Earlier this year, the Mulesoft team at Salesforce released their annual Connectivity Benchmark Report, a survey of over 1,000 CIOs and IT leaders. This new research found that even amid economic uncertainty, IT spending is on the rise, and forward-thinking IT leaders are not shying away from smart investments in digital technology to improve business outcomes and lower overall costs.
The key takeaways? Automation is good. Silos are bad. Digital transformation is essential.
Integration is Challenging
Organizations are using more apps than ever – an average of 1,000 separate applications – 10% more than last year according to the report.
In addition, nearly 75% of customer interactions are now digital, and customers expect each of those interactions to be personalized,
This has left a significant gap in the digital customer experience. Multiple data sources across channels and touchpoints create siloed, redundant data that is difficult to translate into a real-time view of the customer, and even harder to act on.
36% of IT leaders said that data silos are their biggest challenge.
More than a third of IT leaders reported that data silos are a significant pain point. They recognize that the opportunity cost of disconnected data is high. Missed opportunities to better understand and serve customers, and lost efficiencies in their finance, marketing, and sales processes quickly add up to lost revenue.
At Chargent, connecting payment data to critical customer insights is at the core of what we do, and it’s essential to capturing a true 360-view of your customer.
But Custom Integration is Too Expensive
According to respondents, custom development is costly in every sense of the word.
The average organization saw a 30% increase in spend on custom integrations in 2022.
What’s more, nearly all reported that integration issues were slowing down their long- and short-term digital transformation initiatives. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. The average cost of failing to complete digital transformation initiatives can be as high as $9.5 million.
This reflects what we’ve heard from our own customers as well. Often, they come to us at pivotal points in their Salesforce projects, when they needed to be able to take payments without taking on the time and expense of custom integrations.
One customer, a pioneer in social media, initially implemented Chargent at the recommendation of their Salesforce consulting partner, in order to quickly connect their preferred payment gateway to Salesforce Billing. They accomplished that, and more, without adding expensive integration work to their project. In addition, they soon realized that they could improve the overall customer payment experience by leveraging Chargent’s Payment Request feature, while capturing critical payment data in Salesforce.
Every Team Wants in on Automation
CIOs are not the only ones who recognize the benefits of automation like higher productivity and cost savings. From the sales team to the CFO, many forward-thinking executives recognize that automation tools are essential to their future business model – and to successful digital transformation.
56% of finance execs want to bring automation to their teams.
While they are happy to leave implementation and governance to IT, these leaders want to customize their own automated processes – and need intuitive, no-code options to get there.
Chargent’s Automated Collections is an excellent example of this approach in action. A powerful, configurable tool to improve the payment collections process, Automated Collections automates time-consuming collections activities while leveraging powerful data analytics to optimize at each step.
Easily customizable with no-code and low-code options, as well as pro-code API integrations and developer tools, Automated Collections delivers advanced automation and payment technology across the organization and across Salesforce.
The insights captured in the 2023 Connectivity Benchmark Report were not surprising. These priorities have always been and continue to be a core focus at Chargent. However, these unified, clear-cut responses from IT execs reflect in no uncertain terms the urgency of prioritizing automation and digital transformation.
Did this report raise key questions about your technology investments? We’re always here to help. Get in touch and let’s start a conversation.
