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Today’s customers are better informed, better connected, and more demanding than ever before. CEOs are now concerned about Customer 
Loyalty and they recognize that mastery of the customer agenda is essential. In fact, global leaders of successful businesses recognize that creating a customer-centric, digitally-transformed business is a top priority.
In this age of digital disruption, how can organizations engage customers, increase Customer Loyalty, and achieve profitable growth? What is most appropriate when it comes to Customer-centric design?
Almost every market is experiencing a fundamental change. Consumer expectations have shifted and digital technologies are making the biggest impact on businesses large and small since the start of the information age. Ultimately, businesses need to navigate the challenges of digital disruption and find new ways to create economic value and drive growth.
The challenge today is what it takes for organizations to be a Customer-centric Organization.
Unraveling the 6 Core Capabilities of a Customer-centric Organization
A Customer-centric Organization must have 6 Core Capabilities to compete in the Digital Age. In this global time, customer-centricity ceases to be a differentiator. It has become a matter of survival.
The first 2 Core Capabilities are Customer-directed. These are Customer Strategy and Customer Experience (CX).
- Customer Strategy. The first core capability, Customer Strategy is focused on addressing changing customer needs and behavior. It involves the development of a clear view of customer behavior and intentions using data and analytics. Customer Strategy can be applied in several ways. It can be used to refine and develop a proposition or even inform major investments in new media content.
- Customer Experience (CX). Customer Experience (CX) is that core capability that generates a significant competitive advantage – a double revenue growth against industry counterparts. It is being able to respond to customer needs balanced with understanding the values customers bring to the enterprise. The world’s most advanced customer businesses often undertake customer journey mapping and experience design which are critical to executing customer-centric change.
The second 2 Core Capabilities focus on front office capability and across the enterprise value chain. These are Sales & Service Transformation and Connected Enterprise.
- Sales & Service Transformation. As the third core capability, Sales & Service Transformation is essential to becoming a customer-responsive business. This is a newly digitized and fully integrated front office capability that can attract, engage, acquire, and continually engage with customers. With the modernization and transformation of front office functions, Marketing, Sales, and Service teams get to have better ideas on how to work together more effectively. This leads to a full end-to-end Business Transformation. A core concept to Service Transformation is the development of Service 4.0 capabilities.
- Connected Enterprise. Focused on delivering differentiated Customer Experiences, Connected Enterprise is an architecture of fundamental capabilities that work across the Enterprise Value Chain, from back office operations through customer-facing interactions. The application of Connected Enterprises has led to companies experiencing an increase in annual revenue and a positive return on investment.
The third 2 Core Capabilities are Data & Analytics and Digital Transformation — your company’s response to a highly demanding digital market.
- Data & Analytics. The fourth core capability is Data & Analytics. This core capability is focused on creating actionable insights that drive profitable growth. With the use of Data & Analytics, it can uncover patterns of customer behavior, relevant social media influencers, and channel preferences. It is useful in personalizing propositions, channels, marketing communication, and the experiences offered to customers.
- Digital Transformation. The sixth core capability, this is the core capability that can power new ways to engage customers, optimize operations, and transform products. Digital Transformation is delivering the right customer and digital technology. With the advent of virtual reality, augmented reality headsets, the Internet of Things, AI, and cognitive computing, it has changed the way customer-centric companies engage customers. Digital Transformation is not an overnight event. This is a series of incremental steps, each delivering a concrete business advantage.
Developing the 6 Core Capabilities is no easy task. It can be pretty challenging. Companies need to have a good handle of its key challenges and the right approaches to mastering the 6 Core Capabilities. When this is achieved, the high road to global competitiveness is achieved.
Interested in gaining more understanding of these 6 core Capabilities of a Customer-centric Organization? You can learn more and download an editable PowerPoint about the 6 Core Capabilities of a Customer-centric Organization here on the Flevy documents marketplace. There is a series of 3 presentations – Part I, Part II, and Part III that discusses all 6 Core Capabilities.
