A successful customer-focused digital enterprise is calm, responsive, and anticipates customer needs.
Lift the hood and you will find these smooth operators rely on a very active and agile digital business strategy.
On the flip side, an inefficient digital infrastructure (digital transformation) and badly planned Customer Experience (CX) can mean millions in lost revenue due to missed sales, customer defection, inefficient supply chains and uninformed strategic decisions.
The backbone of a strong CX function is the team managing the digital infrastructure – often the enterprise architects or IT professionals and their collaborators throughout the company.
So, what does a best-in-class digital CX strategy look like? It’s underpinned by an enterprise and IT roadmap that is continually being updated and optimized with new information about market forces, KPIs, costs, requirements and information from partners and suppliers. This allows the team to ensure systems are resilient and hit business goals.
An effective digital CX strategy does these five things well:
1. Model
First the business needs a collaborative modelling tool which allows both the enterprise architects, subject matter experts and business executives to monitor and manage the CX and trace it back to the internal IT and business architecture. ABACUS is designed to provide the ‘bridge’ between the CX metrics and these IT and business portfolios. Customer journeys can be traced back to business architectures, business capabilities and continuous business services.
2. Analyze
Enterprises that continually analyze and improve CX improve their performance and achieve operational excellence.
CX metrics need to be industry and channel specific, easy to obtain and consistent. They need to be targeted at the appropriate organizational level. For frontline staff, response time is important. For senior executives, brand perception is high on the agenda.
The analytics available in ABACUS will enable groups across the business to take a data-driven approach to planning CX strategies.
3. Adapt
Customer trends change, goalposts move and in a customer-focussed business, analysis should be an everyday habit. Business strategy and enterprise planning tools should have the capacity to continually change the way they model. Those responsible for CX can then scrutinise their digital ecosystem to ensure customer, IT and business alignment.
ABACUS is the most configurable EA tool on the market with support for over 100 frameworks and notations out-of-the-box. Users can create hybrid frameworks in minutes.
4. Plan
Anticipating customer requirements and reactions requires data, and planning. Teams need to chart multiple scenarios: project architectures, transition architectures and target architectures, weighing which are best against the chosen CX KPIs. This sophisticated roadmapping approach is one of the core capabilities of the ABACUS toolset. (Read: How to build an EA roadmap: 4 styles to consider)
5. Present
Stakeholders in the CX strategy need to understand complex information at a variety of levels of the business – including C-level, IT and marketing. Intelligence also needs to be accessible in the cloud and on mobile devices. Enterprises need to enable self-service access to real-time data.
Here, the traditional EA role overlaps with Business Intelligence (BI).
ABACUS provides this style of reporting via browser-based dashboards which can be used to explore and analyze the enterprise repository and perform ad-hoc queries and analytics.
To set up a demonstration of how you can use enterprise planning methods and the ABACUS toolset to streamline your digital business and CX strategies please contact us at [email protected]