The lesson here: you are unlikely to end up exactly where you think you will go before you launch, but that’s OK. It’s much better to plan to be 65% correct with your initial release and have the internal iterative processes and funding reserve to fine-tune once you are actually in the market.

Organizational Insights into what Prospects and Customers Want (Voice-of-Customer)

What functionality and benefits do your prospects and customers want? What makes a great digital experience from their point of view? What would they suggest that you work on first? What are your competitors up to? Don’t know?

Rather than guess what value your digital initiatives can offer, and what order this list should follow, wouldn’t it be confidence-building to ask them? After joining a major bank and reviewing the last two years of customer satisfaction surveys, I found that customers consistently rated our on-boarding processes as worst-in-class. We realized that these processes would benefit from digital support, redesigned them, digitally-enabled them, launched them, and turned our customer ratings to best-in-class in the next survey. In fact, we actually branded our onboarding services and included performance guarantees.

The benefits didn’t stop there, either. Since the faster and more efficiently we onboarded customers the faster we would see transaction revenue, we improved not only customer satisfaction, but also our own revenue streams and timing. These are the kinds on “win/win” scenarios we are looking for in our digital growth plans.

It's unlikely that in your relevant market, yours is the only business thinking and acting digitally. It’s a best practice to do deep dives on your competitors and their digital initiatives. Today, it’s pretty easy to make simple comparisons like the performance of your website against others’. It’s also pretty easy to understand what they are doing for online sales, customer experiences, and other value-added digital growth initiatives.

What is hard to discern, but still important, is being able to describe their digital strategies and plans. You’ll want to understand not only what you can see of your competitors, but what their plans are to stay in the race. This information is more of a challenge to discern, but also more important to know since your plan must consider delivering equal or better capabilities for you to remain competitive.

People and Organizational Building Blocks

There are several ways of illustrating the building blocks described in this article. Here’s a simple model to reinforce the points I’ve made.

Can We Finally Talk About Digital Technologies?

Not quite yet—we’ll get there when we look at Platforms in the next article in this series. We are following the USA approach as we lay out a digital transformation roadmap.

Where to From Here?

Next up in our series of best practices to implement effective digital engines of growth in your business are these two follow-on articles:

Topic: Platforms:

This article will examine building a robust set of enabling tools which fit into the business, adopting and standardizing scorecards, financial models, business cases and business plans, and completing periodic reviews of voice-of-customer VOC, competitive monitoring, and market analyses.

Topic: Roadmap, Results, Metrics, Benefits

This installment will emphasize effective adoption of best practices, offer a logical sequence to implementation, and discuss building organizational and program maturity. These articles will help you understand how to achieve “digital growth champion” status!

Please stay tuned for more practical guidance as we bring best practices for implementing engines of growth in your business.