Who owns the digital customer experience in your organization?
Marketing?
Product?
Technology?
Those are common answers from most organizations. All three make sense as the ultimate owner of digital customer experience, but … each of those groups have different goals in relation to and support of the broader business plan. How can three groups avoid conflict and inconsistency for the end user experience
What happens when everyone tries to speak (digitally) to the customer at the same time? And imagine if they all arrive on your customer’s phone at the same time?
Marketing: Here are the latest offers, buy this now, check this new item / feature out!
Product: How was your experience? Do you like this feature? Please rate us!
Technology: It’s time to upgrade your app! Please reset your password.
Now here’s a live look at your customer trying to figure out how best to interact with you:
What can you do about this?
To avoid the potential CX disaster, Localytics recommends a Digital Engagement Steering Committee, staffed with representation from Marketing, Product, Technology, and Finance. Each of these functional expertise areas have a stake in your customer’s digital journey, and the Steering Committee is designed to increase your organization’s effectiveness in delivering a great digital experience.
Part of the Steering Committee’s function is to resolve issues that result when department goals may not align on the best digital experience. To resolve these issues, we recommend first to raise all of the department goals that impact decisions on customer experience. Here is a small sample of goals and questions from the departments invited to the committee:
- Marketing — Drive Revenue. What is the conversion rate on our offer?
- Product — Attract Users. What feature should we build next?
- Technology — Maintain Service. What pain point alienates users?
Getting started
Aligning your organization for success with the Steering Committee is easy, and we recommend a few simple steps to make the first session run smoothly.
Step 1 — identify your stakeholder organizations and contacts
Step 2 — interview and gather current goals and challenges from each invited member
Step 3 — document goals and challenges for sharing in the first meeting
Step 4 — send out an agenda that includes a discussion of the project scope, goals, and challenges
Step 5 — commit the Steering Committee to a monthly meeting with interim updates provided by email
After gathering different perspectives in Step 2 and 3, plan to share your findings in the first meeting.
Here is a sample agenda for your first meeting:
- Data Availability (25 min): Spend a few minutes looking at the data Localytics makes available in the dashboard, highlight a few specific data points, and discuss any initial insights to what the data is showing.
- Dashboard Education (10 min): Take a few minutes to make sure all dashboard users are educated to confidently create campaigns and pull various data sets to glean useful information.
- Business Goals and Metrics Overview (20 Min): Refresh everyone’s understanding of the business goals and key metrics sourced from each stakeholder group. Discuss the points of alignment or potential conflict on these goals. Who can take the lead in resolving them?
- Campaign Review (20 Min): Once goals are clearly understood, discuss the core campaigns that will drive those metrics upwards. Understand what it takes to plan a full mobile engagement strategy across each persona, and what are the key actions a user must take to level up from persona to persona.
- Localytics Scorecard (15 Min): Lastly, spend some time reviewing how Localytics “judges” the maturity of a client as it relates to their mobile model, taking a deep dive into: Mobile Strategy, Data, Skills, and Infrastructure.
Governance is not a four letter word
When organized and managed effectively, the Steering Committee is a force for changing processes and delivering new experiences to customers, that are aligned and working together.
However, it can also deteriorate into bureaucracy and resistance if not actively managed.
Avoid the useless meeting trap by following these best practices that will keep the meeting fresh and relevant to the business:
- Publish your plans and meeting minutes
- Get feedback from other leaders and influencers
- Make your progress transparent — how messages are going out, from which stakeholders, and what was the customer’s response
- Give praise and attention to the team that is working together, and coach privately the ones that appear to be lagging, or not engaged
Your customers will appreciate the experience!