How to Make Your Customer-Centric Transformation a Success

With smartphones dominating the mobile landscape and customers using multiple devices and demanding highly personalized and relevant experiences, organizations have been rushing to undertake customer-centric transformations of their businesses. Many companies have taken on that challenge, and now that a few years have gone by, the experiences of many companies suggests that there are some clear indicators of how to make such a transformation a success.

It turns out that the priorities some companies have embraced in making their transformations haven’t always been the right ones. Some best practices have emerged to ensure that your business has a rewarding customer-centric transformation.

Planning the Digital Transformation Is Vital.


When a company undertakes a customer-centric transformation — shifting fundamental ways of doing business from serving the company’s internal operational processes to applying an understanding of the whole customer journey to every department in the organization — it is common to rush into implementing a solution with very little planning. Successful transformations invest time in planning and have a formal program office to lead the initiative with clear milestones, progress reports, and funding in place.

It’s Not All About the Technology.


It is too easy to assume that, since we are all trying to capture customers’ digital attentions, the technology behind a company’s transformation would be the deciding factor in determining success. While getting the technology right is an important element, it isn’t the top factor. Lack of organizational and executive buy-in, overly ambitious goals, and poor project management are the top reasons for failed initiatives.

Keep Your Transformation Goals Realistic.


Being too ambitious in your transformation goals is risky, since getting your transformation wrong can have lasting impacts in companies that haven’t embraced failures as learning experiences and are slow to forget past disappointments.

Communication Is Key.


The more cross-channel and line-of-business collaboration you have within an organization, the greater the likelihood for success in your digital transformation.

Executive Permission Is Not the Same as Sponsoring.


A compelling case can be made to company executives to transform the business into a customer-centric organization, but being given permission to proceed is not the same as sponsoring the transformation. If your digital-transformation initiative doesn’t obtain funding priority, have executive leadership in the steering committee, and engage in managing conflicting priorities, it is highly unlikely that it will be successful.

Get Outside Help.


The majority of successful transformations are those that have been implemented by teams with the right skills — not all of which can be found in-house. Employing external experts can greatly increase the chances of success. Said one executive, “We are all about doing everything in house. As a result, everything takes forever to get done.”

Getting rid of preconceived ideas of what it takes to transform your business into a customer-centric one may be the most important factor in increasing your chances of success. Remaining flexible, developing an enterprise-wide mindset, and making course corrections along the way will keep everyone on course toward a successful transformation.
For more details on these ideas, check out the Adobe/Merkle report, The Case for Change: Exposing the Myths of Customer-Centric Transformation.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/make-customer-centric-transformation-success/