Ep. 2 | How to Calculate Digital Maturity
Digital maturity = customer centric maturity. It’s all about the customer experience, and you need to know where you are on the maturity curve to build revenue and great customers. Host Allison Hartsoe explains how tracking your position on the customer-centric lifecycle can help you build revenue and customer equity.
Read Full Transcript
This is the Customer Equity Accelerator, a weekly show for marketing executives who need to accelerate customer centric thinking and digital maturity. I’m your host Allison Hartsoe of Ambition Data. This show features innovative guests who share quick wins on how to improve your bottom line while creating happier more valuable customers. Ready to accelerate. Let’s go.
Welcome to episode 2 of the Customer Equity Accelerator.
Today I’m going to help you score your digital maturity although I call it customer centric maturity and we’re going to talk about why knowing where you are on this maturity curve can help you build revenue and great customers which results in equity. Let’s start with why. The why begins with a quick recap of episode 1. We talked about how Customer equity creates real bottom line dollar value for companies. It’s built from individual customer lifetime values and further the way we listen to and respond to customers that is our everyday actions helps create good experiences which in turn feeds lifetime value, all makes sense right. So if it’s all about customer experience and you want your customers to have a good experience then why does it matter where you are on the customer centric maturity curve. How can this help you build revenue and customer equity. Well that answer has two parts. So, Part 1 – customers are not generic every time you hear this term in aggregate it should just raise warning bells in your head. Organizations that think like that and treat everyone the same are often institutions like government. People do not want to be just another brick in the wall. You can compare that kind of treatment to a hotel chain like Marriott that does a fantastic job of understanding customers and their value. So if customers aren’t generic then part two of this answer is knowing who our good customers are and who are about to become good customers is where marketing has a unique opportunity to create customer equity. But, Oh no!� We have to deal with this deluge of digital customer data before we can truly become customer centric today. Otherwise were really just tone deaf. So we use the maturity curve process to start to hear these customers and gradually understand what good customers do. What can you achieve by identifying your company’s maturity correctly? When we use these signals that customers give us to respond in a timely fashion with good information I think it flows like a natural conversation. It sounds something like this.
Hi, I’m Mary. Oh, nice to meet you Mary. How do you know Betsy and Lauren? Oh we work at North Plate.� I know Maggie over there. Do you work with her? Oh I do, I know her really well.
Wonderful, hey why don’t we all go to lunch next week. Ahhh! �
You know this kind of marketing is personal, contextual, rapid, and effective. But when you don’t do something like that. I think it’s more like having Beavis and Butthead crash your customer dinner party. Could you please pass the butter? You said but. (Sigh) I just wanted the yellow stick on the small tray. Could you pass it to me? And then he shouts, I am Cort Oleo!� And this kind of marketing is totally disjointed, mildly offensive and hardly effective. And it’s not all that uncommon today. When was the last time you said “hey please take me off your call list.” Right.� So what should we expect from this work. Well a roadmap to customer centricity is our secret code for basically saying marketing that connects intelligently with customers returns high value on investment.
It’s a direct connection. Now there are key questions for each stage. I want you to, maybe mentally or perhaps grab a piece of scratch paper. Count how many yeses you get on the following questions and they should go logically in a row. They’re going to be eight questions and you’ll maybe you’ll say yes to the first second and third one and you’ll say no to the fourth onward that’s kind of the pattern that I typically see.� In following podcasts, I’ll try to dig into each stage with more depth and I hope to do some interviews with companies that are in each of these stages. But for right now I want to give you a high level view and the most important piece of advice for each stage.�
So stage one question one. Do you trust your data and by data I mean all that digital deluge that’s coming in. If you said yes move on. If you said no you are at the foundational stage. What should you do? You should focus on tools. You need to validate and start tracking and collecting digital data from all channels. That’s your e-mail channel. That’s your customer service channel. That’s your website. That’s any channel you can get a hold of.�
Question number two, did you make at least one decision based on your digital data this month? If you said yes, great ding ding ding, move on. If you said no, you are in the early insights stage. You should focus on hiring an analyst and beefing up your data collection tools, especially the voice of the customer.� Reason I oftentimes recommend voice of the customer especially early is because there’s nothing that gets movement like a bunch of customers complaining about a bad process or needing help in a certain area. Voice of the customer is powerful.�
Question number three. You do not have an overwhelming number of reports that fit together. Now this is a negative so. You do not have an overwhelming number of reports that fit together. If you said yes that is indeed the case. All my reports fit together nicely. Move on. If you said no, I get all these reports and I don’t know what to do with them.� Then you are in the pit of reporting despair my friend. You need analysis expertise that focuses on humanizing the data and we oftentimes do this through use cases that approximate human behavior and task completion. This basically helps the data follow some kind of who’s coming in or are they trying to do format.�
