Episode #58: DCFTS 4, The Complete Guide to Digital Transformation Use Cases

A deeper dive into the strategic use cases that can help you determine where to start on your digital transformation journey. It’s all about listening, assessing, planning, integrating, activating, analyzing, targeting, and governing. Think of it as a roadmap to happier customers, and a way to capture more value from your DT efforts.

Click here to view the Digital Customer-First Transformation System Capabilities Model (pdf, 270KB)

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Man, I never, never never get tired of that intro. Alright, welcome to the CXM Experience. I am Grad Conn, CXO, chief experience officer at Sprinklr. And today we are continuing our series on Digital Customer-First Transformation. And I’ll do a quick recap of what DCFTS stands for and what it means. And then we are talking about the capabilities model, which is step two of the DCFTS model. So we’re doing a three-parter on a multi-parter within a two-parter within a multi-parter. It’s like the matrix, man. I don’t know. It just happens, right?

So let me talk a little bit about digital transformation. It’s something that everyone’s talking about now. Everyone should have been talking about it a long time ago, but many decided to kick that can down the street. And now they have no choice but to focus on it because the world has changed. And so for many years now, Sprinklr has had something called the Digital Customer-First Transformation System. I used it and looked at it when I was a customer back in my Microsoft days, which was extremely helpful. And there are five stages. Stage one is the value model. And we talked about that previously, how do you know that your outcomes will deliver value to the organization. Stage two is the capabilities model. And that’s what we’re talking about right now. So we’re gonna dig into that a bit more. Stage three is the maturity model, one of my favorite stages, because it’s really powerful to sit down with a team and benchmark where you think you all are on the maturity model. Very, very strengthening exercise for the team’s orientation. Step four is validating the investment. That’s the ROI model. Very important and good way to keep checking to make sure you’re driving the improvements you want to drive. And then in Step five, deciding what to do — there’s a functional use case model, an operations model, and a reference architecture. And all that drives to this digital transformation.

Now, change is hard. And people sometimes ask, why bother? Or why do we need to change? That question has been asked less frequently. But it’s still out there. And I want to talk a little bit about what all this drives. This is a concept that we are still probably a bit early on at Sprinklr. But something that’s reasonably mature internally, but we have not expressed it as much externally. And that is, what is the result of all this? What are you trying to do? And I would argue, as with many others, including our CEO, that you are trying to make your customers happier. Happy, not so much. Because happy is a state of being, it’s hard to control all the factors in someone’s life. But after an interaction with you and your brand, someone should feel happier.

I don’t know if you’ve listened to the song, there’s a song called Happier. Marshmello featuring Bastille, and it’s one of my favorites. It is a fantastic, fantastic video, if you’ve ever seen the video. It’s absolutely amazing. And it is a great song about happier and the little moments in life which can deliver happiness and deliver a state of being that is happier. So if you get a chance, go to YouTube and put in Happier official music video and enjoy that.

So let’s talk a little bit about the capabilities models. Last time we did a little review of the outcomes and experiences. We talked about the personal element of feeling like you’re heard, feeling like you enjoy being with the brand, and you’re remembered, preferred, and loved. So we’re going to talk today about the strategic use cases that go along with it. And so I’m just gonna go through a few to orient you to what I’m talking about here. And then talk a little bit about the people and the process and technology that goes along with it.

So one example of a strategic use case would be that for the company, they need to listen, they need to monitor, detect, assign, and automatically route every relevant social conversation to appropriate handlers. And they also need to segment. They need to create unified profiles and clustered segments around key social audience attributes and behaviors. So this listening and segmenting is a way of helping people feel like they’re being heard. You also want to assess. You need to map your current state of social capabilities. And you need to benchmark, leveraging foundational social metrics to evaluate your impact over time. So assess where you are, and then benchmark against others. And this is how you drive towards an outcome of knowing how well you’re doing, and getting customers to enjoy interactions with you.

Another use case would be to plan. And that would be about building a cross functional asset management, content planning, and campaign design ecosystem. And then publishing. How do you efficiently publish and respond across social accounts. This is how we tell consistent stories and help people feel loved and remembered. Another use case would be to integrate, and then to automate. To integrate the existing system of engagement to CRM and other priority legacy systems and the whole front office, and automate by streamlining workflows, and synchronize the ability to collaborate, cross functionally. So integrate and automate. This helps us recognize customers where they touch our brands, and help people feel appreciated.

Another use case is to activate. Build communities of brand advocates and opinion leaders and influencers. And then to engage. You want to nurture those advocate communities to propel positive sentiment, extend reach, and improve your share of voice. And this is how we get an army of people who show support and respond to us. And this is how you say that I’m proud to be a brand loyalist. Next use case to be to analyze and report. So to analyze, you’re creating business insights from data captured across different channels and surveys and research. If you’re reporting you’re gonna create, provide access, and distribute reports on every meaningful activity across the organization. So if you don’t report it probably didn’t happen.

Second to last one, target, and amplify. So targeting you’re using audience profiles and paid media targeting to create personalized one on one interactions and experiences on every social and digital property. And amplify is a way of leveraging paid social advertising to boost content and extend campaign reach. So this helps people directly reach and engage the right people. And for customers, they feel like they’re looking at personalized content. And finally, govern and comply. In govern you want to prevent the advanced persistent threat of account hacks, data leaks, and system breaches. And under comply you want to sustain all required certifications, industry standards, like GDRP, California privacy law, that kind of stuff. And this is how the brand secures its brand reputation and the customer feels like they’re in control, and how their data is being used.

So to, this is a way of thinking about how to go through these strategic use cases, not functional ones, and how to think about listening, assessing, planning, integrating, activating, analyzing, targeting, and governing. And really, when you think about it, these things are all about how do I really listen, learn from, and then act. And act in a way that causes customers to love you, which is the listen, learn, love framework that I’ve talked about many times on this podcast.

And what’s cool about these is they all ladder up to a set of people, process, and technology pivots. So basically, you can understand how these things make sense and how they work. And what we’ll do in the next segment, is I’ll spend a bit of time looking at how all those work, and spend a bit of time on what the examples are under each one of those. So that’ll be fun, because then it brings it to life. And helps you understand as a global brand, what you need or what you have to do to capture value from the system. And to drive digital transformation. Because at the end of the day, what these models do and what makes them particularly powerful, is they’re an alignment device. They allow you to work with different people in your organization, help them understand what you’re doing, help them have input on it, have them feel engaged in that process. And everyone feels like you’re trying to drive to something that’s got true business value, not just building followers or doing some of the things that people sometimes make the mistake of positioning social as.

So for the next one I’m gonna dig into people, process, and technology. But for today, that’s it. And this has been the CXM Experience. I’m Grad Conn, CXO at Sprinklr and I’ll see you next time.