As enterprises are rushing toward building new digital platforms and solutions, it is important to take a strategic approach to maximize one’s ROI. Below are some of the reference strategies appropriate for those who are involved in building their organization’s strategic digital solutions and platforms.
- Be wary of the fast pace of change of digital technologies – As you design your solutions geared for specific mobile devices and gadgets, ensure that you scan the marketplace and analyze the market adoption and penetration of those specific digital technologies. You should also be aware of the trends and be cognizant of the fact that not only these gadgets are changing constantly but customer behavior related to the adoption of these technologies is changing rapidly as well. In fact, the pace of change for these technologies is faster than it has ever been for other technologies.
- Monitoring Consumer behavior – Knowing consumer behavior related to your solutions and platforms is very essential before you further invest in those solutions. Designing digital products and services that are not aligned with contemporary market behaviors can lead to high bounce rates for your digital solutions and assets. Whether you are building a digital app, a hardware of software product, or a simple web page, it is essential to develop a feedback system that channels customer and user sentiments back to the product teams regularly so that appropriate changes and adjustments can be made to the digitalized business solutions and processes.
- Monitoring Online Traffic – An essential metric to collect and monitor that is related to the digital products and solutions rolled to online customers and users has to do with online and digital traffic levels. Whether it’s organic traffic through search engines, downloads of an app, or number of high quality user reviews, an organization must monitor those traffic levels to gauge market acceptance of their products and services.
- Broader Digital Ecosystem – Although each enterprise has its own business ecosystem that it’s part of, it’s important to be aware of the much larger digital landscape and the new opportunities that emerge within it on a daily basis. A digital content publishing company, for example, can find numerous new digital delivery platforms to distribute its content. An ongoing process to scan the larger ecosystem can help the organization reach larger audiences on more platforms on a continual basis.
- Agile Design and Delivery – As your organization rolls out new digital products and services, you have to ensure that you have an adequate backend design and delivery process that is agile and adaptive. Consider a serious defect in a service that you have delivered to the online marketplace but are not able to fix immediately. Such a scenario can seriously erode your brand value and permanently jeopardize your offering in the marketplace. Many organizations, therefore, are changing their internal IT processes and methods to ensure they are agile and flexible to deliver quality products and services quickly to the market.
- Look to differentiate on all dimensions of the internal digital ecosystem – Today’s consumers have a wide array of choices for products and services. More than aspiring to get a quality product or service, consumers are looking for personalized customer service and other features and services. Therefore, when designing new digital products and services, ensure that you look to the entire ecosystem of your product and service and differentiate your offering on a wide array of dimensions.
- Consider the full customer journey – Mapping customer journeys can help you assess how your customers find your products and services, the steps they go through to make their decisions, and after sale support. Make sure you not only map the entire customer journey for all your products and services but look to provide value at various steps of the journey.
- Deliver integrated customer experiences across channels – If you offer your product or service across multiple digital channels then you should assess whether delivering an integrated customer experience across those channels is something that is relevant to your business. For example, if you are reading a Kindle ebook on your laptop and then switch to your mobile device, you will be able to start off from where you left off on your laptop. This form of integrated experience has become the norm in the digital world and therefore you should analyze your customer’s journey and engagement habits to see if delivering customer experiences across channels is relevant to your business.
- Design for the savvy and experienced digital user – When designing digital products and services for your users, you should remind yourself that today’s users have a wide array of digital experiences across multiple digital products and services thus elevating their digital experience expectations from other digital products and services. It’s therefore prudent to analyze your potential customers’ expectations and to incorporate relevant best practices from digital products and services that may not necessarily be in your industry.
(This post is periodically being updated)
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