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At Differly, we work with many organizations that are facing an urgent need to rethink, how they create and deliver value to customers in a digital economy. Some will call this a transformation (if there are many initiatives to manage at the same time to make the shift) and others will call it a continual process of innovation.  Either way, it's really not about technology but rather a business strategy. 

If you're a leader thinking about or embarking on a major shift, here are five guiding principles to focus your efforts

1. Always put the customer at the heart of the transformation

Customer behavior is arguably the biggest shift of the digital revolution. How can you design and deliver a better end-to-end experience leveraging both on and offline channels seamlessly? Can you leverage digital technology to remove any barrier, friction, and continually deliver additional value? 

2. Align on vision

Before determining the pain points,...

At its simplest, customer experience is your customers’ perception of how you treat them. What does it feel like to do business with you? Your “brand” is the sum total of all their experiences with your organization and every touchpoint matters. Your customers’ perception will impact their behavior, actions and ultimately brand loyalty, or lack thereof. Only when your business has defined what that experience or feeling should be, can it determine which processes, improvements and technologies are needed to support it.

In this hyper-connected era, one of the biggest challenges I see my clients struggle with across all industries is understanding the role of each channel on the path to purchase (or whatever your particular conversion point may be such as a renewal or a subscription).

Four steps to becoming more customer centric:

1. Understand your customer. Develop personas (not just segments).
2. Seek to understand and map the journey across your channels...

A doctor, a lawyer and a cop walk into a bar… This classic joke opener is a sure bet because it offers up three different “types” of people that we are likely to recognize or will be able relate to. You could call these characters personas.

In working with marketing, BI and sales teams over the years, I've noticed a regular misuse of the terms segments and personas. Although often used in complementary ways, they are not one and the same. Here’s how I would differentiate:

Market Segments

The purpose of market segmentation is to identify groups of customers (or potential customers) within a market. Markets tend to be geographical or a particular industry vertical.  Once identified, these groups are referred to as segments and allows the organizations to then target particular products, services or marketing messages to those segments over time.

Photo by Jens Johnsson on Unsplashtation

Customer Segments

Customer segments are created primarily to be...