Increasingly, excelling at delivering a coherent
experience across multiple devices is crucial to customer acquisition and retention,
especially for organizations with complex products or many service offerings across
several delivery platforms.
Customer experience is a major component of the brand. Marketing owns it, and now requires information like customer feedback, analytics, and social activity to manage it well.
To deliver relevant offerings at every touch point of the customer journey, marketers need access to data across the enterprise. This requires collaboration and integration with IT.
Further, organizations that actively capture and leverage customer feedback in product and service delivery gain a competitive edge. Product reviews and recommendations, combined with insights gleaned through analysis of social interactions, are influencing the very nature of product innovation and service design.
This doesn't happen by magic, or by trying a bunch of things and see what sticks. It happens by design. In fact, a deliberate approach will involve identifying what matters, what changes are needed, and what needs to come first, second, and so on.
Design, Build, and Deliver
Research# released by MIT Sloan and Cap Gemini late last year [hat tip Neil Perkin] supports a strategic approach to digital.
The two-year study of about 400 companies was designed to assess the impact of digital technologies on large, traditional companies, and how they are responding to those challenges.
The study found that while many of the companies in the sample across several industry verticals are using technologies like social media, mobile, analytics and
embedded devices to change their customer engagement, internal
operations, and even their business models, few firms are capturing the real business benefits.
Using digital intensity (=investment in technology-enabled initiatives to change how the company operates) and transformation management intensity (=the vision to shape a new future, governance and engagement to steer the course, and IT/business relationships to implement technology-based change) as axes in the classification quadrant, Cap Gemini/MIT split the organizations into four digital types:
- Beginners -- the dabblers and those testing the waters in my social/digital integration model
- Conservatives -- manage risk and proceed with caution
- Fashionistas -- the term says it all, they try trendy tools
- Digirati -- most mature, combining focus on technology for change and alignment of people, processes with an understanding of the effects of change on relationships and culture
The study found the digirati to be 26% more profitable (average), and have a 12% higher market capitalization. Organizations with a strategic plan leverage existing capabilities better and net 9% more revenue from existing assets.
Both the implementation of technology solutions
to support an on-demand customer experience across channels, and the creation
of cross-functional teams to innovate in product development require closer
alignment between marketing, information technology, and often finance.
CMOs and marketing groups are all too aware that their ability to integrate different technologies and measure results and ROI within current structures and resources remains problematic.
Further, organizations in which technology and marketing cannot partner to act on their data suffer from fragmented analysis, decisions driven by what was done before or the opinion of the highest paid person rather than by user feedback and analytic insight. The inability to invest in marketing or technology based on accurate assessments of ROI is an outcome of this tension.
Key take aways:
1) Business/IT relationships are key, and in many companies they must be improved; 2) Opportunities exist in all industries with no exceptions; 3) Digital Leaders understand that transformation management intensity is more important for driving overall performance; 4) successful organizations know they must evolve, adapt, and iterate everything they do.
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.