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Category Archives: customer experience

Digital Trends & Digital Leadership

What are the key digital trends of 2019, and what are the key traits of successful “digital leaders”?

Digital Trends

Research recently released by Harvey Nash/KPMG, Info-Tech, Gartner and Deloitte have highlighted a mostly shared view of of current and future technology focused trends. The research demonstrates that organisations are changing their product/service offerings or business models in a fundamental way, predominantly driven by digital disruption and the need to get closer to the consumer.

The combined research demonstrated an increased investment in cyber security, data analytics, AI/automation and transformation. Organisations not investing in AI and automation can expect, over time, for their cost base to be relatively higher than their AI-investing competitors.

The combined summarised view of digital trends is shown in the table below:

*Digital trends where 2 or more trends were featured across the four sources*

Digital transformation is becoming business as usual as enterprises look to stay ahead of the game. It has been recognized that digital transformation should and can be handled within existing budgets and without extra investment.

Digital transformations should be business led rather than IT led, to ensure business leaders are fully engaged with how their operations should be optimized for automation and digital change.

2. Digital Leadership

Leading organisations who demonstrate strong digital leadership experience improved time to market, superior customer experience and high operational efficiency. As a result, both revenue growth and profitability are higher too. Today, there is no longer business strategy and technology strategy. There is just strategy, and technology is driving it.

Digital leaders, as opposed to the Digital Management mainstream, have several traits that set them and their organisations apart from the rest. Digital Leaders distinguish themselves as being more outward-looking, using technology as a means of breaking into new markets, engaging with customers and gaining market share. They also tend to have different operating models that focus on the business owning and leading aspects of technology delivery in collaboration with IT.

Digital leaders:

Implement new technologies end-to-end across functions and geographies and change the ways of working to maximise value from technology. They use cross-functional teams (IT and business staff) and ensure business leaders work collaboratively to deliver technology change
Report business outcome-based metrics for technology projects, and scale up projects quickly if the project is successful or stop quickly if it isn’t.
Integrate core business systems with newer digital solutions and bring a long-term ‘product’ rather than a short-term ‘project’ mindset to technology implementation. They employ automation in software development and maintenance, and use methodologies such as agile and DevOps to speed up project delivery
Ensure that non-IT staff have the right technology skills, and use both internal and external resources to access the right skills
Maximise value from the data they hold and maintain an enterprise-wide data management strategy
Identify and manage the key security and privacy issues across technology development and operations, and build customer trust through the service delivered to customers and end user

In essence, digital leadership is about prioritizing value creation over efficiency generation, with a focus on speed and agility. The role is that of influence and partnering with the business rather than about control.

According to Harvey Nash / KPMG, the top 5 Board Priorities for digital leaders are:

Developing innovative new products and services
Delivering consistent and stable IT performance to the business
Enhancing the customer experience
Improving business processes
Increasing operational efficiencies

Customer Experience & Technology

11 Mar

Every organisation has a different array of stakeholders, whether it be customers, staff, consumers, suppliers, the Board, shareholders, clients or owners. Each of these stakeholders have different needs and expectations. For example, customers may want great service or excellent value, staff may want certainty and to be paid well for what they do, and shareholders may seek a solid return on their investment. As professionals, we are there to help balance the needs of these stakeholder groups. At the end of the day, none of these groups would exist without the need for the service or product in the first place, and no business would survive without these consumers paying for (or being funded for) these products and services.

So, why would consumers spend money with your organisation, and keep on coming back?

Customer Experience

Happy customers receive a perceived value or benefit from purchasing a product or service. A core component of receiving value and benefits is through having a positive customer experience.

Positive customer experiences drive positive emotions, brand loyalty and referrals. For companies it is also shown to increase stock prices. You enable trust in your brand by providing products and services which are timely, consistent, easy/simple, are of great value and meet needs of customers. Customer intimacy is also an important sustainable differentiator.

Two thirds of companies now compete on the basis of customer experience (and that figure is projected to increase).

So, how do we improve customer experience?

There are many ways to improve customer experience, some of which involve technology, all of which involve process change, people and leadership.

Technology is a significant enabler of customer experience but is certainly not the magic pill to address all customer experience challenges. For the perspective of the IT department and IT leader there is a need to reprioritise technology projects towards those that are geared towards providing better customer experiences. The technology department must work very closely with other areas of the organisation (such as HR, Marketing, PMO, etc) to make this happen and to ensure alignment of change.

The Approach

I believe the best approach is simply talk with people. Talk and (more importantly) listen to as many stakeholders as possible to find out what they do, how they do it, and what their challenges and pain points are.

Synthesize this information, along with research, experience and best practice to devise a plan, ensuring that the end goals and objectives were well defined and aligned to Corporate Strategy.

This should be broken into phases and prioritised based on costs, value for money, effort, complexity and risk.

In Summary

Identify the end goals & objectives. What are the problems you are trying to solve?
Liaise with key internal and external stakeholders
Develop a plan (aligned with corporate strategy) that includes:
- An integrated approach to encompass people, process and technology
- Customer experience (mostly external) and operational excellence (mostly internal)
- Prioritisation of initiatives based on value, cost, risk, complexity, effort.
- Identify low hanging fruit, quick wins, etc. Celebrate the wins. Be agile. Fail/learn fast.
Leadership, leadership, leadership (plus teamwork and accountability)
“Sell” the plan. It’s all about the people. Communicate as one with simplicity and meaning.
Change management. Answer the “what’s in it for me” question to improve change acceptance
Measure benefits and success. Reassess the plan and priorities regularly.

“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to“
Richard Branson

Ben Ward