Dr. Natalie Petouhoff and Steve Trimbo presented on optimizing customer experience through better digital experience management. They discussed how most companies have separate IT and customer experience teams that do not collaborate effectively. This leads to poor customer digital experiences despite investments in customer experience. They proposed assessing an organization's digital experience management maturity across five dimensions and collaborating across teams to improve digital performance and close the gap between customer experience and digital experience.
We can all agree we live in a world that is increasing more digital and more social
There’s no way around it
And
Customer Experience is NOW A CEO-Level Conversation
CX is critical to business results, and consequently
A top strategic priority across many industries
92% of executives surveyed said the customer experience strategy is one of their top three priorities
65% of respondents expect to improve profitability by improving the overall lifetime value of customers
Word-of-mouth in social media tends to be very direct & authentic
Most everything the business needs to know…
What’s working
What’s not working
What would be better if…
Can be seen in social networks…
Brands NOW must become Public Social EXPERIENCES that they share
Customer’s Digital Experience Determines
Loyalty to a Company- That’s a Bottom-line Issue
While CX investments are significant, returns are often lacking.
In the customer’s opinion – which is what really counts
87% of customers agree customer experience needs to be better
Even though they care about the same thing, they are looking at different things and they will never get to the right answer that way
Business metrics could be sales, sign-ups, applications submitted, etc.
IT could be response time or some more sophisticated composite score, like Dynatrace uses for published DX benchmarks – considers response and reliability, and parses mobile versus desktop
Based on numerous Dynatrace DX assessments (thru consulting services), mapping operational data to business results is among the lowest scoring variables – demonstrates a high/rare level of DX maturity
CX professionals are rightfully focused on mapping the customer journey, but they are omitting an important set of variables – DX
Consider the inflection point – not good business to shoot for “as fast as possible” assuming each degree of “fast” comes at an incremental cost. The inflection point is also cost optimized.
[Dave Anderson’s retail industry benchmarks; YoY BoW for other industries?]
So is this a case of chicken little or the canary in a coal mine? Much ado about nothing or a real leading indicator?
DX involves conscious decisions about trade-offs – initiatives to improve CX can have implications for DX – does it move the inflection point?
We need to keep the focus on DX because we have no data to prove the impact on business results
Consider that DX is not something that you “fix” and are done – it is a continual process, starting with monitoring; the environment is dynamic, the customer population and their behavior is dynamic – you need to manage continuously
DX
Witness Factor™
Describes the idea that digital experience or DX is the new CX
Which is now public
There are all kinds of things happening and you can’t possibly know if you are not looking for them or even know that they are going on
Third party data
Seeing how interaction with a third party affects a transaction
WebRTC – responsive design – understand all the dynamics and can figure out which of the three pictures should be shown, however, all three pictures are rendered, with only one see
Progressive design takes into consideration all of the things-
They are on a wireless carrier that don’t have 4 G – and what they see is horrible compared to what you found in your testing
A lot of changes by marketing – say a flash sale, and connect to another source – reviews website, check to see if it is in your geography and the price–but they didn’t have the price cached and so every time they had to check the price, they couldn’t send it from their content data network, it had to go back to HQ- to ensure really good performance,
It’s time to rethink everything
You have to manage DX to manage CX
So how do you do it?
I want to start by defining a term that I will be using a lot, and that is “Digital Experience,” or “DX” for short. Admittedly, there is no common interpretation of the term Digital experience in the industry, nor is there a common term used to describe what we mean by it here, so here is what I mean when I use the term.
Natalie said that you have to manage DX to manage CX, and she’s right.
To DELIVER better and MORE MATURE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES, you have to MANAGE them. What does that mean? What does it require?
First you have to MONITOR these Digital Experiences. Start by asking: “What are the best practices you need to support for the best experiences? What POLICIES do we need in place to support these best practices
Next, determine what TOOLS you need to gather the DATA required to determine how well and if you’re following your agreed-upon POLICIES. What data will you need? Too much data without context can be confusing. Too little can lead to poor decision-making in the management process. Here’s where you need the BEST TECHNOLOGY AND EXPERIENCED LEADERSHIP to help you determine what data you gather and translate it into actionable direction.
Finally, once you have the right, accurate data, what do you do with this information? How do you share it with all of the stakeholders in ways that are meaningful to everyone? What are your next steps to improve your maturity? How do you prioritize?