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The Data Analytics Revolution is here. It is transforming how companies organize, operate, manage talent, and create value. In fact, advanced 
data analytics is now a quintessential business matter. It is important for CEOs and top executives to be able to clearly articulate its purpose and translate it into action. Yet, this is not so.
CEOs and top executives are finding it difficult to articulate the clarity of purpose and act on it. It must not just stay in an Analytics department but must be embedded throughout the organization where the insights will be used. Leaders with strong intuition do not just become better equipped to kick the tires on their analytics efforts. Leadership Development now calls for leaders to be capable of addressing many critical top management challenges. It now requires employing a range of tools, employing the right personnel, applying hard metrics, and asking hard questions.
Data Analytics is a means to an end. It is a discriminating tool for identifying and implementing a value-driving answer. It can unleash insights that could be the very core of your organization’s approach to improving performance. This, however, cannot be achieved if there is no clarity in the purpose of your data.
Data Analytics Revolution: Are We Ready?
The Data Analytics Revolution is transforming how companies organize, operate, manage talents, and create value. But are we ready for this? A number of companies are reaping major rewards from Data Analytics. But this is far from the norm. More CEOs and top executives are avoiding getting dragged into the esoteric weeds.
Data Analytics have complex methodologies and there is a sheer scale of data sets. Machine Learning is becoming increasingly more important. For us to be ready in the onset of Data Analytics Revolutions, we need to be capable of addressing many critical and complimentary top management challenges. We need to be able to ground even the highest analytical aspirations in traditional business principles and deploy a range of tools and people.
To be properly equipped on the proper use of Data Analytics, we just need to develop a mindset for Purpose-driven Analytics anchored on 4 guiding principles.
The 4 Guiding Principles of Purpose-driven Analytics
- Ask Clear and Correct Questions. The first principle focuses on generating impact the soonest. Hence, precise questions are asked based on the company’s best-informed priorities. Here, clarity is essential.
- Identify Small Changes for Big Impact. The second principle focuses on generating gains even on small improvements. There is a need to identify small points of difference to amplify and exploit because the smallest edge can make the biggest difference.
- Leverage Soft Data. The third principle focuses on getting quality insights and generating sharper conclusions. It is at this point wherein the use of softer inputs such as industry forecasts, predictions from product experts, and social media commentary are given more emphasis. Soft data is essential when trying to connect the dots between more exact inputs.
- Connect Separate Data Sets. The fourth principle focuses on capturing the untapped value. This principle emphasizes the need to combine sources of information to make sharper insights. When different data sets are examined, the greater is the probability that problems can easily be fixed.
From Learning to Doing: Connecting the Dots
It is not enough that organizations learn about Purpose-driven Analytics. One also needs to be able to put these into effective use. Companies undergoing Digital Transformation must take a multi-faceted approach to analyze data to minimize overwhelming complexity. There are 4 guiding principles for Purpose-driven Analytics implementation. Using these principles will facilitate the effective use of analytics and transform outputs into action.
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In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are approaching the age of automation. Together with this is the impending penetration of 
digital technology into the labor force which can threaten to destabilize crucial aspects of how employees work by. This can undermine the stability companies depend on to be agile.
With the coming transformation, executives can resolidify their companies by developing a robust Digital Transformation Strategy. There is just a need for executives to adjust their leadership behavior, embrace digital workforce platforms, and deepen their engagement with digitally enabled workers.
Facing the Current Digital Landscape
Workforce Digitization and the powerful economics of automation require a sweeping rethinking of organization structures, influence, and control. According to a recent study made by McKinsey Global Institute, most industries have yet to fully digitize their workforce as these are lagging behind the leading digitized sectors. Digital Transformation is just not happening in most industries. Organizations have to realize that in Workforce Digitization, automation can devastate established assumptions on stability.
The hallmark of an agile age is the ability to be stable and dynamic. The McKinsey research further showed that the workers’ roles and the processes that support them are the bedrock aspects of stability. These are the first and fourth most important factors that differentiate agile companies from the rest.
However, with the onset of automation, the workforce is destabilized. Jobs are disaggregated into component tasks and companies are forced to reassemble remaining tasks into something that makes a new kind of sense. On the other hand, job destabilization can have a dual-faceted impact. Organizations can either become more agile, healthy, and high performing or it can collapse into internal dysfunction.
