Episode #66: DCFTS 8, How to Master the Five Cs of Customer Engagement

Our penultimate Digital Customer-First Transformation System episode. Today we explore the Operations Model. It’s a nuts and bolts deep dive into the five critical elements (the 5 Cs) of engagement management: conversation, community, collaboration, campaign, and content. Together, they create a unified, customer-first workflow that connects you with your customers and prospects.

Click here to view the Digital Customer-First Transformation System Operations Model (pdf, 424KB)

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back. It’s the CXM Experience. And today we are continuing our journey on the Digital Customer-First Transformation System. Just gonna recap it quickly for a moment or two. And then we’ve got two super exciting additions to it. And this will actually, after the next two episodes, this will conclude our DCFTS series. We’ll continue talking about transformation. Don’t worry about that. Lots of transformation ahead. And we’ll talk a little bit about how DCFTS comes into action. But this will be the last of the formal reviews. So just hang on for two more episodes.

Let me drill into this for a second. So DCFTS, background, this is a system built by the Sprinklr team. Based on the more than a thousand installs we’ve done in some of the world’s largest organizations. We observed what was happening there. And one of the key issues when you’re trying to do digital transformation is how do I get everyone aligned? How do I keep my stakeholders engaged? How do I make sure everyone knows that we’re making progress? And how do I keep momentum behind the project? What we found was that was a really useful process to start by thinking about what value do I want to deliver with my digital transformation initiative. And we’ve collected a lot of the values that people have said they’ve delivered and put that into one document that you can go through.

Then the second thing would be alright, now I know what I want to try to get done. What are the capabilities that I need to make that happen? And so, then we went through a pretty deep review of the capabilities model. I think we actually spent three episodes on that. And then the maturity model which is, where are we right now? Very important alignment device. Sometimes people think they’re further along than they really are. Are we at the early stage? Are we at a later stage? Where do we want to be? Very important way of looking at.

And then the ROI model. And so, the ROI model is one of the most important ways, of thinking about how to pay this thing out. We are going to make these investments, we’re going to make all this change, we know people don’t like change, at the end of the day, this is the ROI that we’re going to generate.

And then there’s three models that fall into the rubric of deciding what to do. There’s a functional use case model, an operations model, and a reference architecture model. The functional use case model I’m not going to get into today, I’m not gonna actually gonna cover that one in detail, because it is very specific to the capabilities that you’ve gone through. The capabilities presentation we went through covered a lot of the functional use cases. So, think of the functional use cases as being like the actual alignment with the teams on the use cases that they want to bring to life. It is very specific to each engagement and each organization. And it’s an important step to do. Then there’s an operations model. I’ll talk about that a little bit more today. And then, in our last DCFTS show tomorrow, I’ll talk about the reference architecture model.

Now, one thing I’ll also say, I have had a number of people reach out and say, Hey, how do we access this? Or how do we do this? Obviously, the materials are available, we’re posting it on the blog, I’m talking about it here. We can send you PDFs and other sort of electronic versions of this if you like. But we actually do a lot of consulting. I go in. One of my great partners in this is Carlos Dominguez, you may have heard him on one of our earlier podcasts. Carlos is our executive chairman, but has been involved with Sprinklr for many, many years, from its earliest days. And many others in the company plus some of our valued SI partners like Accenture and Deloitte will go in and do DCFTS workshops. We do them for free, and we do half-day workshops, full-day, 2-day… you want me there for a week, we’ll go for that, too. Usually that’s not necessary. But two days certainly is a great timeframe if you can devote that. And at the end of that, you end up with a really good model for digital transformation. That’s not just about Sprinklr. It’s about all the digital transformation that you want to do in order to be able to generate a customer-first model in your company.

So, let’s dig into the operations model. The operations model is really, really important because you’ve got to come up with a system of engagement, to be able to understand how you’re going to drive the system, how it’s going to work, and how all the different parts of the organization are going to work together. So, this model is actually a pretty sophisticated model. It’s very helpful to sit down together on this and it bears a lot of examination.

So basically, there’s a system of engagement… it talks about conversation, community, collaboration, campaigns, and content. And what you want to be able to do through that is you want to for those five steps, you want to be able to govern, analyze and automate all those different steps. And so, data is flowing through this system and is flowing through essentially all the front office functions of your organization.

And we probably talked about this before, but the back office is, of course, all your accounting systems, your CRM systems, all the backend stuff that helps a company run. The front office is anything that is customer facing. I still think the word front office is not well understood or even as broadly used. I think sometimes people misinterpret it to think of it as a front desk. But the front office is technically a term for everything that’s customer facing. So that’s marketing, customer care, advertising, anything in ecommerce, research and analytics, all your product development, public relations, of course, anything to do with sales, your human resources. Especially today, with products like Blind and others, you’ve got to be very tied into what your employees are feeling because they’re going to express that publicly. Glassdoor, another great place where people talk about things publicly. You can’t just think of your employees as a non-involved input, you have to engage them as well. Legal, which has a big impact as well. Especially these days, there’s a lot of legal implications to everything that we do. And then finance, which is actually… I think finance is an often undervalued department in the company, but there’s a tremendous amount of customer contact with finance. Finances is issuing bills, finance is issuing refunds, finance is actually doing a lot of work. So, you have to think about how is finance optimizing the customer experience as well, and bring them in. And you’ll find that your finance people are, first of all, almost always crazy smart. If they’re not, then you’re in really big trouble. I find that there always crazy smart, super engaged, love to be engaged with the customer piece. And because they’re often left out, when you pull them into the loop, they tend to be very valuable partners, have a great perspective, and be very excited to be part of that. So if you’re not heavily engaged with finance, try doing that. You’ll be surprised what you can get out of it.

