Digital Candy or (Digital) Transformation
Thanks to Pete Sena and his team who produce the 4:4:4 webinar, we (I) got to chat a little on Digital Candy — my definition: the repurposing of old, current, or new tech/digital projects under the umbrella of Transformation or Digital Transformation. That is fine if those projects are the output of a transformation strategy that looked at one or more of the following the customer journey, employee journey or supply chain journey with the goal of making a significant impact and set of positive outcomes, and where the team took the outside-in lens and not just a pure inside lens, and the management team understands the biggest challenge in any transformation is the ‘people’ part of ‘people, process and technology’ — I guess that is my definition of ‘digital transformation’ or simply ‘transformation’.
My own experience is to lead with a ‘full-cycle customer journey’ map, as much of my focus is on revenue growth, product innovation, and customer experiences. By full-cycle, we like to take at least a 2 to 3-year view from when a buyer who is not engaged with a company to being a prospect to becoming a customer to the successful activation of a customer through short and long term retention, and generation of.= a higher average revenue per customer (LTV — new revenue + up/cross-sell revenues, and customer loyalty). Put yourself and your team in the customer’s seat, try to remove any cognitive bias and be critical of what is good, bad, and indifferent (FYI — indifferent is often where quick wins and competitive advantage can be leveraged at lower risk/costs). Be nimble or the often overused term ‘agile’ in how you move through the map.
How do you start?
There are plenty of templates and tools for ‘customer journey’ mapping that can be customized/tweaked for your markets. Though in the 20+ years I’ve been working with ‘customer journey’ my first iteration is still in a spreadsheet and a whiteboard with sticky notes. The key part to kicking off a successful ‘customer journey map” initiative is the ‘mindset’ and I recommend a read of Pete’s post “From Gone to Gold: How to use a Japenese Principle to Reimagine your Business Future” and maybe pick an easier starting point to fix in your customer journey like Pete’s example of the “Sawdust Principle”, which is similar to the ‘indifferent’, above.
I like to use a quote about agile that applies to ‘customer’ journey mapping, and focus on customer “outcomes …”:
The full 4:4:4 Digital Candy webinar:
Coming soon, some higher-level examples of a customer journey map.
Thanks for your time.
Some previous posts on the subject:
Digital Transformation: are you on the journey?
How many companies, brands, marketing, and sales folk actually match the customer's steps to buying?
