At this week’s San Francisco-based customer event SDL Innovate, web content management and globalization vendor SDL sported a range of improvements in their product line.
From improved machine translation technology to a new SDL Digital Experience Accelerator that promises to shorten the time necessary for global web development teams to deliver great customer experience (CX), to social media-centric business intelligence solutions that leverage big data to help brands measure purchase intent and brand advocacy, SDL appears well positioned to drive their customers’ digital transformation efforts forward.
For the customers in the room, however – many of whom work for large, recognizable brands – SDL’s digital leadership fell mostly on deaf ears. For this crowd, “digital” largely meant “web,” indicating a mentality squarely ensconced in the 1990s.
The Digital Disconnect
This disconnect clearly didn’t reflect any shortcomings with SDL’s sophisticated product line. Their technology seamlessly supports responsive web sites, empowering web professionals to support the full range of mobile interfaces customers favor today. And yet, when one speaker asked the audience how many of them were building mobile apps, nary a hand went up.
It’s important to note that there’s more to digital than simply adding mobile sites and apps to your marketing mix. Digital represents an end-to-end shift in how enterprises provide value to their customers, beginning with the realization that customer preferences and behavior drive enterprise technology decisions.
Today those preferences are largely for mobile interactions – but CX goes well beyond any particular touchpoint. CX involves the entire customer journey: the customer lifecycle from the initial interaction with the brand through the purchase and on to using the product, getting support if necessary, and hopefully buying more over time.
A major cause of this disconnect appears to be the fact that the web professionals in the room see themselves as marketers – and traditionally, marketing has focused on moving prospects through the marketing funnel, where the end of the funnel is the purchase, or “conversion” in marketingspeak.
Digital has fundamentally changed this principle, however. “Marketing has to be involved across the entire customer lifecycle,” explains Paige O’Neill, CMO of SDL. Simple in theory, but deeply transformative in practice. This principle upends traditional notions of marketing, and with them, the role of the marketer.
When business transformations disrupt the roles of individuals, confusion results – and digital’s impact on marketing is no exception. On the one hand, perhaps marketing is expanding to cover the full breadth of the relationship with customers. On the other hand, it might be more accurate to say that marketing (in a more traditional sense) is becoming an increasingly small, insignificant part of how companies interact with the people they serve.
Either way, marketing will never be the same.
Whose Eye is on the Customer?
Another speaker asked the audience whether any of them had a single view of their customer. Once again, no hands went up.
For a company to have a single view of a customer, sales, marketing, customer support, and anybody else responsible for interacting with that person must share the same information about them. The goal is to give each customer the impression that they have a personal relationship with individuals at the company, even though they may interact with different people over time.
Unfortunately, virtually all enterprises fail appallingly at this basic digital CX principle. If call center reps can’t even tell that a customer has already identified themselves to the previous rep, how can the company expect everyone to be on the same page across all customer interactions over time?
For their part, SDL is working on technology that helps companies move toward this single-view goal. They are developing “digital fingerprinting” technology that can identify one individual as they switch from one device to another.
Whether enterprises will pick up this ball and run with it, enabling retail associates, call center reps, service technicians, and anyone else who touches the customer to share the digital fingerprint data remains to be seen.
Does Digital Belong in Marketing?
Another speaker related the story of a Chief Digital Officer at a large food and beverage chain. Every time this CDO makes a change to the customer-facing digital experience, the company must update the processes in each store accordingly. In other words, the CDO serves in an operational role, not solely a marketing role.
Most digital professionals, and by extension, most enterprise digital initiatives fail to understand this basic point – and abysmal customer experiences are the unfortunate result. In fact, it seems that the more mature and diverse digital technologies become, the poorer companies are at providing a good customer experience.
In fact, CX failures abound, according to survey results that SDL released at Innovate. Some lowlights: 21% of major CX failures happen before a customer even buys, while 16% of major CX failures happen during the shopping journey, or at the register (either real or virtual).
Most ironically, more than 40% of consumers’ worst CX experiences occur in digital industries, including communications, electronics and online retail. Digital, therefore, is often part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
How to Fix the Digital Disconnect
Digital transformation, in reality, is more about the transformation than the digital. It represents a cross-organizational rethink of what a company does for customers. Changing customer preferences and behavior require both technology change as well as organizational change.
The reason the SDL Innovate audience seemed so ill-prepared for such transformative change is because they self-selected based upon existing siloed organizational structures. SDL provides web content management and globalization technologies, so the customers who attend their event are predictably professionals who belong to web content management and globalization business units.
Digital transformation requires a rethink of such traditional hierarchical organizational approaches, replacing them with cross-disciplinary, self-organizing teams who are responsible for the entire customer journey. Executive management must drive decision making down to these teams, shifting their own role to facilitators and context setters.
Don’t be misled by the term digital. True, advances in technology are paving the way for such change – but only because today’s customers demand technology advances from the companies they do business with. But for all their power, today’s technologies are simply tools in human hands. Digital transformation will always be about people – both the customers and the individuals that serve them.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. SDL covered Jason Bloomberg’s travel expenses to the recent SDL customer event in San Francisco, a standard industry practice. Image credit: SDL.