Going back to these five. So, those are the front office functions. Basically, how do you have conversations with customers? How do you create community with your customers? And then how do you collaborate as an organization, across those conversations? And there could be, most likely will be, thousands. There will definitely be hundreds of thousands in a large organization. And in many cases, there are millions of conversations. And so how are you going to organize around it? L’Oreal has an objective now of having conversations with 100% of the people who talk about them. That’s a bold, fantastic initiative. They’re gonna upend, I think, the packaged goods world with this approach. Marc Pritchard opened the door when he talked about mass one-to-one a few years ago at Cannes. But L’Oreal is actually doing it. It’s very impressive to see what they’re doing. But how are you going to collaborate across the organization to be able to have those conversations?

And we start to see things evolving, like conversational commerce. You can now buy products through Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram. How does that look? That person’s had other conversations with you, that person has worked with other departments in the company. If you have a CXM profile on them, and an agent is looking at that person, having conversation with them trying to buy a product, wouldn’t it be great to know all the things that they’ve said about you, and all the things they said to you, and all the departments in the company that have interacted with them. That way, you can see all the stuff that’s happened. And so, everyone who collaborates around a customer has a full view. This is the 360 view of the customer that I keep talking about. Because if you talk to a customer like it’s the first time you’ve met them, you’ll piss them off because they think of you as a representative of the brand. And it’s not the first time they’ve interacted with the brand. And so, the brand should know about them. Not you, the brand should know about them. And you need to create the systems to do that. We’ll talk more about conversational commerce actually, in the future. I think that could be one of the most exciting things happening right now online. It sits at the juncture of the death of physical brick and mortar retail stores, and the not great experience in most online stores. I think conversational commerce is a total game changer. But we’ll hit that in a later show.

And then after collaboration you’ve got to have a campaign. So, your campaign is: how am I going to target my audiences and have audience intelligence in place? And then what content am I going to build in order to drive the campaign? And how do I measure, optimize, and continuously improve that content, and keep it in a spot where I can get to it. We work with a lot of DAMs, like Adobe DAM, etc. Some people actually use Sprinklr as a DAM, which is very interesting to see. But we are the highest-rated content marketing platform in the world right now. And in fact, Forrester rates us as the only leader in content marketing platforms because of our ability to pull in listening and optimized content. And we’re in the top right, leader quadrant for the Magic Quadrant at Gartner as well.

That’s the system from end to end. Again, it’s somewhat beneficial to see it in a visual form, but I think you get the idea that you’re moving from, hey, I want to listen, I need to learn. And then I need to love the customer. We talked about listening and love before. To do that correctly, I’ve got to collaborate across the organization, there needs to be a universal API connector. That’s something that Sprinklr’s spent a decade building and optimizing. And then that connects to the existing technology ecosystem, like your CRM system, your CMS, your ERP, your call center, all those systems need to be connected. Because while actually there are many customers who use Sprinklr for those functions, and, in fact, we have some customers who now are using Sprinklr for their end-to-end call center, including doing emails through Sprinklr, doing voice through Sprinklr. While, that does happen, our perspective is, with the larger organizations that we work with, typically, they don’t want to rip and replace a bunch of systems to bring Sprinklr in. So they’ll add Sprinklr in, and then we’re great at integrating into what they have.

Then what this model does, which I think is extremely powerful… and this is where it’s worth reading, because I’m not going to go through each one of these in detail. But there is a checklist under conversation management, community management, collaboration management, campaign management, and content management. So those five steps. And it allows you to do things like identify and analyze relevant conversations, that would be under conversation management. Under community management, it would be to take specific community-based comments and apply real time insights to it, etc, etc. And what this is, is actually a checklist. And there are about a dozen items under each one of these buckets that allow you to make sure that you’re taking all the steps necessary to properly manage each of these steps in the operations model.

I think one of the great things about the operations model is at the end of the operations model, it helps your organization understand the general complexity of being able to work across the customer base, be able to think about all the things that we need to do, and manage all the systems we need to manage. We will classically spend most of our time in the workshop on this operations model. Because this is what engages all the teams and brings everyone together. And then we will spend a bit of time on the reference architecture. We’ll do that in the next show. And then we will be finished DCFTS for now.

So, for the CXM Experience, I’m Grad Conn, CXO at Sprinklr and I will see you next time.