How do you navigate digital complexity and changing customer needs?

A crucial part in B2B that is often overlooked is that sub-part of procurement/contracting: Once the customer (business) has selected you as vendor, you need to go through several hoops of legal and procurement. The clearer you have that journey mapped out with your business champion before entering this stage, the faster will you pass through

One of the most underrated activities, because most stakeholders believe they know the customer journey. It's a trap that many easily fall into, usually because they have decades of market experience. 10/10 times they are wrong. Doing a throughly data-driven CX map is a critical pre-condition of hight ROI digital strategies.

While on paper this sounds easy, usually it's really hard to have on digital USP (unique selling proposition). There are 2 frameworks that can help to start: 1. Top-down: relevant when you have a strategic benefit that other hardly can offer. In this case you start from defining what is this and why is strategically different from what others can do. 2. Bottom-up: relevant when you have quite similar services as the competition. In this case you find small elements that are better, offer more value, eg. a shorter registration flow, fast payment process via Apple Pay, or the ability to deploy your solution in 2 business days. You should create a list of these small benefits and when ready try to find the top 3 strongest value drivers.

As part of digital customer experience design it is important to keep the customer at the core of this design. The digital experience should not only be able to simplify customer experience but also help them to engage with the entity’s product or service proposition at a deeper and more meaningful level. Eventually it may be pertinent to measure the impact of digital process design in terms of the net promoter score and higher customer engagement levels. Lastly the design should enable seamless customer feedback listening for sustainable value contribution.

Execution effectiveness would be a critical element of the digital strategy. One important watch out aspect will be around “change management”. Any change can create elements of uncertainty and insecurity for some people involved and accordingly it would be useful to manage the change related dynamics in a conscious manner.

Don't forget your many customer-facing employees in all various roles and how thwy can contribute to the successful implementation of your strategy. They can multiply your activities on digital channels like social media manifold!