Editorial
In the race to execute digital experience for your customers, you must become a leader in what Jahia Solutions calls the “third wave.”
It’s no longer about just web experience, or just one channel.
"It’s the power of one-to-one connections and putting the power back into the people,” said Jessica Sundstrom, director of digital strategy at Jahia Solutions, during the CMSWire webinar, “Are You on the Wrong Side of the Digital Experience Adoption Curve?” “In the third wave, you focus on digital agility and a full range of customer experience including what happens pre log-in and post-sale. Those companies that move faster and innovate in customer experience and manage it will win.”
Breaking Through the Barriers
Mark Grannan, analyst at Forrester Research, offered steps during the webinar to break through organizational barriers that prevent digital experience execution.
Grannan suggests connecting the dots, so all stakeholders feel responsible for and work towards the final result. Have those working on backend processes like website uptime demonstrate how that affects customer-facing metrics like loyalty, conversions and average time on site. Correlate that with your business metrics around revenue, he said.
Create actionable insights from what you learn at the different customer touchpoints.
“Bring them in line with your business objectives by focusing on the customer,” Grannan said.
Challenge your staff. And the easiest place to do that according to Grannan is to hit them in their wallets: Make digital buy-in a mandate by tying things like use of new tools to commission. Any resistance quickly dissipates when it comes to people's wallets.
Revisit the way your teams collaborate to locate areas where it can be refined. Find out who owns what. Collaboration often fails, but without it, digital experience is no more than a romanticized notion.
Organizational Debt
Grannan said most larger organizations on Forrester’s client list have existing technical and cultural roadblocks that impact their attempts to transform digitally. These come, he said, in the form of siloes.
Marketing handles campaigns. Merchandizing does commerce.
“Those teams are individually focused on the customer but aren’t communicating in a meaningful way,” Grannan said. “They aren’t creating systems of data that talk to each other.”
Organizations that store data independently and inconsistently suffer because there’s a “huge imperative” around integration.
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It’s a Journey
Above and beyond technology, culture and strategy are very much a part of the digital experience execution game. Organizations that follow a customer journey map that allows teams to understand the pain points customers experience on a day-to-day basis will benefit, Grannan said.
And one thing he emphasized: everyone, across all departments, will need to be on board in digital experience adoption.
Grannan told a story of an organization whose sales teams objected to using a new e-commerce function and instead advocated sticking with traditional ordering functions. Grannan said he’d tie their commission to effective use of the e-commerce engine in order to force adoption.
“Digital experience is all well and good,” Grannan added, “but it needs to exist as a subset of a larger transformation of digital. You need to be cross-functional and need to work together.”
Designers and developers should not be sitting on separate teams and working in siloes. “They are directly tied to delivering great digital experience to customers,” Grannan said.
Great digital experience is a balance of customer experience and operational excellence.
“Those things working together,” he said, “drives top-line growth.”
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