In recent years, an increasing number of companies have embraced the idea of becoming digital enterprises. A successful digital enterprise often involves new technologies and a variety of projects to complete a digital transformation. Since a digital transformation is a journey rather than a single project, it can be difficult to measure the return on the company's investment using traditional methods. Nevertheless, organizations typically want to accelerate the ROI as much as possible. With the advances in AI technology, however, the ROI can be achieved faster, and the transformation can be more extensive and easier as well.

It is no secret that customers have become increasingly demanding in recent years. It often seems that they expect you to know what they want before they do, understand how they prefer to be contacted and know whether they are ready to buy or just shopping. Furthermore, they want you to know which of your messages are of interest to them and deliver only those messages. Even if a customer interacts with you via social media, your mobile app, email, a kiosk located inside your physical store and your website, he or she expects you to track the entire communication journey and deliver content in the proper context. To accomplish this, you need data regarding every customer's purchase history, behavior, location and preferred method of interacting with you. You may already possess the data you need, but that does not necessarily mean that you can turn the data into actionable steps. However, combining the power of Dynamics 365 with the power of Sitecore can help you achieve your goals.

Effective outreach demands that you leverage technology to fulfill the needs of not only your consumers but also the team members who work so hard to see your organization expand. Could Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 help your teams activities evolve from hesitant undertakings into decisively smooth operations?

As global competition has become more intense, most businesses have increased their efforts to retain existing customers. Acquiring a new customer can cost as much as 25 times more than retaining a current customer. To help them reduce customer churn and improve their retention rates, marketers have increasingly turned to CRM technologies. The unprecedented growth of the CRM industry reflects the importance of providing meaningful, engaging experiences to customers as well as the constant evolution of CRM technology. This evolution will continue to bring new trends and innovative technologies during the coming years, but there are several enhancements that you can expect to see in 2017.

The concept of retail personalization has been around for several years. A decade ago, Netflix and Amazon led the industry when it came to personalized experiences for their visitors. Netflix made recommendations based on the visitor's past history or stated preferences — a practice that continues today but was unexpected when it first launched. Amazon was especially adept at using visitors' previous purchases or navigation paths to show items of potential interest to each specific visitor. Other early attempts at personalization included greeting returning visitors by name, enabling site-specific preferences or using different versions of a site for specific audiences.

Marketing technology has come a long way since the new century dawned. As recently as the 1990s, many marketers were still relying more on "gut instinct" than hard facts, but harnessing big data helped them make more informed decisions. What passed for personalized emails was often little more than a mail merge to insert a contact's name. Target audiences were painted with a broad brush that often included more people who had no interest in the product or service than people who might actually become customers. Automated campaigns, predictive analytics, customized content, seamless connections across touchpoints and powerful marketing analytics have helped transform how — and to whom — marketers are delivering their messages.

Launching a digital transformation project can be scary. Customers are demanding more, managers are expecting to see rewards and employees are hoping that the project will make their jobs easier. You know that your project is not going to progress from inception to deployment without a few issues, but you are also aware that seemingly minor issues can snowball into project failure. With so much at stake, how can you reduce your risks and feel confident about the eventual success of your project?

Companies launch a digital transformation initiative for a variety of reasons. Some are looking to respond to changes in customer demands and preferences, others are trying to remain competitive and some companies see the opportunity to expand into new markets. Whatever your organization's reason for undertaking a digital transformation project, you will need to plan and budget wisely if you want the project to be a success. Considering that IT budgets are set to increase by almost 2 percent in 2017, according to Gartner, the pressure to provide detailed, accurate budgets is likely to increase as well. If you are responsible for the task, the following tips can help you plan and budget for a digital transformation project that will be completed in 2017.

When making the move to a digital enterprise, many businesses find themselves wondering whether they need to focus more on digital technology or the development of a digital strategy. A few companies even believe that technology alone is sufficient; if they can dazzle their customers with all of the latest technological advances, the strategy will take care of itself. Other companies find themselves so involved with developing a strategy that by the time that they are ready to implement a plan, the chosen technologies have been usurped by innovative methods.