A great webinar that discusses the the ways your customer(s) touch your business along with an example of a Company’s Digital Business Transformation and how they began their process.
— Transcript of the video
We have all experienced the ways on which we become frustrated in our interactions with the businesses that we do business with and, as you see with this slide, it talks about how customer experience management is high on the list of many top executives. And, we all know from history that the cost of sales is high, whereas if we can keep a client with us; in other words, retention, the profitability from that customer increases dramatically. And so, how do we continue to cause that individual to be loyal, right, that stickiness… and then it’s about quality of data, right. e
So, using and understanding a master data management strategy so that we have that golden record, that really identifies the fact that Jim Marrsolla is the same as Jay Mars Ola, the same as JH Mars Ola, the same as James Mars Ola. And, so instead of being four different people with inside your system with maybe two or three different email addresses, I’m identified as one individual. And my attributes in regards to how I (or customers) want to be communicated with in interacting with your business is also consolidated. And then and then last is the fact that with this direction around customer experience management, those that… I wouldn’t say have cracked the code, because there is always the element of continuous improvement, it’s really around the fact that their leaders have greater loyalty; meaning that with that loyalty comes more buying, right, your share of the wallet is increasing your ability to go deeper and wider with inside that customer’s ability to purchase from you additional products or services, and then as importantly is the willingness to forgive right, is that everybody makes mistakes. And, if I’ve got a trusted relationship with my with the business or the business has with me, chances are I’m going to forgive them if they have a miscue. And so, these are the things that we’re talking about as we start to dive into this area of digital transformation and digital business transformation.
Now, for the last maybe 18, 24 months we started hearing a lot about digital transformation, digital business transformation, new digital business models, and the like. So, the question always comes up is really what is digital transformation? And, as you pull different people different things come up, and so when you ask somebody hey you know our year is your business digital? Is your company you know going through a digital transformation metamorphosis? And, you’ll get responses back with, well, yeah absolutely. we we’ve got a responsive website so that when you go on to the device whatever device it is it you know you’re going to have an experience that’s going to be associated with that device. and you know we really have done a lot in the last 12 months for, you know, a couple years around social CRM, or the way that we’re starting to allow our website and doing true tag management, and optimizing our search engine optimization around copy writing in and we’re really a believer in in content management marketing and in associating that.
And so, you start to hear these different elements in regard to what depending on who you’re talking to these isolated areas of digital transformation. and I would I would challenge the thinking around something a little bit different; relative to the fact that to us, digital transformation is really about understanding the customer and becoming a customer advocate. And so, our view of things is to really flip the model, and be thinking from the customer out and aligning your digital technologies, all of your systems, your projects, around the customer’s experience, and not the other way around. For instance, putting a system in and then coming to realize who this is going to be you know we didn’t count on how the customer is going to interact with this eCommerce system, or how they’re going to make a payment for this. And now we have to modify and in our own minds, justify why this is a good thing for the customer to go through as opposed to engineering from the customer’s involvement with the business and rearranging the organization to support that. And so, the reason why we believe that the customer experience is king is because, most people in their business haven’t necessarily connected the dots on a regular basis on the goldmine that comes from your customer. Because as this slide shows, your customer really is in a position to… the customer service; there is ways that they understand how maybe your product or service works better than you do. You could have an open community where you’re starting to see others with inside your customer base answer questions, solve problems.
You also have the way of looking and interacting or by interacting with them, to have them give insights into what might be new what additions might be necessary, so they can be a forerunner of your research and development. Of course, advertisement right you know, the Nike swoosh, and whatever the Fitbit might be, they all of a sudden those are items that become an advertisement. But at the same time somebody is out blogging, somebody is out socializing, what it is that you made or the service you did. That’s the one that everybody always seems to latch on to because it’s the most obvious. The next one is maybe from a designer perspective, how are they modifying, what are they taking and adding to your product or service that’s making it unique in their own.
And then finally, really the connection of, what are the various additional products that might link together from different sectors or different areas Tomasz create a brand new category around your product and service. And so, these are areas that if we’ve got a strong customer engagement experience process, we really start to see that our customers truly are Capital Management, and an investment for our business.