Digital Experience maturity can and should not just be monitored, but it should also be measured and MANAGED – using information from monitoring along with knowledge from experience and best practices to MEASURE results and then take action to improve these results through MANAGEMENT. And by measured I mean - relative to objectives. The most mature organizations determine the relationship between DX metrics and business results, and establish objectives for DX that should maximize business results.
This means that you’ll need to involve people and processes from across your entire organization—siloed information and action WILL limit your maturity.
Guiding principles:
Digital Performance Management - not just Monitoring
Understand and improve the end-user experience, application, and infrastructure layers
Alignment of DPM activities with business goals
The entire Application SDLC owns end-user performance
Understand the complete application delivery chain – not just the components in the data center
Understand capabilities—not just tools
Provide teams a common lexicon around DPM
Reduce MMtR from performance related incidents
So where do you start? Begin with assessing your DX maturity by asking some tough questions… (start with the two here and then go to the next slide…)
Introduce these as the five measures you can use across your organization to determine your DPM maturity… Walk through them…
Rate yourself according to these factors in each of the five previous categories…
Level 1 – Reactive: This is the lowest level of maturity a business can be at and signifies an “at risk” level of digital
performance management.
Level 2 - Aware: This phase indicates a growing understanding of how technology shortcomings affect the customer and
signifies a “marginal” level of digital performance management maturity.
3 - Effective: This level indicates things are progressing to a level where digital experience impact is better understood so
at this level the organization has a “good” level of digital performance management maturity.
Level 4 - Optimized: This stage indicates a brand is using “best practice” levels of digital performance management maturity leading
to increased business outcomes.
Level 5 - Pervasive: Digital performance management has become part of the DNA of the business and of IT and the company has
reached a “next practice” level of maturity providing the business team even deeper insights upon which business decisions can
Be made.
…and don’t be too hard on yourself… As you can see from the results of over 40 assessments we’ve conducted and summarized on this chart covering many business sectors – for the initial assessment on average the organizations have scored in the “Reactive” level of Digital Experience Management across all aspects.
Most companies in every imaginable industry are still at an early stage of DPM maturity. Be realistic in the early stages and you can see improvement occur in a relatively short period of time.
While all companies want to be performing at an “Optimized” level of Digital Experience Management they initially set their sights on getting to a maturity level of 3 – meaning “Effective” which leads to organizational understanding of where digital experience impact is better understood and insights can lead to decisions leading to improved business outcomes.
Aside from how far many companies are from their desired state, it’s also interesting to note where we see most companies rate highly in our assessment process—and where they usually have low scores.
Usually companies report that they have a good understanding of digital experience through common, repeatable transactions, and they are able to measure the general quality of these experiences from different geographies worldwide. This data is relatively simple information around individual transactions, times..etc..
However, where we see organizations struggling is in areas like gathering more complex digital experience information about their actual customers that requires data in context, in real time. In addition to capturing this critical digital experience data around customers is the challenge many organizations have in presenting that information in a business context which would lead to new insights that could be utilized to improve business outcomes.
It’s typically difficult for organizations to gather data around business-centric metrics and understand how they relate to IT-centric SLAs.
KEEP? ->This is where Dynatrace’s complete view and our experience in providing information in context for IT AND business stakeholders works for you…
[Add stories about actual engagements…]
So it becomes obvious that it is difficult to make progress without better communications and collaboration between IT and business. Organizations often think they are doing this well, but when we peel it back we see that the connections mostly exist between IT dev and the business, with the focus on application functionality. If the organization is DevOps mature, this bleeds into IT Ops to some degree. But more often than not, operations considerations like DX are not part of the dialog. In order to make DX work for the business, there needs to be good communications and collaborations between IT Ops and the business.
Why is this so often lacking? Well, as Natalie said, DX and CX professionals are often speaking a different language. They need a shared lexicon to enable communications, and identifying shared metrics is a way to accomplish this.
To reach process maturity in Digital Experience management you need to arm all stakeholders with easy-to-access metrics and the ability to answer digital experience questions leading to deeper and more meaningful dialogues about and insights into your customers and their experience with you. Leveraging a digital performance management solution that ties together business and IT metrics and the relevant information for all stakeholders will drive large increase in maturity gains.
With Dynatrace technology, expert leadership and our unique Digital Experience Center, we deliver the right, detailed information to all stakeholders in context. This enables the collaboration required for groups to MANAGE complex digital experiences and align goals for business success. Metrics are aligned, goals aligned and understanding is now out of silos—everyone is on the same team.