Digital Services are a lucrative source of competitive advantage in today's digital world. For some businesses, digital services are their core product offering, for others they're a way to reduce operational costs. They're often measured by customer experience metrics like Net Promotor Score, Customer Effort Score or Five Star Ratings. High ratings usually increase customer loyalty. They can also be used in promotions to help influence more sales, lowering cost per acquisition and increase digital service usage too, lowering operational costs.
For new digital services, these measures in conjunction with analytics data, provide a rich source of actionable insights that reliably inform your growing digital business of where it can be more competitive.
But there's more value in digital services than simply delighting customers and enjoying the free referrals they bring. Digital services are an exciting opportunity to deliver strategic cost-saving targets through automation and customer self-service too. This can be loosely measured in Full Time Employee (FTE) capacity increases, which can significantly enhance your value chain.
To put this in context, imagine identifying your most frequent customer service tasks and evaluating them for their cost-saving potential. Then, where there are rich savings to be made, you automate the process and promote them as simple and engaging "self-services" online. These typically "high volume / high value" customer journeys can be monitored via the same analytics solution used by your website. Online task completions can be compared to the manual offline process to measure and demonstrate your operational cost savings.
Similar to Digital Sales, "Free", "Rent or Buy" and "Build" infrastructure options may be part of the solution for your business. Whichever option you decide to use, and wherever you are in your digital transformation journey, we suggest our "Framework for Success" below may help you make the right decisions for your growing digital business. It is our preferred way to manage digital projects.
Getting to know you
Initial
meeting to understand your industry, your objectives and your company’s goals. This is a good time to understand your budget capability too. Then, identify your internal skillsets and where you may need outsourced support.
Agree approach
We
highly recommend the approach outlined on this framework. However, this is only a guideline, we aim to agree on the most effective approach for your project when we meet. Your budget and risk appetite will be key factors when determining the best approach.
Facilitate
- Identify, evaluate and co-opt potential external suppliers as needed
- Get to know your internal contributors and your strategy's stakeholders, where required
- Propose a strategy development schedule and agree it with all contributors
- Coordinate and facilitate workshops and regular progress meetings
- Co-ordinate contributions
-
Provide regular project status updates
Investigate
Recruit some of your customers, talk to them and uncover their "pain-points" with your existing services, whether they're fulfilled online, offline or both. What do they expect from a supplier like you in todays digital world and what would make them more loyal?
Investigate your current digital capabilities, including back-end technologies and their potential to "talk to" other digital services.
Discover what best-of-breed digital services look like for your industry from similar businesses around the world.
Compare
With input from your customers, compare your services with competitors and identify shortfalls or any significant digital competitive advantages your competitors may already own.
Innovate
"A lot of times, customers don't know what they want until you show them"
- Steve Jobs
Get creative and offer innovative digital service concepts influenced by solutions from other industry verticals and feedback from your customers that may provide your business with a competitive advantage in your marketplace.
Present
Deliver an informative and easy to digest presentation of key findings and recommendations… ready for validation in the next stage.
Internal investigation and validation
Firstly, to assess which services may be most operationally valuable, workshops should be held with your business team(s). The Digital Marketplace Analysis will be presented and validated by them.
To maximise the value of this stage, we'd recommend that they are reassured that the objective is to increase capacity, add business value and make their working lives better, not to make anyone redundant. Similarly, perhaps it should be presented as an opportunity for employees upgrade their expertise to suit the marketplace of the future?
Next, the team will collectively investigate, identify, evaluate and validate your costliest internal customer service tasks in terms of employee overhead, or any other processes that are very likely to deliver significant cost-savings from a combination of automation and customer self-service. Similarly, any other benefits in terms of sales and marketing should be investigated in the same way.
How will it look?
Using marketplace analysis and internal workshops, design the first wireframe concepts of your potential digital services. Then, validate it with your business team(s).
If we build it, will they use it?
Assess if customers will use your proposed tools and services and which would they use most. We'll use surveys and possibly interviews with your customers, show them the wireframe concepts and validate them.
The aim is to deliver a prioritised list of features so they can be packaged, estimated and proposed as cost options in the following stages.
Define roles and responsibilities
Define all the internal and external contributors that will be required to deliver the strategy, acquire delivery commitments, identify gaps and propose solutions.