So, with that said you know let’s talk about the ways that your customers are touching your business, and these areas that if they are taken holistically, can really change the way that you’re interacting with your customer and creating a customer experience. If dealt with isolated which is how most of us are dealing with them today, we end up with siloed information, disconnected customers and they’re on the edge or the verge of staying with us until they find somebody that is going to holistically work with them and engage them on that basis. So, the first thing that comes to mind, again is our web site. The web is really our initial interaction with our customer. You know, depending on what report or story you want to read, anywhere between 40 to 80… I’ve heard it as high as 90, but let’s you know keep it back into that that spread we all go online, and we start to investigate, we start to evaluate, we start our sales and our information process, about what we want to purchase, who we want to do business with, what service we want to do from somebody’s website; or do a web search. And so, from that, you can see here the number of ways that we can capture data and we can have an interaction with our prospects or our customers on that basis. And, every interaction leaves the data trail; and so be mindful that with the website, there’s a rich amount of information that depending on how we’re integrating that into our organization, can be quite useful.
The second one is what I mentioned earlier was mobile. We talked about how ages 8 to 88 is in this released, in North America are using mobile devices and interactions. And so, from that what there is available is really location analytics and how somebody is interacting. So, where does mobile apps play with inside our ability to have a unique customer experience for our customers and our prospects. And so, mobility becomes a very strong opportunity to really create a competitive advantage for us, and also a loyalty opportunity for our customers. Again, social we talked a little bit about earlier, there’s the listening side of it, the engagement, more and more organizations are looking at ways on how to use that for customer support, and so social becomes another mechanism in regard to the interactions and the touch points that that a customer is going to have with our with our business. I mentioned earlier, supply chain; so our suppliers how are they engaging with us? Are we allowing them ways to interact with our business that’s convenient for them, or is that on our terms because that’s what that’s what’s helpful for us in the way that we’ve constructed our systems? And again, we have the ability to look at mobile or other apps that can be extended in supporting our partners as part of our customer, as part of our customer experience management direction. as we look at organizations that have locations; so if you’re, let’s say a financial institution, you could be a retail location, you could be a hospitality… you could be a hospital, a clinic, any area that has locations where you’re doing physical interactions with your customer, really becomes an opportunity to start looking at location analytics, and in ways that you can engage and interact with a customer, as they’re coming in to your location or even as they’re coming around your organization.
When I’m out and I’ve got pride no different than anybody, else high-maintenance Starbucks even though I’m not one that specifies a lot of different types of Starbucks coffees, I like it straight up and black, I will get a text on my phone of Starbucks that are in the area. So, location analytics are ways that we can have a different experience with our with our customer base. And to that extent, when we look at our locations, there is these opportunities once again for the interactions and the capturing of the data trails that are associated with those interactions at that location. And you may notice if you’re if you’re if you’re catching it, a lot of these are mobile apps, a lot of these have a mobile capability associated with it. and from this location interaction, we can start to drive loyalty, we can we can sift information from point-of-sale interactions if we are actually taking credit cards or payments that are associated with that and starting to enrich the data on how we’re associating the customer with the actions and the reactions that they’re taking with our with our business.
The next one is traditional marketing, so marketing in the sense of how we’re doing advertising, media buying, our email interaction, there’s still enough evidence that comes out almost on a daily, if not weekly basis, talking about the value of email, and how to interact in and exchange information associated with that. and like, I’m sure you’re like me, is once you submit your information to one, funny how it seems to populate like rabbits we’re, all of a sudden, I’ve got you know a half a dozen or a dozen more emails coming in just because of one download of one white paper or information that’s associated with it. So, email is still a very big connection in regard to marketing, but there’s also with so many other facet and facets of how marketing is working to engage with the customer and more times than not, marketing has been isolated as the group that needs to talk about, or work with the customer experience. And yet, as we look, digital transformation far exceeds just what market is doing, and they really can get need some help from the organization to make effective, what they’re what they’re promoting about the about the business and about the products and about the services.
