With $2.5 billion revenue, 45,000 active parts, and 20,000 customers, SAP customer MAXIM Integrated is the analog semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, California, that is transforming its customer experience through e-commerce, according to its chief information officer, Walter Curd.
In an interview with CXO Talk’s Michael Krigsman, Curd discussed how MAXIM has used digital technology to break down the silos and become more customer focused.
“On the sales side, we’ve really revamped things. We call it a digital transformation, but we’ve gone heavy into e-commerce. Now, this was a really interesting discussion in the company because we were very traditional,” said Curd when Krigsman asked about 45,000 active parts. “But we realized that we’ve been product-focused for so long and in order to get customer-focused, we had to own the customers… We’ve put a lot of time into enhancing our website, the analytics, the customers, and so on, and then allowing us to really understand the customer experience.”
Curd describes the business-to-business customers MAXIM serves: “If you look at who our customer is, it’s a design engineer, which is a completely different experience from a consumer. We understand the journey that a customer, in this case an engineer, goes through and we’ve redesigned our website and our selling process around that. So far, we’ve actually, in the last two years, each year we’ve doubled our e-commerce revenue. That gives us a lot more insight to the customer, which, as we know with digital transformation, is critical.
“Engineers are king in our company, but we’ve had to really expand our focus on the customer, especially as we have 20,000 of them. The small customers and medium customers that we can’t touch directly, we have to touch with our website. You don’t know which ones are going to become big customers.”
“All the business processes go from these systems over here to these systems over here. The only people that understand the end-to-end process and make it work are IT. What I realized was, if we’re not getting better, if we’re not executing the right projects, we’re hurting the company,” he says when asked about the role of IT. “The world has changed, and IT is not a silo anymore. Each business thing is not a silo. It’s one process, one integrated system.”
Watch the full interview above to learn more about MAXIM Integrated and how digital transformation is involved across the entire organization all the way up directly being involved with customer experience.