The direction organizations will go will depend on how it can utilize Digital Workforce Platforms.
The Workforce Platform: Leading Organizations to Stability
Proper use of Workforce Platforms can help leaders restabilize the workforce and reconceive organizational structures to achieve stability. It has 4 core benefits of achieving stability.
- Collaboration. Workforce Platforms can be effective staffing coordinators with a multiplex of roles. It can maximize the visibility and mobility of the best people within the organization.
- Retention. It can bring science to talent management through the scientific process of retention. Workforce Platforms can help employees grow and develop as their career progresses.
- Succession Planning. Workforce Platforms are effective in increasing employees’ engagement in their work through Succession Planning. Through Success Planning, organizations are ensured that strategic capabilities, institutional knowledge, and leadership skills are retained within the organization.
- Decision Making. A vital core benefit, it can create conditions where employees feel valued by their organization and are happy in their environment. This is crucial as it can create conditions where employees feel energized and empowered.
Workforce Platforms are effective in leading organizations towards achieving agility. It moves companies to go beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to human resource and talent management.
Maximizing the Benefits of Workforce Platforms.
Benefits gained from Workforce Platforms can further be maximized. This can be achieved when there are appropriate support processes in place. There should be dynamic scheduling and appropriate leadership decisions. Our leaders are our organization’s architect. Being able to make the right leadership decisions can lead organizations to successfully maneuver their transformation in this age of automation. At this stage, Leadership Development plays a vital role.
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“All you need is your own imagination
So use it that’s what it’s for (that’s what it’s for)
Go inside, for your finest inspiration
Your dreams will open the door (open up the door)” Madonna
Madonna is a perfect example of reinvention. A very versatile actress, Madonna has the ability to adapt to new trends; someone that can send a lesson to companies struggling with their own digital revolution.
In this digital age, change is rewarded while being static is being punished. Companies must be open to Digital Transformation; a radical reinvention to find new, significant, and sustainable sources of revenue. Incremental adjustments or building something new outside of the core business can provide real benefits and, in many cases, are a crucial first step for a digital transformation. But if these initiatives do not lead to more profound changes to the core business and avoid the real work of re-architecting how the business makes money, the benefits can be fleeting and too insignificant to avert a steady march to oblivion.
Discovering Digital Reinvention
Reinvention is a rethinking of the business itself. Based on a Digital Quotient Research, reinvention requires significant commitment. First, the investment must be aligned closely with strategy at a sufficient scale. And second, digital leaders must have a high threshold for risk and must be willing to make bold decisions.
Digital Reinvention is not a throw-it-all-out approach. If you look at Apple when it moved from a computer manufacturer to music and lifestyle brand, it has reinvented itself while continuing to build computers. Likewise, this is the case with John Deere. John Deere is the brand name of Deere & Company that manufactures agricultural, construction, forestry machinery, and others. It continued to sell tractors and farm equipment while reinventing itself into a creator of online services for farmers.
Digital Reinvention is an innovative approach to laying the foundation for future growth while continually pushing improvement targets. Digital Reinvention is Business Transformation in action.
Approaching Digital Reinvention
Digital Reinvention will put new demands on leadership. Hence, an organization must have a strategic approach to Digital Reinvention: The 4Ds of Digital Reinvention.
- Discover. The primary goal of Discover is to develop a tight business case for change based on facts. Organizations must discover what your digital vision is based on where the value is. This will shape your digital ambition, strategy, and business case.
- Design. Designing, creating, and prototyping breakthrough experiences is the main focus of Design. It is reinventing and developing new capabilities and breakthrough Customer Journeys.
- Deliver. This is the third phase where organizations need to gather speed and scale necessary for reinvention. Its primary focus is to deliver and develop a network of partners who can rapidly scale your ambition. There is a need to activate an ecosystem to rapidly deliver at scale.