Along with that is sales, right, there is the opportunity to generate interest, and then there’s the opportunity to close right or to win the business; and that’s where sales comes in. and so all of those interactions whether it’s on an e-commerce basis direct selling, indirect selling through channel partners, all of that is nuggets of information that are all creating an experience for the customer or the prospect and how they are looking at the way your organization engages with them. Sort of like the courtship right, if if how I’m being treated as a prospect can give me a glimpse on how I’m going to be treated as a customer after the fact. And so, that’s always what’s running through some of our minds on why we may or may not want to do business with an organization. An area where a lot of us forget is accounting, and in how we interact with the invoices, the bills, payments that come about when we’re interacting with an organization.
One of the big ones that I put on here is fraud prevention, and in the use of big data in that area. I travel a lot and so if I haven’t remembered to let chase, or be of a or Wells Fargo know that I’m going to be in a particular location for a period of time, or forget because their window is about three months, all of a sudden I swipe a credit card the next thing I know, I’ve got a text coming through, I’ve got an email coming through and I’ve got a phone call coming through, from one of the banks in regards to fraud detection; cancelling or denying a transaction. So, all of that creates an experience of how I need to react or interact with the accounting department, or with the invoicing area with insight in this case, my banking relationships.
The next one that seems to have a life of its own, but is so involved with all of our day-to-day actions, is the call center. Whether it’s through social chat or telephone, if I go to the website and in the opportunity to get service help and the opportunity for the business to do an upsell or cross-sell. How many times we’re now, you know, the clothes of 2015 and in Fortune 500 companies that you know of specifically, in certain service industries, whether it’s again banks, it could be your mobile phone company, it could be your internet service provider where you make a phone call, you key in your data, and then the next thing you’re being transferred to a live operator. And, what’s the first thing that they want to do? Maybe they’ll ask for your opinion identifier, and those are the few that at that point, your information is pulled up and they they’ve identified you. But more times than not, I’m still finding that I have to go through the routine of giving information back to them that I just plugged into their IVR system. And I’ve learn now to no longer ask the question, ‘why did I have to put this into your system for only you to have to ask me that question again?’ because the answers come back exactly the same, the scripts that a call center are given are exactly the same. You know, I’m sorry Mr. Mars Ola for the inconvenience, you know, and I realized that there walking through their scripts and the information that I’m trying to share won’t get passed on beyond their apologies, and their scripts. But, again it’s an opportunity where as a business; we’ve got the capability of aligning and linking this information together. If we start to think about the customer experience and start to work on knitting together all of this information from the customer advocates perspective out. and then the last one is the investors are maybe donors; so if you’re a publicly traded company, you’ve got… we talked about mailing lists, maybe you’re a not-for-profit or org and you want to have communications out to your donors, there’s a lot of rich information on ways that they’re interacting with your organization and how you want to be able to capture that information and communicate back out to them.
So, really the whole point between all of this, is centralizing the data. because at the center of it is the way that this data is brought together allows your business to be able to create an environment so that when the customer engages with your organization, that information is centralized and those that are interacting with the customer have access to the data, so that they can have an intelligent reaction and conversation or interaction with the customer on that basis. Again, the key is around the customer experience management the customer experience and the loyalty.
We talked about early on, that the more loyal, the more money the, more profitable, more opportunity we have to expand the services with that particular customer. So, let’s transition and now talk about the frame work on what we think is a good model and a good place to start, and you’ll notice here I put in parentheses use a scrum based model. If you’re not familiar with scrum you may know the term agile; the model around that is very simple. we’re not going to talk about specifics around scrum, that we can set aside if you’re interested in that, happy to go into a another discussion and we can we can actually do a webinar specifically on how to use scrum for digital transformation, which might be a good topic. But, the concept around scrum is to chunk things out, is to do things in in a 1 to 4 week model and get something that’s useful out into the users, or in this case, the customers hands, so that so that there’s continuous progress and continuous improvement being made on how you’re going to do your transformation.
