Pervasive Customer Experience And How Digitally Focused CMOs Are Leading Our Revolution

Justin Wilden Solutions Director IE Media

A massive shift is happening, and in 2011 we will witness how the digitally focused CMO (dCMO) will replace the specialist digital executive fraternity. The dCMOs are leading the charge to draft and own a company's strategic initiatives in the digital landscape -- they are a new category of digital strategists. These digerati have lived with "always on" connectivity every day and developed their careers within the digital arena. They know that digital touchpoints are not websites and applications, preferring to echo their customers' viewpoint that "digital tools" are simply products and services delivered via a digital experience.

Pervasive Customer Experience and How Digitally Focused CMOs Are Leading Our Revolution
The dCMO set realizes that the focus of a company's digital strategy is to inject core business processes and a set of optimal customer behavioral attributes into a proprietary digital platform. (N.B. "Proprietary" does not mean building the platform from scratch.)

Building the right digital platform means delivering consistent customer experiences in any channel or on any device to ensure that customers are engaged with brands anywhere and at any time.

This is the pervasive customer experience.

Start Thinking Like a dCMO
The ubiquitous nature of digital means people consume information on their platform of choice. For brands this means start creating a 2015 Digital Roadmap with a vision on how a digital platform will engage with customers in a multiplatform world.

 A dCMO's thinking is powered by a deep understanding that customers live in a connected world, and they expect a consistent product experience to be delivered across mobile, desktop, and other digital touchpoints.

The act of defining the customer behaviors that are critical to the success of delivering a product experience means determining the optimal intersection of customer behavior with the company's customer experience offer.

Fundamentally, to be considered pervasive, the behavioral attributes need to be transferrable between the various channels and devices that customers are using. The optimal attributes are captured in the behavioral rules (engine) of the digital platform.

Rethink the Next Digital Project
Before embarking on the next CRM, CMS, or app project, brands should rethink their digital strategy. Instead of thinking about the next website or online campaign, a business needs to analyze its digital landscape to uncover digital assets that can be transformed into customer-facing, connected products or services.

And as an alternative to simply writing a brief to transform a website into a mobile website, strip the mobile offer down to the core customer behaviors to see how it works from a customer's perspective. Commence by creating customer experience models to aid in defining the pervasive behaviors that will have an impact on the mobile offer.

The goal is to identify customer behaviors that need to be satisfied to deliver a compelling product experience. The next step is to link the best behavioral attributes with specific product features to maximize the customer experience offer. This sets up the foundation for redefining the mobile product as a pervasive solution.

Uniting Client and Vendor Strategy
Consider a cinema chain selling movie tickets: a dCMO would take a few steps back and recognize that the most basic step in getting people into the cinema is the ticket purchase process.

That means the strategy is not to brief a vendor about building a "mobile website that will facilitate ticket sales for customers on the run;" in its place is the need for a digital platform that can manage and deliver the core pervasive customer experience attributes related to a ticket purchase.

On the flip side, the vendor's project is twofold: first, to design a technical layer (API) to deliver the pervasive ticket purchase experience so that it can be consumed on any platform. Second, to build a compelling mobile ticket buying experience that can be seamlessly delivered to any device, not just a "mobi" site, native iPhone app, or other solution left to drift in its own experience vacuum.

Bonus Points for Figuring Out the Next Step
With insight into the cinema group's evolution over the next five years as it strategically navigates towards successfully achieving its 2015 Digital Roadmap, the dCMO will have outlined strategies to exploit the fact that movies are already a digital asset and can be transformed into a digital product.

Using the pervasive customer experience approach, the dCMO isolates specific customer behaviors to architect an innovative movie-viewing experience, uncovers new audience segments, and builds a plan to launch a new digital service to satisfy at least one of the segments.

Archetype the Future Competitive Differentiator
The pervasive customer experience approach is essential where competitors have exactly the same process.

Investing in the development of unique brand and user experiences is impossible when the digital foundations are formed from a standard set of business rules built on top of the same industry-compliant, technical flavor of the month. The results are entire industries with feature-bloated, copycat websites that achieve zilch for customer engagement.

The dCMO needs to run an agenda to determine which customer behaviors are pervasive and then embed these attributes in the digital platform.

Unique brand experiences will be easier to produce because the digital products are intrinsically based on customer behaviors and inherently speak directly to the audience.

Furthermore, competitors will not be in a position to creatively swipe the integrated interface and experience offers because their underlying digital platform will not be built on the same pervasive attributes.

Next: Real-world examples.