MIND THE GAP

Category: Digital

  • Keeping your digital priorities straight

    Keeping your digital priorities straight

    Sometimes it’s hard to stay focused on what’s important for front-end digital teams in a company, particularly when there are so many things which could be done.

    Now an exco view or a smart consulting company is going to give a list like this:

    1. Define your business strategy
    2. Look at your business process and operating model
    3. Define your digital strategy, process and operating model in the light of one and two
    4. Choose digital products to create change within the organization
    5. Look at your architecture and technology you want to use
    6. Understand how data and analytics will play their part
    7. Do a business case and ROI analysis
    8. Execute the above

    Here’s the problem – that’s a three-to-ten-year journey. And how many members on an executive or board change in ten years — a large percentage of them.  Therefore, trying to maintain consistency of rollout of a multiyear plan is hard when people and priorities keep shifting.

    But most digital teams don’t start from here. They have new strategy coming in on the one side, and a host of competing priorities on the other:

    1. Large backlogs of historical things they just need to get done
    2. Stakeholders hoping for new and shiny things to be delivered
    3. Demanding KPIs
    4. Vendor management and or management of internal teams
    5. Etc.

    It becomes a juggle between trying to align with what the board and executive team are thinking and digital things which need to get taken care of to make the digital ecosystem work.

    So how does one tackle the problem?

    1. Start with getting the funnel working

    At the top of the digital funnel, reach is required to as many people as possible and at the bottom, conversion is required to impact the bottom line or key goals of the organisation.

    Marketing, social and content teams need to ensure the right content and campaigns are reaching the broadest base of people possible to draw as many people into the top of the digital funnel as possible.

    From there, UX and product teams need to ensure the journeys and offerings are as efficient as possible to bring people down the funnel and conversion rate optimisation teams need to figure out how to make conversion rates as high as possible.

    This is the heartbeat if any digital team. And yet, digital teams often get so lost in the things talked about above that they forget to ask the simple question: does our digital funnel work?

    2. Data is critical

    Having the ability to capture the right data and utilise it is the other side of the coin. An organisation’s funnel can work very well, but if the data is not being captured and analysed, it’s like having a cullender and not a funnel.

    From a data perspective, if you’ve got good traffic, start with segmenting the audience with a DMP and targeting those users on the Internet as well as using look alike audiences.

    From there, it’s about moving audiences from anonymous to know through login scenarios, lead generation etc. to identify the base as well as looking for information gaps and strategies to fill those gaps.

    Practically, companies often have massive gaps in terms of percentages of accurate email addresses, mobile numbers, location of their users and personal information.

    This must be one of the starting focal points for improving data sets and capitalising on them.

    3. Personalisation

    Once the funnel is working correctly and the quality and volume of data is on the increase, then personalising content to the user base becomes important.

    What are the interaction patterns of the base, what are their preferences or interests and how do users get interacted with based on that information?

    When do you communicate with someone on their journey? Do you have opt-ins to marketing material? Are you communicating to someone based on their preferences or their purchase or interaction history?

    While companies should be targeting users based on their preference, so often they are targeted on the basis of age, location, gender, the device used. But actually, these metrics do little to bring clarity to the type of user the organisation is trying to reach.

    4. Focused projects

    Once 1-3 are working well, then what can be done on an incremental basis or product evolution basis to grow metrics?

    Using digital for customer satisfaction, gamification, self-service, cost reduction, improving efficiencies and so on are all projects which can be explored.


    MVP’s can be created, and pilots can be run to test the projects’ efficiencies. From there, key projects can be identified and budgeted for to move forward.

    5. Shifting the needle

    If all the above is in play, then organisations can think about what would shift the needle on a digital front in a larger way.

    Does the company need a new channel like a messaging bot? Could a ticketing system improve client interactions? Could staff be more empowered with digital hardware and software like tablets and software for direct interactions with clients?

    In other words, what big projects could be undertaken to make a significant impact for the business.

    The challenge:

    The challenge is digital teams are often expected to start with 5 and 4 and try and juggle 1-3. On a scale of 1-10, CDOs ideally need points 1-3 to be working at a 7/10 or higher before they think of 4 and 5. Once that’s happening, then the focused projects in number 4 will give medium term wins, while large scale projects in 5 will give long term wins.

    Sometimes this order of priority may not be possible but knowing what you need to be doing and then figuring out how to try and get the support to do it is the first important step.

  • Why CDO’s last only 18 months

    Why CDO’s last only 18 months

    While working with one of the big five consulting houses on a project, they revealed data that the average Chief Digital Officer (CDO) lasts only 18 months in a South African corporate. Its one of the reasons why digital really battles to build momentum in companies and solving the problem is a tricky exercise.

