IT company set to help brands compete in Age of the Customer

Geoff Lander, MD of Relate Technologies

Relate Technologies, South African application development company and Microsoft partner, today announced the repositioning of its business to focus on helping brands improve their customer experience through innovative technology solutions. Established in 2004, Relate Technologies is an application development company developing custom business applications for companies in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the US. As a Microsoft partner, the company also offers SharePoint and Dynamics CRM consulting and development services.

The company's new strategy is based on research and findings from leading IT industry analysts, Forrester Research and Gartner. According to Forrester Research, the market has entered the "Age of the Customer" in which customers armed with mobile devices and the web now have more options and more information available to them than ever before. This, coupled with their unprecedented power to influence others via social media, has made ensuring an easy and enjoyable customer experience the number one priority for IT spend worldwide in 2014, according to the Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast for 2014.

"Our new strategy and positioning takes our strength of using technology to help companies 'work smarter' and refocuses this strength on helping companies use technology to win, serve and retain customers by improving the customer experience across all touch points," says Geoff Lander, MD of Relate Technologies. "In the Age of the Customer, the new competitive advantage for companies will be their ability to create a customer experience that is superior to their competitors'. And that is where we now come in."

The company has developed and implemented support, origination, loyalty and CRM applications for major retailers and financial service institutions, as well as partnered with software vendors to develop enterprise-grade automation solutions that reduce turn-around times on customer document requests.

"Although our core strength in application development remains the same, we have brought on new partners to strengthen our offering to call centres and marketing departments, such as operational analytics tools to draw insights from Big Data that identify gaps in service levels and key trends in customer behavior," continues Lander. "With our new focus on improving the customer experience, our development team have begun incorporating mobile and NFC (Near Field Communication) technology into our customers' applications to make it easier for their customers to interact with them and ultimately buy from them."

The re-positioning of the business has led to a rebranding exercise with the launch of the company's new logo, tagline and website taking place this month.

"We have spent the past month visiting with our strategic customers to take them through our positioning and have been encouraged by their feedback. Our new focus opens up new opportunities for us we begin speaking with both prospective and existing customers about a very topical and compelling message of creating a superior Customer Experience to achieve their competitive advantage in the Age of the Customer," concludes Lander.

For more information, please visit the company's new website at:
www.relatetech.com

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