Geek out on your customers & employees

After supporting digital change over 15 years across a variety of industries, there are three key elements of the journey that many companies seem to struggle with which stick out for me. Do you recognise these?

1) Deciding what to change - some embrace CX principles and do so well, but in lots of cases, key components get missed until the detailed design and technical work begins. This can cause significant slippage, inflate costs and dilute business cases.

How does this happen?

Even with the best intentions, things can simply get missed or overlooked at the initial idea generation stage. It's only when user stories and designs are pulled together that you realise just how complex a deliverable can be.

In some cases, it can be a case of requirements being too high-level, too business orientated and not enough consideration given to the end-user demographics and varied scenarios. Alternatively, it can just be down to not having the right subject matter experts in the room from the start.

2) Delivering for your business, not just your customer - rightly the focus is always on getting a solution fit for CX (Customer Experience) but so many companies forget to make it fit for EX (Employee Experience).

How does this happen?

Preparation and readiness of your business to receive a change is crucial. As above, some do it and do it extremely well, but a lot of projects forget to see this as part of their delivery cycle. If a solution is just landed on a workforce that then has to work with it, there's a real risk they'll object and even reject it.

3) Driving a truly 'digital first' culture - this is possibly the biggest failure I've noticed in my career, which has potential to cause significant harm to your strategy and vision.

How does this happen?

Failure to build meaningful insight of your solution can see you flying blind and cause you to make the wrong decisions for optimising both the Customer and Employee experience. Similarly, if you don't engage with the likes of HR, Internals Comms, People Managers and front-line Staff, to embed key performance and behavioural measures in your business, you'll quickly start to stand still and undo all the hard work.

Whatever the cause and effect, it's surprising how common these small mistakes can add up and create a real headache down the line.

Thankfully it's not all doom and gloom - there are lots of ways to plan, prepare and avoid these issues.

Please get in touch if you'd like to discuss your challenges and hear about how my new business venture can help overcome these common challenges.

#DigitalStrategy #DigitalCulture #OmniGeeks