    The lay of the land

    The first challenge is the lay of the land. Corporates will generally have legacy and disparate systems. Whether digital teams are fragmented across divisions or consolidated centrally, both scenarios come with inherent challenges. Then there is the challenge of whether to introduce new tech or rebuild old, dysfunctional systems. The former merely adds to the layers within the business and the latter task of rebuilding systems seems like a grudge project, which is hard to secure budget for.

    And practically as an executive, the CDO is often faced with a dilemma: how do they shift the needle quickly enough to show results before their CEO, the executive and the board start to get concerned about the pace of digital advancement within the company.

    In fact, its such a difficult exercise that the consulting house recommends to their clients that if they really want to build a digital business, they do so on the side from the ground up and then decommission the previous business and move people over.

    What are the options:

    The new tech option is about new systems. For example, new Marketing Tech like market CRMs, content marketing platforms, analytics layers and so on.

    Master data management, 360 views of the customer, targeted campaigns and all of these good things become all the rage.

    Then there is the rebuild option or optimisation. Let’s get self-service working properly and technology to reduce call centre costs. Let’s get ecommerce working properly and get the customer the option to buy online. Let’s improve delivery options to get the lead time of product into consumers hands down to a day or two or even hours.

    Let’s bring in automation into the business and improve business processes. Let’s reduce licensing costs with optimisation around software provision within the business as well as reducing cloud costs.

    All of the above are good things but come with their challenges. Cost reduction exercises are a once off exercise (you can only optimise so much) and new tech stacks or rebuilds of old scenarios invariably run over time and budget, leaving the CFO and possibly even the CEO not very happy with the CDO.

    What’s to be done:

    1. Start with the basics

    No doubt an unpopular choice, but thinking about the customer and how they experience the business digitally is key.

    Does the customer even know what your business is, after looking at the website for two seconds? Can they find something within three clicks? Does your search function actually work? Are the digital journeys optimised and clear? Do pages load quickly? Is the value proposition on product pages clear?

    Invariably there is often a gap between digital from an infrastructure perspective and from a content perspective, with the latter usually falling to the marketing department. This leads to tension when trying to address the above questions.

    2.Think about funnel

    From a funnel perspective it starts with how people are reached on the broadest level digitally, then how are they identified and retargeted to some degree, then how are they exposed to product in a regular way and coming down to conversion, how successful the business at drawing people all the way down the funnel and converting leads into sales.

    The simple reality is if digital can impact the bottom line in anyway, then there is going to be a lot of interest, but often digital is a necessary intangible.

    3. Build bridges, look after your teams

    Front end teams, integration teams, core system teams, architects, analytics teams, business process teams, strategy and innovation teams are often disparate.

    Siloes in corporate often result in people trying to deliver value within their locus of control with the budgets they have.

    Cross functional teams and projects are seen as nice to have’s but not ideal for reaching KPIs and securing budgets for the following financial year.

    However, digital never works unless the tech stack is well architectured and well-built and teams need to be able to work together to do that. Furthermore, digital teams will invariably have difficult problems to solve and the teams need to know their strengths, understand their teammates and have high levels of positive motivation to solve problems and get the job done.

    This means understanding what makes a high-performance team is critical and helping team members to look after their physical and mental wellbeing.

    Here are some characteristics for high performance teams:

    They have defined roles and responsibilities.

    They know others strengths and weaknesses.

    They trust and respect each other.

    They know their work fits the mission.

    4. Win the support of your executive

    If the CEO and CFO don’t believe in the CDO and their vision, their chances of not being part of the statistic are minimal. And if they believe in the vision it has to be one the CDO can fulfil on, not one where the targets are not met because of circumstance or dependencies on other teams.

    CDOs should never promise something they can’t deliver and need to work hard to get buy into what they are doing and why they are doing it. It’s a difficult road to walk but a necessary one for the sake of longevity and success.

    5. Innovate

    Innovation is a tough thing to get right within a corporate space. But when companies like General Electric reduced a projected decade long project down to several months and turned it into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream as described in the book, the Start Up Way by Eric Ries, then the case for innovation becomes clear.

  • 5 Things People Get Wrong with Digital

    5 Things People Get Wrong with Digital

    If you find this article interesting and would like to chat more about it, send us a mail here.

    Digital projects often run the risk of being vanity projects that don’t deliver the value that brands are hoping for. Here are a 5 traps people often fall into that hold digital projects back from delivering real value.

    1. Beautiful is better

    Digital CI is often given high priority on digital projects. Brands spend a lot of time, effort and money on branding, but that only goes as far as the launch really.