Develop feature-based user stories
Informed by the demand validation stage, develop and hand-over "user stories" to Business Analysts, UX/UI designers and IT developers or external development agencies for initial, high level, price estimation, infrastructure/architecture recommendations and delivery estimates.
Non-functional prototypes are included to help these "builders" visualise your requirements and more accurately estimate the effort and cost… what you see should be what you get, no nasty surprises later due to misunderstandings.
Governance
Align the concept with all necessary corporate governance requirements (e.g. Legal, Risk, Compliance or IT). Agree KPIs with business owners and their reporting expectations.
Prepare a strategy proposal for sponsor or board approval
Based on the outputs of the previous stages, bring it all together in a strategy proposal presentation. This will include findings and recommendations, three cost options, pros and cons of each option, expected Return on Investment (ROI) for each and an achievable roadmap to delivery agreed with all proposed contributors.
Initiate Managed Implementation
Assuming the strategy receives a "green light", initiate a managed implementation project for the agreed cost option.
Typical strategy requirements
- Business Experts
- Project Manager + Strategist
- Digital Market Researcher
- Technical Solution Architect / Analyst
- UX/UI Designer + Content Writer
- Suppliers (Sales estimators)
- Analytics Expert
- Company vision + goals
- Agreed approach + schedule
- View of your digital services (if available)
- View of competitor digital services
- Ability to run bespoke operations reports
- Workshop facilities
- Adobe Creative Cloud or similar
- Brand / Content Style Guide
- Pattern Library / Design System
- Survey tool with "MaxDiff" capabilities
Assessments
If required, coordinate all necessary procurement assessments e.g., Vendor Screening, Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), Data Protection Agreement (DPA) and IT Security Risk Assessment as required by your IT governance, legal, risk, compliance or procurement functions. Typically, this is required when a third party will be processing your customer's data.
Prepare contracts
If not already a partner, suppliers (e.g., independent specialists, developers or agencies), where required, should be contracted to deliver their contributions to the project for a cost not exceeding their strategy proposal estimates.
Boilerplate contracts are usually available from the supplier. Alternatively, your company may have a standard services agreement the suppliers may agree to sign instead.
Review and sign contracts
Responsible stakeholders like business owners and legal representatives commit to establishing a partnership with external suppliers based on agreed deliverables.
Suppliers commit to working with the implementation manager to develop a detailed action plan that will deliver in line with the agreed strategic roadmap.
Project initiation
Setup any project management, collaboration or development tools and co-ordinate training as required.
Establish team
Establish the implementation team ensuring all get to know one another, their roles, responsibilities, how 'loose' agile development works and agree on their preferred agile approach. Align sprint tasks with the action plan (see below) and keep the project on track.
Support the team
Establish team-building exercises. Identify, evaluate and sensitively address any inter-personal issues or non-deliveries. Provide coaching or training where needed.
Reassure the team when problems inevitably arise and help them to find solutions. However, it's best to establish a culture of "prevention rather than cure" from the outset.
Most importantly, monitor the happiness and engagement levels of all team members and take mitigating action when required.
Developing an action plan helps to keep a project on track.
Firstly, workshop and agree on key milestones that align loosely but realistically with the strategic roadmap.
Then, identify all actions required to deliver each milestone with the team and add them as line-items to the projects backlog. Keeping them categorised by milestone where possible.
This informs the agile facilitator of when a line item should be prioritised for any given agile sprint.
Why Agile?
Agile facilitation is our recommended project management method. The more traditional "step-by-step" waterfall method is quite rigid, allowing for "pile-ups" when unforeseen delay's are encountered. Agile allows a problem to be taken aside and addressed without delaying other work-streams. Therefore, you're more likely to recover and deliver the overall project on time.
Facilitate
Coordinate and facilitate agile sprint planning, sprint review and stand-up meetings.
Chase
Coordinate contributions and sensitively manage non-deliveries to get back on track.
Report
Provide progress updates based on the key milestones in the action plan, to you, your business experts and your sponsors if necessary.
Anticipate barriers to delivery and take preventative action, problem-solve when necessary, resolve conflicts and negotiate workarounds.