Next question, all your marketing channels appear in one report using the grain of the customer or proxies of customers for both identified an unidentified people. All your marketing channels appear in one report at the grain of the customer. If you said yes. Great move on. If you said no you are in the department alignment stage. At this stage, you really need proccess around governance to help align your teams. Campaign governance is probably the first place to look and that’s not the end of it but it’s a good place to start.�
Next question. Do you know who your good customers are? And what they do in sales, marketing, business intelligence or finance, and call center or support, and how much revenue they represent based on individually calculated, not averaged lifetime value? Now that’s a long one so I’ll read it again. Do you know who your good customers are and what they do in sales, marketing, business intelligence/finance, call center/support and how much revenue they represent based on individually calculated not averaged lifetime value? If you said yes, ding ding ding, move on. If you said no, you are in the organizational alignment or promise stage. You probably are about ready for a chief analytics officer or chief data officer to help orchestrate data requests. If you said no, you are in the organizational alignment or promise stage. You probably need a chief analytics officer or chief data officer about now to help orchestrate data requests and publish meaningful insights. You also need technical support to land the data together as well as get better analysis and support a cultural change from quality to quantity and that’s really complicated. You can’t execute this from the outside alone. You have to have inside business knowledge connecting to the analysis in order to have the data make sense but moreover need to execute a change around the quality mentality and the quantity mentality there is a place for both. But oftentimes we only think about quality or high volume marketing and we don’t think enough about quality which is personalized marketing. So quality is the name of the game at that stage.�
Next up, is there a fast connected data system that pulls each piece of customer data together from every corner of the organization. If you said yes, fantastic move on. If you said no, then you are in the second pull back which is the pit of technology despair. You need immediate next generation technical tools sponsored by a senior executives such as a chief data officer or a chief analytics officer. These tools are not small. They are not lightweight to manage. They are big efforts that have to get underway in order to make your data sing.� There are some great new systems that move faster than before, so in no way should you be talking about a two year project but you are talking about a very robust project.�
Next question, has each member of the executive team agreed to run by a small set of specific metrics usually about four that interlock with company strategy and align to customer center tactics. I want you to think about this specifically by the metrics. Oftentimes organizations will set like you know four kind of general directions or four general terms but this isn’t saying that you know “hey we’re all going to be innovative this year.” This is saying that there are specific measurable tactics that interlock with strategy and go all the way down to tactics. So if you said yes, fantastic move right along. If you said no, you are in promise realized. This is basically where it takes a, you’re going to put together a plan to take about a year to organize and gain commitment from other executives about what these numbers will be. Who’s going to be held accountable?� How they’re measured and how they align the organization? Frankly there are very few companies in this stage.
Next up, and our last question. Does everyone in every department understand and are they individually accountable for this same set of up to four specific company wide metrics which are continuously measured and specifically ladder from tatic to customer equity evaluation or similar goal.� Let me read that again. Does everyone in your department understand and are they individually accountable for the same set of up to four specific company wide metrics which are continuously measured and specifically ladder from tactic to customer equity valuation or a similar goal. If you said yes then hot damn you’re probably the first. Give me a call because I have yet to hear of any company who has operationalized customer equity across every department from a HR to product to back end operations and I would love to meet you. Now if you said no you are not alone. This is the staying power behind long term cultural change that we often times call digital transformation, again although I prefer to call it customer centric transformation. The primary need here is really continuous socialization, use and accountability. People need to know that this is the new normal and they are accountable for it.�
Now you might have noticed that the questions got more complex and addressed more senior executives as they progressed. This is because like any good transformation you have to align at the top. Makes sense right. So to summarize here are the three main points we discussed. Why should you calculate your digital customer centric maturity because where you are determines what you need. Next we talked about what can you achieve by doing this. Well bottom line when you look at customers individually not only do you not have Beavis and Butthead marketing but you have happier more viable customers that you relate to through helpful contextual marketing. Ahhh! And finally we ran through eight key questions to help you score where you are on the curve and what to do about it. Bottom line when you use your data effectively you can build customer equity. It’s not magic. It’s a very specific journey that you can follow to get results.�
Thank you for joining today’s show. This is Allison. Just a few things before you head out. Every Friday I put together a short bulleted list of three to five things I’ve seen that represent Customer Equity Signal not noise. And believe me there’s a lot of noise out there. I actually call this e-mail The Signal.� Things I include could be smart tools I’ve run across, articles I’ve shared, cool statistics, or people and companies I think are doing amazing work building Customer Equity. If you’d like to receive this nugget of goodness each week you can sign up at AmbitionData.com and you’ll get the very next one. I hope you enjoy The Signal. See you next week on the Customer Equity Accelerator.