So, where’s the beginning? The beginning is really organizationally, and what many businesses need to understand is this this concept of digital transformation. Really, if you’re looking at it from a customer centric perspective, has to be strategic. So, the executives all the way on down like any project, it needs to be embraced and inoculated within and through the organization. And so strategically, the organization has to start to understand that this is what’s right or good or best for the business. And, there’s enough data to prove that if, you know, and I should say since that would be the direction for your organization or you may not that… I would imagine that’s the reason why you’re on this on this workshop. Secondly, is the business itself right. So, starting to align the businesses thinking that, we’re a holistic organization we’re building this around a 360 degree view of the customer how the customer interacts with us, walking through the journey maps of that customer and what are all of the to the next pillar organizations with inside the business that are being touched where the departments that are being affected by the journey of the customer, and how are those systems then which is the last pillar the technical side?
So, how does the technology of our organization? Where do these systems play? How are we dealing with them today? Where do we need to be tomorrow to start bringing that that truly 360 degree view as well as the key performance indicators that will model our business so that technically, organizationally the business starts to reflect a strategy on which we want to want to drive our organization in this digital transformation? And so, those three, what we call pillars of transformation, really is around the strategy. You have to know what you want to do, where you want to go, and start to look at what the roadmap or the journey map is for that.
And so, the second part is where a lot of us are very good at as businesses. We’re very good at projects, we’re very good at, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem here’s what we’re going to do to solve it…’, and we have a project we wrapped services and an energy around it and we go and then the last is the operation, how do we keep this up and running how do we make this work for that for the business. And, I think that that is a solid you know idea; what I think that we recommend is you’ve got to start in the getting with the strategy and start to roadmap before you really look at what are the projects and one of the operational sights that reflect how you want to get to where you want to go.
So, step number one, if you remember when we talked about the touch points, the very last slide was about the data. And, it really is all about the data, because if the data is off and there’s misalignment, then we start to really waste money. And also, possibly irritate our customers with bad data; with the wrong information being sent to them. I received a call yesterday from an organization that is a in the systems integration business, happens to have three letters and they call …somebody from their team called up asking if we would be interested in doing business with them and have them come in and do services for us. And, I asked the young man, do you know what business we’re in what kind of work that business and decision does?
And, quite frankly, he didn’t; he made something up and once I explained to him you know it was in a friendly way to just help him realize that he you know, may want to know a little bit more about the customer of the prospect that he’s calling on almost a, you know, the next day I received a call yesterday from somebody interested from a real estate company, wanting to do evaluation on my home and wanting to do it for free. And, when I asked the young lady, I said, ‘In this day and age with zillow.com, why would I need your organization to do evaluation of my home if I ever do want to sell it?’ and she said, ‘Well, quite frankly, I don’t know what zillow.com is.’ and I said, You are in the real estate business and you don’t know what Zillow is?’ and she said, ‘Well, I was hired to do a specific task, and do a specific job, so I really don’t know you know anything about that?’ And so, I share that because with inside all these organization, we have a ton of data, we have a lot of information but we’re not translating it in ways that are useful. And so, I share those stories with you that that’s because there’s so much disconnected data.
Remember the wheel, and remember all those touch points? More times than not, those are all isolated databases that are information that are associated with the accounting department or with the marketing department or maybe in the call center or; or there’s another group that’s responsible for sales and isolating this information, and it gets used by the teams that are with inside that area, but when marketing sends something out in a promotion, it’s not necessarily connected with the call center, or it’s not necessarily made available to the partners downstream, or you know, maybe accounting isn’t aware that this promotion has been sent out, you know. So, there’s a disconnectedness when the organization isn’t sharing in linking this information together.
So, that’s why our very first place to start is with the data; and to look at centralization of the of the information. The second thing is, to really look at the external data. So, now that we you know have our internal data and where that’s coming into play, how are we dealing with the external data, right? So, we have as I mentioned information that may be on our website, but what about our social approach? Where are we and how are we using that information and bringing it in? What about the areas of enrichment? In other words, if there is demographic information that we can pull in, other sources of data that we can enrich the information that we have or the knowledge or the preferences that we have on our customers with insider organization.
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