Manage the team ensuring each contributor can deliver in line with their commitments and the overall plan.
Equally important, ensure contributors do not over-commit and leave enough "wiggle-room" if actions cannot be delivered as planned e.g. unavoidable delays, unplanned holidays, illness, bereavement etc.
Escalate only when no other option to resolve a problem exists with impact assessment and recommendations.
Typical implementation requirements
- Business Experts
- Project Manager + Agile facilitator
- Procurement expert(s)
- UX/UI Designer + Content writer
- Portal Builder System Admin + Editor
- Business Analyst*
- Hosting Environment Admin*
- IT Developer(s)* / Coder(s)*
- ERP / CRM / Database Admin
- Functional tester(s) + Co-ordinator
- User Acceptance Test (UAT) Co-ordinator
- Analytics Expert
- Digital Services Strategy
- Signed Contracts + DP Documentation
- Agile Facilitation Tools
- User stories + Mock-ups / Wireframes
- Brand / Content Style Guide
- Pattern Library / Design System
- Domain Registration + SSL Certificate
- Dev, Test and Production Environments
- Portal / App Builder Tools
- ERP / CRM / DB access
- Tag Manager and Analytics
- Cookie Preference Manager
- Developer / Coder Tools*
- PEN Test Report*
- Payment provider account(s) + Manuals**
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) tracking**
- DUNS number ***
*** If developing an iOS app.
Develop maps
Leveraging the Analytics capability that you should already have in place, develop customer journey maps that monitor and measure customers progress through each of your key digital service's steps or "digital customer journeys" in real-time.
Get an aggregate view
Aim to present an aggregate view of how many people set out on a journey, how many stopped progressing and where they stopped, how many came back later and how many completed the journey. Have the capability to filter this information by "from" and "to" dates so you can get a before and after view of any refinement actions that may have been put in place. This also helps to identify and mitigate seasonal variables e.g. holiday periods.
Governance
The sophistication of these maps will be in line with the governance criteria (e.g. KPIs) agreed in the strategy. They can be as simple as "page-level views" or more detailed "field-level views". While a page-level view is generally all that's needed to identify a problem area, a field-level view should leave no confusion as to what may be preventing users from completing a journey.
Initiate Campaign
If your customers don't know about your digital service and why they should use it, it will most likely fail.
Typically, a promotional campaign will already be a key milestone in your managed implementation action plan.
We recommend a three message approach for any launch campaign:
1) Tell them it's coming
2) Tell them it's here and its benefits
3) Remind them of its key benefits
While a customer journey map should make it clear where customers are failing to engage, it won't tell you how to fix it. Likewise, it won't analyse and quantify the value of non-completed journeys.
So, the problem should be taken back to the implementation team to workshop it, agree a fix and make recommendations. Often, an issue can be rectified with a simple change of wording to the interface, taking very little effort and at a negligible cost, but equally, it could be something that requires significant redevelopment.
If significant, these recommendations are costed and presented back to the strategy development stakeholders for review and agreement on when or if they'll initiate a refinement project to implement the proposed fix.
Most digital services will benefit from refinement over time, whether that's to react to a change in the market, to enhance a user experience or provide new services.
Like any traditional business, change is inevitable in the digital world and you'll need a process of refinement to compete.
All digital solutions require maintenance or upgrades, generally this is to improve security or address a technical requirement. However, scheduled maintenance is also required to address complaints from users and for regulatory compliance.
Going forward, a business department, function or individual will then "own" the new digital service, monitor the dashboard and be its point of escalation with help from documentation provided.
Douglas Digital will be ready to step-in and support when necessary.
Typical post-launch requirements
- Business Experts + Service Owner
- Project Manager + Strategist
- Dashboarding + Analytics Expert(s)
- Email Marketing Specialist
- The Implementation team
- Digital Services Strategy
- User stories + Mock-ups / Wireframes
- Tag Manager and Analytics
- Dashboard Tool (e.g. Data Studio)
- Email Marketing Tool
- Dev, Test and Production Environments**
- Developer / Coder tools
- ERP / CRM / Database access
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) tracking**
This framework is not intended to be an exhaustive list of requirements, rather it's a guideline designed to provide you with a better understanding of what may be required for your digital project.
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