- De-risk. The 4th D, it is focused on structuring the change program, resources, and commercial model to reduce operational and financial risk. It is essential for senior leaders to focus on structural and organizational issues that can hamper the organization’s ability to manage cyber risk.
Having a good handle of the 4Ds of Digital Reinvention will prepare leaders towards Digital Transformation and new challenges. It will be able to come up with the right answers to key questions that will arise in preparation for Digital Reinvention. Coming up with the proper answers to these crucial questions can guide companies to reinvent themselves ad stay in the game.
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Technology, Internet, growth, and globalization have metamorphosed the way we work, play, and live. They have even changed the fundamental laws of economics. We are living in an economy that is quite different from the old manufacturing-based economy of the 1980s. Fewer people are now employed in the manufacturing sector, who are anxious about the prospects of being replaced by machines soon.
The “New Economy” is a term economists started using in the 1990s to describe new, high-tech, high-growth industries that have been the driving force of economic growth since that period. The new economy is also heralded as the Digital Economy, the Knowledge Economy, the Data Economy, or the eCommerce Economy. Top technology enterprises—including Google, Facebook and Apple—have outpaced traditional firms around the globe by taking advantage of the new economy.
Leadership Development in this age of Digital Economy is a key challenge for most organizations. More and more organizations, today, are revisiting what they are about and the meaning of leadership for them. It’s not about one person or even those residing at the top anymore.
MIT Sloan Management Review conducted a study of 4,000 executives from 120 geographies around the world to understand what defines a great leader in this changing world. The study revealed striking results with most executives believed that their leaders lacked the mindset needed to produce the strategic changes essential for leading in the Digital Economy. Enterprise-level transformation is what majority of leaders feared to embark on.
Mindsets are established set of attitudes held by someone that shape how a person interprets and responds to experiences. A mindset arises out of a person’s view of the world or philosophy of life. To know about the Digital Economy leadership mindsets (i.e. leadership mindsets critical to survive in this new economy), the MIT Sloan Management Review’s global study identifies 4 critical mindsets—based on in-depth interviews from executives worldwide and detailed analysis of data:
- The Producer
- The Investor
- The Connector
- The Explorer
Let’s define these first 2 leadership mindsets.
The Producer
Leaders with a producer mindset evaluate each of their customer touch points painstakingly. These leaders exhibit a passion for producing customer value. Producers concentrate on analytics, digital know-how, implementation, results, and customer satisfaction. They focus on analytics to fast-track creativity. The resulting innovation helps them tackle shifting customer preferences and enhance customer experiences. The Producers strive to create all the customer journeys enjoyable.
The Investor
The leaders with an investor mindset make people appreciate the higher purpose they serve by their work. They constantly struggle to instill motivation and teamwork among their teams in order to achieve their overall organizational goals. The leaders with an investor mindset are concerned about the communities that surround them. They look after the well-being and constant advancement of their employees, and devote their efforts to improve value for their customers.
Fostering these types of mindsets is critical to building the right Organizational Culture for an organization to be successful in the Digital Economy.
Interested in learning more about the leadership mindsets required to win in the new economy? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Leadership Mindsets Critical to Succeed in the Digital Economy here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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Technological innovation and intensifying competition are forcing leaders to rethink how they use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to manage and direct organizations. Digitization has reinforced the importance of Key Performance Indicators not only in enhancing employee performance but driving the overall organizational productivity.
The role of KPIs is becoming more dynamic. KPIs are getting demonstrably flexible, smarter, and valuable in achieving strategic advantage. Leading technology-driven organizations—including Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber—rely on metrics considerably and utilize KPIs to steer their strategy and evaluate success. They perceive KPIs quite differently than traditional-focused organizations, and employ them as an input for automation, and to guide, regulate, and improve their machine learning tools.
To make the most out of these dynamic and strategic KPIs of this Digital Age, leaders need to be more insightful and knowledgeable. They should be able to thoroughly determine which KPIs to analyze, how to measure them, and how to effectively improve them. Understanding the value of selected KPIs and their optimization is key to aligning strategies; making the right decision to invest in data, analytics, and automation capabilities; and create a link between people and machines.
