The customer needs to be placed at the heart of all decision-making.
Businesses need to generate value for customers to receive value from customers. The customer needs, wants and experience need to be incorporate in all digital work streams & plans.
Digital transformation must be driven from a customer perspective. You must consider the experience your customer will have when interacting with your organisation, and the methods in which you will deliver value whether that is a product or a service to the customer. This allows you to appreciate the way your customers realise and interpret that value.
In addition to this you want to collect data that adds value to your understanding of your business, and the primary source of this should be your customer. You need to understand every interaction between your organisation and each & every customer. That data needs to be analysed, and the insights found within it used to drive the continuous evolution of your business.
Customer predominately interact with resources and processes. These together should create value for the customer, which in turn drives revenue from the customer.
These processes and resources should shelter the customer from the internal complexities of the business. The customer journey should be as simple, clear and easy as possible.
Without a deep understanding of the customer, and the journey they take with the organisation’s decisions remain best guesses. These guesses will rely on the experience of the front-line teams whether sales or delivery focused AND their ability to capture & communicate these to the wider organisation
If we are making decisions based on this approach, we are unlikely to really delivery the best outcome for the customer or deliver real new value with each product or service release. This will slow your digital transformation and revenue aspirations.
Everyone Owns The Customer
Understanding deeply your customer is not just for the front office teams in marketing & sales.
Every one in the business owns their contribution to delivering customer value. Every role has to understand what their contribution is, how it can be improved, and how it can delivery increasing levels of value to customers.
Investing in the time & tools to ensure everyone understands the customer helps to ensure the right transformations decisions are taken whether in creating new products, defining new processes or just getting communication channels working.