The pace of business change is being accelerated by digital innovations. Readily available information, lower levels of friction, and a lack of loyalty and stickiness means that businesses sometimes have only seconds to engage with their audience. In these moments of truth, businesses need to provide experiences that meet both stated and latent needs and convince their users to invest the time and effort to connect and engage. To address this challenge, businesses are applying increasingly sophisticated data and implementing more robust software solutions. However, instead of simply solving this problem with data and technology, we believe that businesses must first effectively identify their audiences, define their needs, and design approaches to satisfy them.
Businesses working to transform digital experience face a consistent problem: how to tailor user journeys in a cost-effective and relevant way. We believe this is the most important problems to solve in a digital transformation. First, generate insights and analyze data which can help understand customer (or consumer, or employee) intent. Then tailor interactions to provide content and experiences to satisfy both explicit and inferred customer (or consumer, or employee) needs. This challenge is complex and unique to each business. It cannot simply be solved with an off-the-shelf software solution nor a simplistic design template. Effectively transforming digital experiences requires an in-depth understanding of external (consumer and customer) and internal (employee) pain points and how these pain points create issues for the business. This understanding can point to specific problems to solve, contributing to a blueprint highlights the specific areas where journeys can be tailored for maximum impact.
With a design blueprint with clear objectives, it is possible to be more effectively target data and technology in service of the right problems. It can be helpful to work with a software vendor that has the technical savvy and real-world experience to help develop a proper solution. Of course, viable technology solutions must provide scale, security performance, and powerful integration to support growth and mitigate risks. In addition, elegant solutions will leverage common elements cost-effectively for core processes while applying unique innovations or co-creating new designs for areas that are differentiating for your business and users.
A PROPER DESIGN CAN HELP FRAME PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
We believe business design principles are critical to helping determine the problem(s) to be solved. Value can be accelerated by leveraging the expertise of software providers or other third parties to frame the problem, providing new approaches and potential solution patterns. To help our clients identify opportunity areas and define potential solutions, we have developed a powerful design tool.
We have a set of patterns, tailored by industry, which helps us assess customer, consumer, and employee needs across a common series of life cycle stages. These simple but powerful stages are Attract, Educate, Transact and Nurture.
· Attract: Develop interest and establish a connection
· Educate: Deepen the personalized story
· Transact: Enable the desired action
· Nurture: Grow the relationship
Each stage includes capabilities which combine business process, organizational activity, data, analysis, and several types of supporting technology. These patterns help define the overall solution. They provide a frame which can first identify moments that matter for key stakeholders, and then design experiences that meet or exceed the needs of stakeholders in those moments. These designs can be brought to life with powerful software to provide market-leading capabilities across design, marketing, content, commerce, and analytics.
APPLYING THIS TO HELP OUR CLIENTS
Recently a client, a Fortune 200 electronics distributor, had a complex digital engagement problem. They wanted to align the activities of several internal employee groups (sales, field engineering, marketing, customer support) to better support the needs of myriad customer user personas (design engineers, procurement, operations) across the complex business processes required to define new products and established detailed bills of materials for finished electronics goods. This required a business design that satisfied customer needs ranging from high-touch (interpersonal, highly analog engagement for high stakes decisions and interactions) to high-tech (digitizing experiences to support self-service for client team and customers to engage and interact asynchronously over a long complex sales cycle.)
The scale of the problem was huge – one division handled 46 different countries, 20 languages, and 40 billion different customer price combinations – all of which needed to be powered by consistent digital and commerce experiences. The business design reflected the needs of many user types – across customers and employees. A consistent experience design effectively integrated to legacy systems to provide the most up-to-date information needed for stakeholders to be comfortable relying on the new solution. Put simply, our client wanted to reimagine what had traditionally been a highly complex, collaborative, and time intensive interactions for their customers and sales associates.
By gaining a comprehensive understanding of our client’s goals and objectives, as well as the roadblocks standing in their way, we designed and developed a HCLSoftware powered solution that streamlined and simplified data to bring it into one platform. We created dynamic customer and employee dashboards and leveraged artificial intelligence to provide new insights. We also tailored content and messaging approaches for specific customers and user personas. By developing a business design that augmented high-touch with high-tech, we were able to deploy the right software to provide capabilities to transform a business-critical process and give our client a competitive edge.
MAKING THIS ALL WORK
At HCLSoftware we think software is not a commodity and that clients should expect more from their software provider. As a result, we do things differently. We are prepared to engage customers and prospects in a collaborative dialog to get the most out of their technology investments.
Our CX Studio team works help clients amplify progress. We focus on business outcomes and the capabilities that can enable them. When we engage with clients, we will start with strategic needs and desired outcomes, and then define specific business design problems. Illustrative examples of our how we frame business outcomes and enabling capabilities are depicted in the table below.
Effective preparation, research, and facilitation, supported by hundreds of years of agency and consulting experience, allow us to deliver valuable outcomes. We enable success by defining and solving the right design problems, providing thoughtful solutions which illustrate how our products can be applied as part of a broader set of capabilities to tailor customer experiences, grow engagement, increase revenue and solve real-world challenges.