KPI Virtuous Cycle
The relationships and dependencies that clarify, educate, and enhance KPI investment are demonstrated by “KPI Virtuous Cycle.” By digitally linking KPIs, data, and decision-making into virtuous cycles, companies can align their immediate situational requirements with long-term strategic planning. The KPI Virtuous Cycle has 3 key components, and it demands active cross-functional collaboration:
- Data Governance
- KPIs
- Decision Rights
The way these 3 components impact—and support each other—keeps changing. Organizations aspiring to become digital-savvy should embrace, value, and relentlessly invest in the KPI Virtuous Cycle.
Data Governance
The first component of the KPI Virtuous Cycle is about employing authority and control (planning, monitoring, and enforcement) through a set of practices and processes to manage organizational data assets. Leading digital organizations consider data as a strategic resource, a valuable tool for measurement and accountability, and a mechanism to facilitate meeting strategic KPIs. Data Governance frameworks are guided by strategic KPIs. Organizations should know what data sets would be ideal to predict and rank—for instance, customers’ lifetime value and their propensity to leave—to prioritize preemptive and preventive action. Data and Analytics serve as a component of Data Governance.
Strategic KPIs
Strategic KPIs shape and govern enterprise Data Governance models. These KPIs include financial, customer, supplier, channel, and partner performance parameters. For instance, Data Governance initiatives in customer-centric organizations are prioritized to facilitate in realizing customer-focused KPIs—e.g., Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Enterprise Data Governance frameworks are strongly influenced and informed by strategic KPIs.
Decision Rights
Decision Rights ascertain the decision-making authority required to drive the business and strategic alignment. Making decisions in such a way that it boosts organizational performance involves identifying the individuals explicitly involved in making decisions, charting an outline on how decisions will be made, reinforcing with appropriate processes and tools, and defining various decision rights scenarios to facilitate in automation. It is, however, quite tricky to determine and assign decision rights when an enterprise is aspiring to empower its people and making machines function better.
Imperatives for Creating Dynamic and Strategic KPIs
For the KPIs to be strategically defined and become truly dynamic, the leadership needs to provide the required support by getting thorough data sets compiled and meaningful analytics performed. At the same time, there is a need to:
- Decide whether the decision rights needs to be assigned to individuals (rather than machines or vice versa.
- Enhance the capabilities of people and machines.
- Apply decision rights to generate data to identify and gauge productivity.
- Identify the delays and bottlenecks between KPIs, data, and decisions.
- Verify the diligence in the way KPIs, data, and decisions are mapped and monitored.
Interested in learning more about the components of KPI Virtuous Cycle, its applications, and Strategic KPIs? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Strategic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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Creating a culture that measures productivity objectively is a sensitive matter. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are being employed extensively by organizations across the globe to monitor and track performance. KPIs provide valuable metadata to improve top-down and bottom-up vertical efficiency.
Analytics-driven firms are aware that KPIs are much more than a tool to evaluate performance. Utilizing KPIs, they gather valuable insights, create enterprise-wide accountability, and develop a goal-oriented culture.
However, most executives typically fall short of utilizing KPIs to their full potential. They have to realize that the effectiveness of KPIs depends on two distinct yet important elements: KPI transparency for the entire workforce—making the core metrics available across the board at all levels—and alignment of KPIs—determining the KPIs most relevant to the people and organizational purpose, and taking action based on the results of performance monitoring. Leading organizations share KPIs with all stakeholders and use algorithms to gauge the contribution of KPIs to critical functions, e.g., Marketing and Customer Experience.
To create an objective-driven culture, the senior leadership should work on developing capabilities to outline key performance and putting in place accurate metrics to measure it. The selection and prioritization of most relevant indicators is something that the leadership needs to carefully think about.
When defining KPIs, there are 5 KPI focus areas. Each focus area is unique and critical, but collectively they have a profound impact on each other and on the organizations that are aiming to undergo Digital Transformation. Leading Data and Analytics-driven organizations devise KPIs that cover all 5 of these focus areas:
- Enterprise KPIs
- Customer KPIs
- Workplace Analytics
- Partner and Supplier KPIs
- Quantified-self KPIs
Let’s discuss the first 3 focus areas in detail, for now.
