Tormented? Driven Witless?
Whipsawed by Competition?
Ah, the race is on…who will win the customer? The “C” group in most organizations has been scurrying to structure a plan to enact the technologies and processes to keep pace with the ever-changing road of data to the prize, “the customer”! Have you taken measure of your organization’s digital maturity? According to McKinsey, “A company’s digital quotient (DQ) is a function of how well defined its long-term digital strategy is, its effectiveness in implementing that strategy, and the strength of its organizational infrastructure and information technologies.” How you engage customers digitally matters profoundly! It matters because of immediate opportunities for sales and because many of the decisions a customer makes are informed by the quality of their experiences all along their journey.
The rate at which changes in technologies are hitting the consumer is with lightning speed and organizations need to be able to be proactively innovative…ensuring the customer journey is satisfying, embraced and yields results. Organizations need to gather and assess information, data in all forms to get a full 360 degree understanding of their customer. Create a compelling customized customer experience that is relevant at all stages along the customer journey.
Organizations need to be willing to dedicate teams to the consistent pursuit of iterative testing, learning, and scaling—at a pace that many may find challenging.
In some organizations this initiative has suffered due to the ongoing conversation about which functional business group should lead this process. Then there are the organizations who have made significant progress by establishing cross-functional teams comprised of representatives from marketing, e-commerce, IT, channel management, finance, and legal. Often these teams operate in a “war room” posture – prototyping, reviewing campaign results, making tough decisions quickly and always trying a new idea.
Often, organizations find that they require skill-sets they do not have onboard. Since most of these folks are in high demand, an innovative cross-functional team could decide to re-train internal resources, recruit bright college graduates who have grown up with many of the analytical and web design skills needed, or collaborate with specialty resource providers, like TRC (www.trcollaborative.com) to assist them in their team building.
By all accounts organizations who succeed in this new age of customized marketing will look like customer centric technology organizations – embrace it!