    While a bad looking front-end can be an hinderance, what a digital front-end looks is really more of a hygiene factor and a beautiful front-end is far from being a necessity.

    One only has to look as far as e-commerce sites like Amazon or streaming sites like Netflix to realise it’s not actually about what the front-end looks like but how functional it is. After all, if you lose the user’s attention after a few seconds, it does not matter what the front-end looks like.

    A good place to start is get someone to look at your website or app for two seconds and then take it away and ask them what the business is about. If they can’t tell you, you’re already in trouble.

    2. Let’s build a great (desktop) website

    Building off point 1, comprehensive CIs often lead to a lot of effort being put into websites. But when a lot of people think website, they think on their desktopwebsite, but most people actually use websites on their phones.

    A desktop site like Facebook.com shows that the world’s largest social network has not even paid much attention to what the site looks like on a desktop because that is not where their users are.

    Responsive websites on a single URL (same on desktop and mobile) have become the norm, but responsive websites really don’t work well on mobile phones because of the volume of content which has to be stacked on a small screen and the differing sizes of phones.

    Rather companies should be thinking about how to build great mobile websites and then think about how that can make functional sites for on desktop browsers.

    3. We need an app

    Apps are the most overrated digital front-ends because they are misunderstood. With executives generally carrying high-end smartphones and using apps every day, the assumption is your business needs an app.

    But think about the apps you use. Your list may look like this:

    Apps you probably use all the time:

    Browser

    Chat app

    Social App

    Email and office

    Banking

    Music App

    Apps you probably use some of the time:

    Current game you’re playing

    Streaming app like Netflix

    YouTube

    Healthcare and fitness apps

    Secondary social app

    Food ordering apps

    Reading app

    Banking App

    Apps you probably use occasionally:

    Loyalty apps

    Ecommere apps

    Insurance apps

    Ride hailing apps

    Restaurant apps

    Travel apps

     So, the majority of apps companies launch come after the above 20+ apps on consumers’ phones in terms of importance. And once the person opens your app, does it have enough of a value proposition within it to fight with the above list in terms if priority?

    Furthermore, if you’re targeting lower LSMs space issues on the phone together with data concerns become a reality too.

    Careful consideration therefore needs to be given to if you need an app and whether the effort could be better spent elsewhere.

    4. Text channels are less important

    Given the razzmatazz of websites and apps, most brands don’t give a lot of attention to their Whatsapp and USSD channels, if they even have them.
    And yet these front-end channels regularly surpass websites in terms of traffic and engagement.

    While these channels fall short of the beauty of the web and the hype of apps, they more than make up for in being able to give consumers information really quickly and provide options for direct chat to call centre agents, reducing call centre costs.

    Whatsapp provides opportunities for rich gamification experiences with easy redirects to websites and streaming video opportunities.

    5. Pay for audiences

    When front ends fail to get the numbers marketing managers would like, the temptation is often to load up on social and search advertising spend to get the numbers and leads.

    But the more crowded the adverting space has become, the less attention people are giving to brands trying to capture their focus.

    The shift is therefore towards engagement and gamification experiences which centre around the things which consumers are interested in.

    Gamification experiences can hold a consumer’s attention for up to 30 minutes, multiple times a week.

    The development of captive audiences with which brands can then engage with becomes far more valuable than a click through on an advert which the person is not really paying attention to anyway.

    If you found this article interesting and would like to chat more about it, send us a mail here.

  • Steve Whitford, Founder of Th1nk

    Steve Whitford, Founder of Th1nk

    For more on Steve Whitford, Founder of Th1nk

    Steve Whitford

    Email: steve@th1nk.co.za

    LinkedIn profile

    • Consultant to C Suites on digital strategy and execution.
    • Product lead on building large digital ecosystems.
    • Lead design, product, and development teams on large scale projects.
    • Strategic Innovator.
    • Omnichannel expert across Web, App, WhatsApp and USSD.
    • Digital pioneer of several start-ups including e-Sports, gamification, mobile gaming.

    With a strong product skillset, I’ve always worked with platforms. From designing the structure of Content Management Systems and interactive portals in the early days of the Internet, through to designing large scale loyalty and self service front ends today that plug into platforms like Salesforce.

    I’ve also had to lead teams in complex environments, including directly managing a team, running internal and external development teams and managing stakeholder engagements with multiple decision makers across large projects.

    From a leadership perspective, I’ve helped to create shared consciousness within departments and organizations around their goals and have created team frameworks to drive decision making as deep into the organization as possible to create the momentum needed to achieve those goals. I’m a leader who understands my skillset, work gearing and how to add value to those I work with.