Enterprise KPIs
The Enterprise KPIs benchmark the effectiveness of core functions of an organization. These indicators are important to determine the accountability of the leadership and workforce, and are vital for strategic as well as routine decision-making and investment. Examples of these indicators include Risk-Adjusted Return On Capital (RAROC) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Customer KPIs
The Customer KPIs facilitate in measuring the knowledge and impact of all leads, prospects, and customers. These metrics are used to calculate the actual and likely financial contributions of business prospects and clients. The Customer KPIs assist in analyzing and ranking the relationships that organizations aspire to develop with the customers and better understanding each segment and sales funnel the customers belong. Customer lifetime value is an example of these indicators.
Workplace Analytics
The Workplace Analytics pertain to quantifying the efficiency and commitment level of organizational people. These analytics are used to isolate leadership tools and methodologies helpful in enhancing customer focus, and capture and quantify process outcomes and outputs feeding organizational KPIs. These metrics are valuable in measuring collaboration across the organization, gauging the proficiency of managers in motivating their teams, and highlighting the elements that demoralize people.
Interested in learning more about the 5 KPI areas of focus? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): 5 Areas of Focus here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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Businesses are getting increasingly complex and so are customers’ expectations. Digital organizations are digitizing their critical Customer Journeys at scale to outperform competition. These organizations are using Digitization to create streamlined journeys, which result in more agile IT units, quick delivery of new products, and improved Customer Experiences and Engagement.
But before embarking on digitization and streamlining Customer Journeys, organizations need to transform their products, processes, legacy systems and technology, and culture to become truly digital businesses.
Streamlining multiple Customer Journeys concurrently requires integration of existing systems, building new capabilities, and deploying existing competences in a different way. Specifically, it entails embracing the following 5-phase Omni-channel Customer Journey Design approach that is critical for improving Customer Experiences and accomplishing higher Customer Engagement:
- Develop Enterprise Customer Experience Story
- Prioritize Technology Transformation Projects
- Develop a Flexible Ecosystem of Technologies and Platforms
- Adapt Principles of Strong, Agile, and Lean
- Be Adaptive in Performance Management
Now, let’s talk about the first 3 phases of the Omni-channel Customer Journey Design approach.
Phase 1 – Develop Enterprise Customer Experience Story
Creating a Customer Experience Story calls for setting up a Customer Experience team. The Customer Experience team begins by identifying the critical factors and main concerns in their customer relationships. Around these themes, they, then, carefully outline the experiences customers may come across during each and every interaction they have with the company in the form of a story. The Enterprise Customer Experience Story is unique to every company and provides a summary of the strategy, brand, and positioning in workable terms.
Next, the team identifies the journeys that are able to effectively deliver the factors and features critical for the customers utilizing digitization. Each journey should be critically analyzed to assess its significance, cost advantages associated with scaling it, the governance and technical impediments, and the availability of adequate financial and leadership resources to manage it. Thorough analysis of Customer Journeys yields a plan of action that aids in creating prioritized journeys.
Phase 2 – Prioritize Technology Transformation Projects
IT Transformation is typically the most challenging and resource hungry among other change initiatives. For instance, designing a mobile app is simple, however, it’s the linkage of the app to all the channels customers use and its integration with the back-end systems that is complicated.
To undertake Digitization, companies should avoid digitizing each journey separately—as it fosters internal silos—and investing heavily in Internet or mobile-channel IT. A better approach for the organizations is to rather prioritize the IT initiatives to enable smooth transformation of IT architecture with the addition of more customer journeys. Standard IT components are reusable across different journeys.
Phase 3 – Develop a Flexible Ecosystem of Technologies and Platforms
An important consideration for digitizing core journeys and scaling digitization is to link your IT systems with the technologies and platforms working outside the firm. These external systems provide the organization several advantages, including quick access to new customers, data pools, and capabilities.
