed specifically to bridge the divide between line of business managers and IT operations teams, helping them to better understand each others’ worlds. 

With that understanding - as well as our AI and machine learning capabilities to monitor and remediate systems problems - sales and IT teams can work together on improvements that ensure that technology underpinning core business processes runs smoothly, so that both sales KPIs and IT KPIs are consistently met. Together, they can help to deliver results that matter to the business. 

To get involved, sales leaders don’t need a computer science degree or an intimate understanding of IT operations - just a willingness to collaborate with IT and explore the options available. It’s time for line of business leaders to proactively recognize and support the requirement for highly functional IT systems, managed by their IT counterparts.

To find out more about how Avantra can help organizations connect the dots between line-of-business performance and IT operations, read our E-book "The Road to Business Success and AIOPs: Why Business Leaders Should Care".