How to approach your migration to digital age!

Recently, I had published a post about an organization’s digital competency, which prompted to ask questions about digital infrastructure, besides other market drivers. One of the problems that organizations often face is the fact that digital investment decisions are evaluated and measured under the same parameters as the other more traditional initiatives. Digital experience, measurement and analytics require much faster turn-around, which is almost impossible in current monolithic IT and Support functions. 

To further emphasize the “rethink,” I wanted to share a great McKinsey article on how organizations can address a dichotomous decision making process, one for traditional business imperatives and the other for digital projects. Here are the key takeaways:

• Digital products need to be developed at a faster tempo and the projects supporting digital thrusts need to be evaluated at a faster speed separate from the rest of the IT budget approval process
• Digital investments are to be treated as strategic imperatives and short-term fix mentality needs to be abandoned
• Organization needs to establish “digital product management” to be accountable for agile development and release cycle

Managing Business by Revenue OR Customer Experience

In executive reviews across many organizations, discussions are often centered on online traffic, subscribers, revenue, cost, EBITDA, systems availability, key initiatives, etc. What I have found lacking is a detailed analysis of the drivers of these numbers – our customers and their interaction with the brand. Customer experience with our product or service determines performance and trending on the above metrics, yet it rarely is the starting point of a conversation.

Recently, I started one of my weekly reviews with sharing the data on what customers were saying about one of our key products. Included with this insight were comments and feedback gathered from our sales and customer service organizations. Obviously, we were discussing the problems that some of our customers were facing and just as quickly identifying fixes to alleviate those problems. I then proceeded to show our metrics trend, which merely corroborated the customer experience and, the forecast if we continued the trend. Just by switching the order in which we discuss the product or service, we accomplished more in terms of actionable outcomes, quite an achievement in itself. However, a more strategic benefit of this approach could be that we now start to build a more customer-centric organization, the benefits of which surely translate into favorable metrics trends that all executives prefer.

Give it a shot – turn things around to show metrics/reports from a customers’ perspective. I am hoping you’d notice a similar excitement about customer-centricity as I did in my trial.