The Three C’s of Digital Transformation

Jennifer Voisard

Are you involved in any “digital transformation” initiatives at your company? Chances are the answer is ‘yes.’ Are you evolving your digital ecosystem, considering a personalization model, mapping your customer journeys, reorganizing your marketing department to support a better user experience, experimenting with new content assets, and/or evaluating any marketing technologies? If so, then yes, you are involved in digital transformation.

Digital transformation is more of a collective mindset, rather than an item you check-off as complete. It describes a vision that should always be continuously improved upon and it fosters future innovation and growth. It takes time. It is not without its challenges. And it requires new ways of thinking and working. Since it is a complicated subject to tackle, let’s focus on a few basic principles: The Three C’s.

CUSTOMER

The entire organization needs to empathize with your customers. This requires a few key steps to bring them to life. First, develop or update your personas. Next, map out your customers’ digital, social and mobile journeys. Finally, don’t forget to socialize the findings and implications borne out of these first two steps across your entire organization. If few people outside of the marketing department understand your customers, it will continue to be business as usual.

CULTURE

This leads pretty naturally to a very important point. Culture change is the foundation on which digital transformation can be built. Companies need to step out of the old way of thinking and doing business. We need to remove road blocks such as “not my job” or “doesn’t align with our priorities.” The first step in exacting change is to map out your current state against the desired one. This post gives some advice on how to get started.

C-SUITE

Change will never be achieved without leadership from the top. Yes, it is the middle layer that will drive new thinking and new approaches, but as Brian Solis often reminds us, digital transformation driven by customer empathy and culture change requires the formulation of new business goals and leadership. Next month, Forbes will be releasing the results of an intensive study via surveys and interviews with marketing executives who are grappling with these same issues. I urge you to come back and check out some of the learnings and best practices gleaned from this research.

This is a topic I am very passionate about and if you want to continue the conversation hit me up on Twitter, @jennymakeswaves or add a comment below. Good luck!

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