How do customers -- both businesses and consumers -- engage with companies and navigate their path to purchase?

The answer used to be a straight line. They’d start by discovering a product or service. Then consider and evaluate it. Buy it. Then use it. If they liked it, they’d feel loyal and come back for more. 

So far, so simple. But no longer. Like everything else, the pathway to purchase has been transformed by digital.

Empowered by technology, today’s digital customer no longer takes a bee-line route to purchase. True, they still move through the same stages from discovery to use. But they navigate them via an infinite variety of non-linear, interlinked and interconnecting pathways, crossing many channels and with constant loops and switchbacks.

Meet the non-stop customer. They’re on your site right now – and on everyone else’s.

To engage them, you need a new customer model. One that follows and guides the customer throughout their journey. Filters and curates a mass of information to ensure it’s relevant, interesting and influential. And synchronizes a consistent, compelling end-to-end experience.

In Accenture’s view, you simply can’t deliver all this using legacy ‘analog’ business models. You need to transform into an organization that sees the world through the customer’s eyes – and has the inherent ability to change, evolve and adapt in line with the customer.

In other words, you need to create the non-stop customer company. A business that meets the digital customer’s needs with agile capabilities executed at digital speed, and constantly re-invents itself to keep on meeting those needs as they evolve.

How can you achieve all this with pace and certainty? By using Salesforce – and cloud solutions more broadly – in a new way.

We all know cloud computing boosts operational speed and flexibility. But embraced at an enterprise level, it can deliver an even more important advantage: organizational adaptability.

How? By using the adaptive nature of cloud in general, and Salesforce specifically, to drive constant re-evaluation and reinvention of its own business, a company can keep pace with¾and mirror¾the evolution of the nonstop customer’s experience of interacting with it.

Building and running a business with this level of agility requires a new governance model that supports constant experimentation and evolution. This will enable the company to harness Salesforce’s speed and flexibility to deliver the experience nonstop customers demand today, while simultaneously leveraging cloud’s adaptability to keep evolving the new experience they’ll want tomorrow.

Result: deep, durable, profitable, and ever-evolving one-to-many customer relationships. This is the optimal recipe for future competitive edge. 

Saideep Raj is a senior executive in Accenture’s Technology Organization.  He leads Accenture’s global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and North America Cloud Computing practices. Mr. Raj has advised many clients on cloud strategies from shaping roadmaps and architectures to get started, through to leading transformational change programs. Mr. Raj received a Bachelor of Engineering from University College London.

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