Digital Strategy : A Primer

The word ‘Digital’ has been thrown around a lot for the past few years. The terms Digital Solution Architecture, Digital Experience Management has meant many different things to different people.

I’ve talked about what I consider a ‘Digital’ solution to mean and what implications it brings ( You can read about it in my earlier post “ My Journey With Digital” )

In the past few years , technologies have been maturing and acquisitions have been made. If the 10 years ago we were witnessing the commoditization of technology , the past few have seen a commoditization of user experiences. The capability to deliver on the promises of feedback driven contextualised omni-channel experiences seem to be on the horizon, if not already here in parts.

With this blog post I’d like to scratch the surface of what it means for an enterprise to setup a Multi Channel Digital Strategy

Baseline: What is Digital Strategy?

People often will tell you that a digital strategy is to leverage all digital customer touch points and streamline the entire customer journey across those touch points.

Yes and No. While enterprises do need to bring together all their existing digital customer touch points, they also need to realise that in the information age , more and more business is going to be done through digital touch points, whether you cater for them or not.

An effective digital strategy not only focuses on existing digital channels but also, and perhaps more importantly, builds capability within the organisation to bring traditionally non-digital channels into this ecosystem. 

For a retail chain, this means establishing processes and interfaces that allow interactions by customers in the digital world reflect in in-store offers and even traditional print media mailers and catalogs.

For a financial services company, this means ensuring that when a customer walks into a branch to discuss an ad for home-loan he or she has seen on their online portal, the teller or the bank manager knows about it and is in a position to start the conversation off on Step 5 instead of Step 0.

It may go even further and allow a person to communicate with the company and apply for a home loan via instant messaging through its app

Essentially, an effective digital strategy brings together various entities in an enterprise, from CxOs, AppDev, marketing, content strategists, mobile development teams, CRM managers, infrastructure, analytics, systems administrators and even legal, to build capabilities for not only delivering the right experience to the customer through any channel ( online, offline, onsite, offsite ) but also to allow the enterprise to adapt to the fast changing nature of digital interactions.

An example of was-in-the-far-future-but-is-already-here are home orchestration devices like Alexa and the growing IOT ecosystems. You have fridges that can order your groceries for you even!!. Combine that with implications of privacy, security and personal choice of the consumer, organisations have some serious re-inventing to do to stay relevant and better serve customers in this day and age and beyond.

An effective digital strategy is not “just a good idea”. It’s critical!

State of the Enterprise Today

Typically today, all the teams mentioned typically work in silo fashion, dealing with other entities based on specific requirements there are typically several disconnected initiatives across areas that are complementary. Project budgets and timelines and KPIs simply do not allow for looking at the larger picture

You may have group wide implementation strategies within specific lines of business but such strategies rarely consider implementation strategies across different business units unless they encounter dependencies within a specific project.

Even then, projects will cater to their own immediate deliverable and will not even consider blowing out their budget by even 10% for building something foundational for the enterprise that, future projects could use, as they simply don’t have that remit.

What this results in is a Digital Strategy, just kind of “happens” based on the decisions made by individual business lines and initiatives on the day. Quite often it also leads to duplicated efforts and greater spend as different units spend time and money architecting and designing elements that may already have been worked on by someone else.  

Thus you may end up in a Digital Strategy that is ‘cobbled together’ and has serious risk of falling apart or, incurring a lot of spend or, being left behind or, simply all of the above. 

In extreme cases, this leaves the enterprise at the mercy of individual project teams as well as market forces.

A forward thinking approach

While the above does paint a dismal picture, it’s, thankfully,not all that bad and you do have great CDOs ( Chief Digital Officer - they're a happening thing these days ;) ) at the helm of some of the great companies out there.

What’s needed is a top down and group wide approach to digital strategy that allows the potential synergy across various groups to be tapped. 

An enterprise should establish maturity models across the organisation for content strategy, data collection, analytics and segmentation, personalisation and marketing to name a few.

(Oh, I feel I must say this, “ Tag everything, and measure everything – we’ll make sense of it later” is not an acceptable analytics strategy!! )

While different units and teams within the organization may be at different maturity levels, there will at least be visibility on the gap to overcome, which then can be addressed in a systematic manner.

These maturity model in turn need to be supported from by enterprise wide capabilities in security, DevOps, with a playbook for approved architectural and development patterns that all projects can leverage.

What we want to end up with is effectively a blueprint for a Cross Channel Digital Experience Management Platform that teams can work towards.

This will allow project teams to be more productive and contribute in a visible manner towards the organization goals ( e.g. customer uplift across brands, better services, lower dev costs, better compliance and what have you ) , instead of simply engaged in “ just doing a lot of stuff “ to get a project over the line ( That last phrase I’ve borrowed from an esteemed CIO from the company I am engaged with  - It’s a great line :) )

When we do that, we will emerge from trying to maintain the status quo and reacting to market forces, and tap into new value chains that would simply not have been possible before. i.e. Contextualised experiences through ChatBots or, 360degree view of customers that affords view on all interactions by a customer across any channel including call centers for example

Considerations for a Digital Strategy - 

These are the key considerations for an enterprise level digital strategy. These are some of the most basic questions you will need to address.

Alignment with Enterprise Goals

1. What are the high level goals for your enterprise and how do they relate / translate to customer interactions ?
2. Have you defined your customer journeys across all interaction points for your organisation ?
3. Has there been an executive buy in across all units and teams that have a part to play in realizing any future digital strategy?
4. What do you mean by improving customer experience across these interaction points ?- quantifiable values help
5. What insights do you need from these interaction points and channels?
6. Have you considered potential interaction points that your organization does not yet service ? It is a good idea to identify them and understand the capability gap in bringing them in scope if any as well as the loss of opportunity if they are excluded

Enterprise Content and Data Collection Strategy

1. What is your content and experience strategy across all interaction points identified above ?
2. Establish a cross department dictionary for identifying context across these channels and points of interaction – e.g. this screen on this app, or this page of this website, or this branch of this suburb.
3. Establish a strategy to collect context from these channels.
4. Establish a strategy to help share content and context across these channels.
5. Do you need a single source of truth? Consider consistency of experience and integrity and authenticity of content
6. Do you have a content expiration / archival strategy ?

Gleaning Insight and Decision Making

1. Does the data give you a complete picture of the customer journey ? – If not , identify the gaps.
2. With the above context established, what do you want to do with it ? 
3. Are you prepared to experiment and iterate?
4. What form of personalisation are you targeting – implicit, explicit,campaign based ?
5. How do you want to reach out to your customers in future visits - which experience in which channel would be best ?

This at least starts to ask the right questions , even if they are difficult ones to answer. Beware of falling in the trap of not addressing a hard question. There is a tendency to only work on initiatives and requirements that have a clear and visible monetary gain or cost reduction.

Capability increase via iterative improvements of customer experience may not give you such hard numbers to begin with, but once you get that ball rolling, you will find out just how much opportunity lies on your doorstep.

That's it for this part of the series.

Next week, I will talk about the various high level platform and technology considerations of a digital platform as well as some example vendors in this space.

What are your experiences in working towards / setting up / being a part of a Digital Strategy - Share your thoughts in the comments below!