How do you include customers in IT strategy? This is a crucial question for any IT leader who wants to deliver value, meet expectations, and foster loyalty. In this article, you will learn some practical tips and methods to involve your customers in your IT strategy process, from defining your vision to evaluating your outcomes.
The first step to include customers in IT strategy is to understand who they are, what they need, and how they interact with your IT products and services. You can use various tools and techniques to gather customer insights, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, personas, journey maps, and feedback loops. The goal is to identify your customer segments, their pain points, their goals, and their preferences, and use this information to shape your IT strategy.
Let's first differentiate between internal and external customers. My take below is on the customers of your enterprise and not internal. Irrespective of the industry, it is critical for the CIO/IT leader to know the customers being served and what customers expect from your company. Go out into the field where the action is with sales or customer facing teams. Be one of them and learn from observation and then ask questions. Considering that the team mates on the field would typically not be senior management, take your position to ask targeted questions. As an example the conversation could be: I am here to understand your expectations from MyCo Corp - physically, virtually, or in any other way. Use these to craft your IT strategy
The first step should be understanding your customer's needs and wants. What do they use you for, and why would they leverage your product or services? Once you have understood this, you need to look at two factors: what you do well now for your customers and what your competitors do better for your customers and how that improves the experience. This data will help you drive a strategy with customers at the core. BUT MAKE SURE YOU ARE ENGAGING CUSTOMERS! No strategy will work if you haven't engaged and asked these questions to your end users.
The next step is to co-create your IT vision with your customers. This means involving them in defining the direction, purpose, and value proposition of your IT function. You can use workshops, brainstorming sessions, prototyping, and testing to collaborate with your customers and generate ideas, solutions, and innovations. The goal is to align your IT vision with your customer expectations, needs, and desires, and create a shared understanding of what success looks like.
The vision is what will tech do to fulfil customer expectations, examples from my limited experience Retail: if I can't find the merchandise I want, can someone help me locate it or deliver to my place of convenience? This was the advent of omnichannel fulfilment. Pharma: Ask the Doctor what can we do differently to help you with your work? Everyone does detailing for their respective brands, and Doctors tolerate it at best as 95% of the time it adds no value. Farmer: if you use my products, why do you choose my product over competitors? If you don't how can I help you shift. What can we do to improve your ability to cope with plant diseases or yield improvement. I think you can see the trend. Reality is you have to be out there
The third step is to communicate your IT strategy to your customers. This means informing them about your goals, objectives, initiatives, and roadmap, and how they relate to your IT vision and customer value. You can use various channels and formats to communicate your IT strategy, such as newsletters, webinars, presentations, dashboards, and reports. The goal is to keep your customers informed, engaged, and supportive of your IT strategy.
Arm your Sales teams and Customer Success organizations with external facing roadmaps to showcase your IT strategy. Get to industry conferences and other events where you can present and showcase key achievements or new technologies.
Communication is for internal customers and the external customer facing teams on the changed messaging to the final customers of the enterprise. This can come in many forms, but it is best experienced rather than just communicated.
When defining change and implementing a strategy, you need to be clear on your approach; you can tell the customer what is coming and what the road looks like. However, this can lead to disillusioned customers if you fail to deliver within your timeframe. The other approach is to not communicate to them until the road has been laid and you release it to them; however, this could cost you customers as they may feel like change is not coming. It is a delicate balance; you must understand what works for your business model.
The fourth step is to deliver your IT value to your customers. This means executing your IT strategy and delivering the products and services that meet or exceed your customer expectations. You can use agile, lean, and DevOps methods to deliver faster, better, and cheaper IT solutions, and ensure quality, security, and reliability. The goal is to create customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty with your IT delivery.
The fifth step is to measure your IT impact on your customers. This means evaluating how your IT strategy and delivery affect your customer outcomes, behaviors, and perceptions. You can use various metrics and indicators to measure your IT impact, such as customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, advocacy, revenue, and cost. The goal is to quantify and demonstrate the value and benefits of your IT strategy for your customers.
Impact is best measured in quantifiable terms, revenue, cost and profit. If you believe that there is no direct correlation, then go back to the drawing board and rethink the deliverables. All other measures are good but not enough to define the impact. As a Board Member I will probably not approve a proposal which does not have a real outcome.
The sixth and final step is to learn and improve your IT strategy based on your customer feedback. This means collecting, analyzing, and acting on the data and insights you get from your customers, and using them to improve your IT products, services, processes, and capabilities. You can use continuous improvement cycles, such as Plan-Do-Check-Act, to learn from your customer feedback and make adjustments to your IT strategy. The goal is to create a customer-centric IT culture that adapts and evolves with your customer needs.
Consider enabling a customer communities page where direct feedback can be obtained on how to improve the technology or product. Any incentives such as monthly drawings, etc. can be used to help incentivize participation in idea sharing.
Having a strategic plan that includes customers is vital, however, you need to focus on that a strategy should not be isolated to making improvements for the customer if these changes have a negative impact elsewhere in your business, processes or functions. It would be best to balance improvements to the UX and internal non-customer-facing changes to get the most for all.