Overcoming Point Solution Chaos and Proving ROI with a Unified Social Media Management Platform

It’s common knowledge that enterprise cloud applications first came into existence in the early 2000s. Even though the market became quite saturated with these point solutions within the next decade or so, their adoption rates didn’t soar until 2020. So what happened that year? The global pandemic, of course.  
 
The pandemic-induced lockdowns forced businesses worldwide to implement remote working practices, and the subsequent mad dash to digital transformation — the adoption of point solutions to facilitate remote working — led to a phenomenon now known as the “point solution bubble.” 

The point solution bubble 

To truly understand the point solution boom, one need not look any further than the healthcare industry. It underwent a seismic shift during the pandemic, compelling healthcare providers to adopt telehealth and other digital health solutions rather quickly.  

Before the pandemic, telehealth wasn’t as mainstream as it is today. However, as the pandemic raged on, healthcare infrastructure worldwide faced stiff challenges, including limited hospital capacity, concerns about infection transmission in hospital settings and the need to prioritize care for Covid-positive patients. 

Telehealth was seen as a godsend, allowing healthcare providers to treat patients remotely and without the fear of exposure to the virus. This sudden surge in demand led to a rapid expansion of the point solutions ecosystem — cloud-based digital tools designed to address specific healthcare needs — in the healthcare landscape. The expansion was further fueled by the relaxation of regulatory barriers during the pandemic. Consequently, many startups and established companies launched new products and services to meet the growing demand for telehealth and other digital health solutions. This pretty much was the case with every other industry as well.  

Problems created by the point solution chaos 

Although their intentions were noble, employers’ haphazard adoption of numerous point solutions led to a bloated tech stack in most cases. This resulted in undue administrative burden and data privacy issues; confusion also prevailed among end users, hampering the realization of value from cloud adoption. Today, the market continues to grow and evolve with numerous innovative "pick and shovel" solutions but problems persist.  

Inconsistent CX 

Disjointed customer experiences can frustrate customers enough for them to consider switching to a competitor. Point solution-heavy tech stacks are not conducive to sharing customer data and insights within an organization. A jumbled mess of point solutions in some cases can put the burden on customers for login information across multiple platforms, resulting in poor experiences. 

Departmental silos 

Siloed departments within an organization can trigger disjointed customer experiences, as the resolution of customer service issues often requires collaboration between multiple departments. For example, if the advertising and sales departments aren’t on the same page, it can result in customers receiving discount promotions after they’ve made their purchase. Such delays can mean the potential loss of repeat business.  

Lack of relevant insights 

The use of multiple point solutions gives rise to data silos. If data is not made accessible to the appropriate business units, it can create friction in the customer journey and result in missed opportunities to enhance customer loyalty with optimized experiences. Incomplete data sets blur the visibility a company has on a customer’s preferences and their past purchasing habits, which contributes to flawed business decisions and badly targeted messaging.  

Difficulty measuring ROI 

Data trapped in silos makes the task of calculating the returns gained from CX investments (ROI) difficult, if not impossible. To acquire budget for new CX investments and projects, CX practitioners need to build data-led business cases that demonstrate the business benefits CX investments can achieve. Research shows that 54% of CX teams fail to prove the ROI of their projects. This means future CX investments and initiatives will be hard to come by if teams fail to demonstrate ROI. 

Such scenarios can be avoided by using a platform that unifies various data sources to create a single view of the customer. Such a platform democratizes insights across the organization, so teams can make informed decisions that not only streamline operations but also drive revenue. And one such platform is Sprinklr. 

How Sprinklr can help your organization overcome the point solution chaos 

If you are thinking of swapping all your point solutions for a single unified platform, invest in a platform that can adapt to whatever your needs will be in ten- or twenty-years’ time. With the right platform in place, you can snap on new applications as and when the need arises. 

Sprinklr Social Ultimate is an AI-powered unified platform designed to help social media teams enhance productivity, scale governance and deliver great customer experiences on social media. It makes all that possible by consolidating listening, publishing, engagement, ads, advocacy and customer service.  

Yes, Sprinklr Social Ultimate helps you unify research, marketing and social media teams, orchestrating seamless customer journeys with real-time customer and competitor intelligence. This enables the seamless execution of end-to-end marketing campaigns and proactive social media engagement. The platform also eliminates the risks of off-brand engagement with a global compliance framework encompassing approvals, governance rules and moderation processes to protect your brand reputation with enterprise-grade governance.  

Social media ROI: An in-depth analysis done by ESG  

The analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently undertook a thorough analysis of the business value Sprinklr Social Ultimate can help businesses realize via increased productivity, risk mitigation and cost savings. 

Below are its findings: 

The firm concluded that Sprinklr could deliver cost savings of around $3.1 million in 5 years for an organization that processes 20,000 inbound customer service messages per month, has a social listening program, monitors competitor accounts, posts 400 live ads per day, and leverages both organic and user-generated content using traditional tools and processes. 

Conclusion 

Point solution chaos can damage both customer and employee satisfaction levels. Luckily, a comprehensive social management platform like Sprinklr Social Ultimate can fix the shortcomings of point solutions. This AI-enabled unified platform enables organizations to engage with customers faster and more effectively across all channels, provides broad source coverage by pulling in data from over 30 social channels and millions of blogs and websites.  

If you still rely on multiple point solutions to manage your brand’s social pages and engagement on those channels, you might want to try Sprinklr Social Ultimate. 

Watch this video to learn more about ESG’s evaluation of Sprinklr and how it differs from the competition. Download and read the complete report here.