The 13 Lucky Fundamentals of Digital Strategy

Winning in business is about taking more money from the market, more profit from the market and building a sustainable brand position. Getting your customer experience strategy in the digital world, spot-on is critical to this.

Here are my 13 fundamentals that you need to consider in your digital experience strategy. The winners tend to have better answers in each fundamental than their competition.

By the way we consider a target a “Consumer” whether or not B2C, B2B or are already a customer – people consume all sorts of services and products and experiences throughout their daily lives, in business or personally. We call them a consumer as they are active in a market, whatever their mode. A new digital proposition can often make life better for those people.

1. Target Market – Which group of consumers in which market with which attributes are we going to target, with what need and set of behaviours that makes us think we could be successful? A clear target model of our consumer is required.
2. What Difference Can We Make? – What is the change or contribution to the world to make life easier or better? Usually there is a core idea and there are lots of things to incrementally achieve more for the consumer to improve speed or ease to value or increase the value they are seeking. Think of the prime and secondary differences we are making.
3. Business Model – What is going to be the way we can deliver and extract maximum value to and from our target market? How do we want the target to pay, how do we price, direct or through channels, intermediaries, and do we take a sales, license, relationship, or service approach to getting a stride on our competition? A clear test is to ask is your business model sustainable and the least cost to deliver and most perceived value to the customer?
4. Consumer Insight – How do does your target model go about living their lives, classic hopes, fears, desires? Their needs for features, their hierarchy of benefits, the way they are influenced, their social groups, the way they gather information, shop and experience the life situation you are seeking to address. Ease of use as well as resonance with behaviour and culture are key here.
5. Proposition – How are we going to present the value to our target? How do we package it and how do we articulate it? How do we price and what benefits do we articulate most and what hierarchy of features they get and the experience they fulfil come to their attention? This usually has a lot to do with getting one up on your competition, carving out a differentiated position in the market and changing the rules of the game a little to give you traction.
6. Communication - Your channel combination for communicating to your audience and then engaging. In digital it is understanding which social platform and communications media are most relevant at each stage of the customer acquisition and customer lifecycle. Pinterest is very different from Facebook as is Twitter from YouTube the combinations at different stages of the customer journey need to be designed to meet each customers moment of truth with the right intervention.
7. Engaging – Key to both digital experience and customer relationships that maximize opportunity to deliver and receive value with your customer is to interact during the consideration, buying and end to end sue of your product or service. The reason being that through engagement we get dialogue and two way information and data exchange. Each interaction is an opportunity to understand more and qualify their needs to convert, sell and enhance the relations to upsell, cross sell and enrich the relationship for future life time of transactions between you and your customer.
8. Your Channel for Servicing and Delivering – Digital is all about data driving the service, so what channel or combination of channels do we use to provide the user with the best value and experience. We often think of direct hand held digital aps but we should also look at the Internet of Things and combinations of digital and service agent interactions. The use of predictive functions with algorithms and other triggers to provide instant benefits to the consumer. Can we deliver services and information on Social media platforms or plug-ins?
9. Your Channel for Added value – You may want to use channel, product and service partners who bring added value or convenience to your customer. Can your channel enrich the experience?
10. The Relationship Angle - Digital lends itself to on-going relationships, so do make sure that you have and understanding of customers life time value, the customer longer term profitability, cost of acquisition versus the on-going metrics around cross sell and upsell. Getting your customer economic model is critical to longer term success and helps with the investment and business plan buy in. Look to invest in emotional enrichment as this provides the biggest ROI, longevity and value of your brand.
11. Data Enrichment – What is your definition of data exchange with the consumer? How are we tracking their behaviour through their lifecycle and lifetime journey. People get confused about “Big Data” which usually consists of Hoovering up all the available data and chucking some clever analysts at it with some sort of regression analysis. Design which data you need to press which lever at which stage of the customers journey – then find ways of acquiring that data as part of the customer engagement.
12. Customer Lifecycle – Always plot your customer’s lifecycle as this will feed into product and service enhancements and will also help identify where you lose customers and how you may win them back.
13. Technology – Oh yes of course lets not ignore the “Digital is all about the technology” movement. We do need to make sure our IT works, is easy to use, the lowest cost and most efficient. This is not just your websites content management system and App of the month it is also asking where are we positioned on the Device Mesh landscape. This includes the journey from your hand held/mobile to Automotive devices, The Internet of Things, Virtual environments, body and clothing technology, Advanced Learning Machines (with Deep Neural Networks), robots, autonomous vehicles, virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and smart advisors among many. Where there are legacy operations and IT infrastructures to rely on, ensure one customer data set, one version of the truth exists.

Sorry for going all techy there for a moment! My advice is think about the consumers life, the difference we want to make, imagineer the technology and then go build it.

14. Your People - Well we couldn’t leave it on Thirteen could we? If we are planning a digital transformation, particularly in the service or service wrap space it is fundamental that our people to become digital savvy, to use and think in a digital way. Not only to feel comfortable with all things digital but also able to apply lean sigma techniques to the customer experience and their own support and delivery processes, to use digital as an enabler to everything they do.

There may be more, but if you can design an approach to each Fundamental that is powerful, compelling and better than the market leaders, you too should be onto a winning digital strategy!