Next-generation integration architecture should be designed in such a way that it should support open standards, dynamic interaction models, and curtail security threats. Progress in cloud computing and technology infrastructure has made quick and easy access, management, and operations of infrastructure resources possible—including networks, servers, databases, programs, and services. The skills needed to manage these technology ecosystems include DevOps experts to supervise integration of development and operations, enterprise architects, cloud engineers to manage software and cloud-computing, data scientists, and automation engineers.
Interested in learning more about the other key phases of the Customer Journey Design approach? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Omni-channel Customer Journey here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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Digital-savvy startups are disrupting markets and threatening conventional businesses. They are doing this by utilizing technology to offer new products and services and providing tailored yet uncomplicated experiences for their customers.
Likewise, large traditionally-run firms will have to keep evolving their Customer Experience approaches to secure additional avenues of revenue and to stay competitive. To accomplish this, they will need to develop capabilities to effectively utilize insights on customer preferences and design offerings as per the customers’ preferences.
Many organizations, today, are undertaking Digital Transformation programs to improve their Customer Experiences. However, a majority of these Digital Transformation initiatives fall short of securing their maximum value potential due to focusing only on improving specific touchpoints instead of confronting the entire customer journeys—spanning across several departments and channels.
To make their Customer Experience sustainable and to become Customer-centric Organizations need to clearly transform their ways of doing business, operations, and employee behaviors. It is critical to improve these fundamental support processes before embarking on initiating any Customer Experience optimization initiatives.
Customer Experience optimization facilitates in gaining more satisfied/paying customers, additional value, and better retention rates. Research reveals that the companies that have higher Customer Satisfaction levels can achieve four times growth in value compare to those that rank lower in Customer Satisfaction.
Customer Experience (CX) Approach to Value Creation
The following pragmatic 5-phase approach to Customer Experience Management and Value Creation is of great benefit to organizations aspiring to enrich their Customer Experience, achieve clear-cut differentiation, and capture the most potential value:
- Understand What Customers Value
- Simplify and Streamline Offerings
- Link Customer Value to Operational Drivers
- Focus on Most Important Customer Journeys
- Adopt Continuous Improvement (CI) Thinking
Let’s now delve deeper into the first 3 phases of the approach.
Understand What Customers Value
Ascertaining the key drivers of Customer Satisfaction is the foremost step in improving Customer Experience. A flawed approach—that many companies still employ—at the onset of a Customer Experience optimization initiative is to reduce costs associated with internal processes and exploring customer pain points. This doesn’t assist in maximizing Value Creation.
Customer-centric organizations, on the other hand, devote their time in developing a clear understanding of what really matters to their customers. This helps in deciding where to focus, rationalizing their processes, and creating new experiences for the customers to generate additional value.
Great Customer Experience necessitates much more than just satisfactory interactions. Customer Satisfaction should be mapped along the entire customer journey—spanning multiple functions and channels—as customers use various channels to communicate with companies before making a transaction.
Simplify and Streamline Offerings
Alongside rationalizing the processes, it is equally important to carry out a detailed analysis of the brands, offerings, and price structures is essential to tap value from Customer Experience. After all, even the most pleasing Customer Experience cannot offset an unpredictable or exorbitantly expensive product.
Once these fundamentals are in order, organizations should investigate which interactions and Customer Journeys carry the most significance in a Customer Experience; evaluate how the organization is rated in each journey; identify and focus on the operations that need to be overhauled to improve the overall Customer Experience.
Link Customer Value to Operational Drivers
Technology and customer input provides the stimulus to streamline offerings and Customer Experience. However, the real value comes from linking the Customer Experience to core operational processes. Seeing journeys from the customer perspective aids in focusing on what they need and linking internal processes, structures, and KPIs to customer facilitation.
This necessitates deeper insights on elements that are of most value to the customer across a journey, pinpointing drivers of business costs and revenues, and—most importantly—inculcating the right mindsets across the organization. This detailed evaluation of customer journeys facilitates in determining operational improvements that bear the most positive effect on Customer Experience.
Interested in learning more about the other phases of the approach to managing Customer Experience? You can download an editable PowerPoint on the Customer Experience (CX) Approach to Create Value here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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