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

Presenting Consistent Brand Experience to Customers

In all my experience working with organizations there has been a visible lack of coherent strategy for customer communication via various touch-points. I am referring to customer service, corporate websites, social forums, blogs and marketing campaigns. To be fair, the challenge has been in rapidity with which changes have been taking place across the above landscape, which makes the job of “keeping up” all the more difficult. However, these have now been around long enough that customers expect organizations to button-up and present a consistent brand experience.

I believe the challenge is not in how to deliver a consistent experience instead, why organizations fail to deliver a consistent experience across its customer touch points!

I find the lack of adequate investments, executive support and unclear role descriptions as the key factors that companies need to focus on. The benefits of a consistent communications approach are many – brand growth, customer retention, acquisition, etc., to name a few. So where does one start? If there are separate sites for sales, customer service, account management, etc., consolidating all into one consistent look & feel is a good start. Consolidating, with all reporting into one organization, will also help with messaging consistency that often gets lost in subjectivity across business units. Next step would be ensure customer can easily navigate between various sites as they engage with the brand. Now we are ready to actively interact with your community via, blogs (if? there is one!) and across social spectrum. Also, providing information and self-service tools across your company sites is trivial, yet engaging. Digital presence needs to be integral to overall strategy and appropriate controls need to be in place to ensure accountability, regular updates, monitoring and reporting.

Once we achieve an integrated look & feel for our brand, we can then start to understand customer behavior across these touch points and, in turn, start providing better products/services/support to our customers.