Digital change has to customer-driven

Digital Marketing

March 23, 2016

This Econsultancy article on digital transformation echoes how we approach any digital project. Understand who the customer is, listen to what they want, and design your products/websites/strategies for them.
Prosper Williams, Assistant VP of Digital Adoption & Communications at Barclays PLC, discusses how organisations need to be customer focused, not just to grow, but to survive:

“In this ‘age of the customer’, the only sustainable competitive advantage is in becoming customer obsessed, and this does not mean creating broad strategies of how to get close to the customer.”

Developing a customer focused culture

He suggests that there are three core principles that need to be addressed culturally within an organisation:

1. Understanding the end-to-end customer lifecycle

2. Employing design-centric thinking

3. Connecting strategy to execution

The majority of our clients sell their products and services to other businesses. This does not change the fact that there is still a human being that will look at your website, read your article, watch your video or like your Tweet. Therefore, your digital strategies and assets must be designed around these individual engagements, and the output must support these strategies in order to change perceptions and drive conversions.

We have seen organisations aiming to create best-in-class websites, but expecting that they won’t have to touch it again for years. Prosper Williams recognises that digital projects no longer have a completion date:

“We all love the sexy aspects of digital transformation – great apps, beautiful design, fantastic usability – but if organisations don’t employ processes which allow them to transition from yearly, quarterly or even monthly release cycles, they cannot expect to keep pace with the increasing evolution of customer and technology trends.”

We work to develop customer focused solutions for a huge range of financial services businesses. Whether you are looking to transform your digital communications strategy, corporate website or mobile application, get in touch to discuss how we can help.

 

Author

Craig Freeman, Director of Digital Services

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Original article

Published 10 March, 2016 by Prosper Williams

Prosper is Assistant VP of Digital Adoption & Communications at Barclays PLC, a Visiting Lecturer at Cass Business School, and a contributor to Econsultancy. You can follow him on Twitter or connect via LinkedIn.

Further Reading

Incoming Axa chief Thomas Buberl to focus on digital transformation

Digital Transformation in Financial Services: challenges and opportunities

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