One organization is on a quest to enable customers to place an order without completing a paper-based purchase order. Another one is toiling to predict when a customer is within 2 days of running out of a product in order to proactively prompt them to re-order with 1 click. Yet another one is creating unattended stores, where customers simply walk in, grab what they need and march straight out, their payment fully processed. These organizations are all on digital transformation journeys - but with very different sophistication targets. Each choice of target has implications on the required resources, optimal approach, execution horizon, payoff timelines and assumed risk. I believe that proper calibration of the sophistication targets that makes sense for any organization will diminish frustration and improve outcomes.
Personalization: The goal to personalize the customer experience is noble. In practice, it appears lofty and evokes frustration in those struggling with the basics. Clarifying the type of personalization you are reaching for may bring the dream within clutching distance. 1) Journey personalization - Different customer personas have different paths when they interact with a company across touch points. For example, a high value customer could be automatically detected and routed directly to specialized handlers instead of waiting in line. They may also have a different path across your digital properties once identified. 2) Service personalization - Customer service teams are empowered to engage differently for the different customer personas. To offer different levels, types or styles of service for different personas. 3) Content personalization - Tailoring content for the different types of customers so that they don’t all hear or see the same generic content. 4) Channel personalization- engaging with customers through the most effective channels. For example, knowing when to engage via email, mobile app, SMS, in-person, phone, website and so on. Which personalization types are you reaching for?
Intelligence: There are at least four levels of intelligence that we can reach for in our digital transformation efforts. 1) Descriptive - the ability to look back and understand what happened in the past, to use historical insights to inform our future actions. 2) Predictive - leveraging technology to predict what will happen. This liberates you to focus on defining the actions to take in response to those anticipations. 3) Prescriptive - technology not only predicts what will happen but also delivers prioritized recommendations of the necessary actions . 4) Automated - technology determines what will happen and automatically executes the optimal actions so humans no longer need to do it. In each of these areas, further refinements are possible for example, improving the freshness of descriptive insights (from every month to every day), shifting predictive insights further into the future, improving levels of confidence in prescriptions and automated actions and so on. What level of intelligence are you reaching for?
Interaction: The pervasive way of interacting with enterprise applications is to explicitly type information into pre-defined screens. Nevertheless, there is a cornucopia of machine capabilities that that could dramatically alter these interactions, improve customer experience and operations. A couple of examples include the following: 1) NLP/NLU/NLG - ability of machines to understand as well as to generate written prose. 2) Voice Processing - ability of machines to process voice (listen, understand and extract meaning) as well as speak (voice generation). 3) Vision - Ability to detect and process images and video, 4) Movement - leveraging robots (physical and digital) to tackle some aspects of your operations. Is there room to re-imagine the human - machine interactions in your digital transformation efforts? What types of interactions will you enable?
Content Maturity: Progression to higher forms of intelligence, interaction and personalization requires a parallel advancement in the content arena. For instance, personalized experiences means scaling the capacity to create, optimize, manage and deliver content for a potentially large number of personas. Similarly, advancing interaction maturity requires developing the capacity to generate, process and harness a wider range of content types. For example: documents, structured text, unstructured text, audio and video. Finally, higher forms of intelligence (described above) demand improvement in how we collect content performance data across various interaction channels. This data then powers more intelligent content generation and delivery in the future. 1) What content implications arise from your overall digital sophistication targets? 2) In what ways do you need to increase the variety, interactivity and impact of your content, 3) What changes will you pursue to enable content reuse across different delivery channels, 4) Do you need to empower a larger content team that may include machines alongside humans customers, external agencies? 5)What are the core requirements for any content management systems that you enable?
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