Tag Archives: business model

Creating a Seamless and Unique Customer Experience

1. Technical Architecture

Outstanding customer experiences are supported by modern technology stacks that permit two essential capabilities:

Access From Any Touchpoint

Great customer experiences have the flexibility of touchpoint, and permit you to not only interact via web, phone, mobile, kiosk or other devices but have all actions instantly updated and available in a consistent manner. An example of what not to do: I placed an order on HomeDepot.com and immediately realized I made a mistake. I wanted to cancel it, but due to technical constraints, you can’t cancel orders on the website, only from the call center. So I called the call center, and they told me they wouldn’t be able to “see” my order (and therefore weren’t able to cancel it) for about an hour when the systems synchronize, and I should call back then. Not a great or accessible customer experience.

Flexible Frameworks

Flexible frameworks have the ability to be modified rapidly along with the changes that are being frequently deployed. The number one secret to how great customer experiences got to be great? It’s not by having a genius team that gets it right the first time; it’s through an iterative process of testing and learning. To do that, you have to be able to efficiently code, test, and iterate or kill new ideas quickly. Furthermore, the frameworks for presentation, business logic, and transaction processing need to be flexible. If user testing shows that changing the sequence of information collected from users during a checkout process might improve conversion, you need to be able to make a change like that reasonably simply. We often see companies with aging mainframe-based “back office” systems that are holding them back from being able to re-engineer their customer experience because “that’s not how the legacy system works.” No matter how much pain, companies in this situation need roadmaps to upgrade, redesign or replace these inflexible systems to permit the creative evolution of their customer experience.

2. Business Operations

Serving the digital customer effectively is not just about creating digital touchpoints, but about evolving the total experience with digital at the center. That means you will need to change the way you do business in a variety of spheres. Customers who use online chat to ask questions expect answers far faster than those who email, let alone those who send in snail mail. Digital customers opening an account at your bank don’t want to have to wait to receive a thick packet of forms in the mail that they have to sign in 17 different places. You may want to offer digital customers alternatives in “out of stock” situations (such as a direct ship) or permit them to customize their purchases in ways that weren’t previously possible. Truly optimizing for digital will probably change how you merchandise, your return policies, your customer support, customer communications, and, well, everything. It may require new roles, new processes or a re-organization of the company.

3. Business Model

One of the benefits customers see from digital is a huge improvement in the value equation. Skype has taken our long distance bill from hundreds of dollars to pennies. Spotify has given us access to practically any song ever recorded for a few dollars a month, and Netflix has done the same for movies. In many markets, Uber has halved the cost of a taxi. This is awesome for consumers, but threatening to incumbents whose business models are dependent on the pricing levels of legacy business models. Jeff Zucker, the former CEO of NBC, echoed this concern a decade ago when he bemoaned having to trade “analog dollars for digital pennies.”

Why are some companies able to offer consumers a “better deal?” Because digital can take substantial cost out of the equation, allowing more digitally centric companies to be more cost-competitive or shift to totally different business models (subscription access to huge content libraries instead of one by one DVD rental in the case of Netflix; offering the largest ground transportation fleet in the world without ever buying a single vehicle in the case of Uber; likewise eBay and Alibaba, two of the largest online stores, both of which stock no inventory.) You can have a great website and app, but if the fundamental value equation of your business is no longer competitive, you are going to struggle.

Don’t Bolt On Digital

Digital started out as a means of communication. We then had the era of eCommerce, where we “bolted on” digital alternatives to access the same inventory and offers available in our non-digital channels. But today, the winners are “digitally-transformed” companies that are offering a digital value proposition and have a technology stack that empowers them to create a great customer experience, and the business processes necessary to support and deliver on it.

It may seem like a lot. And it is. The world is changing fast, and the companies that succeed in the future will be those that make the transition. The ones that don’t will wind up on the list with companies like Kodak, Polaroid, BlockBuster, Sports Authority, Borders, Linens and Things and Circuit City. You can use this as a high-level roadmap for what you need to do to keep up with the digital transformation era. If your formula is not working yet, ask yourself which of these three areas you might not be paying enough attention to, or adapting quickly enough.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pexels

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What Have We Learned About Digital Transformation?

Lesson 1: There are three distinct levels of transformation, and operating model transformation is the one that deserves the most attention.

Geoffrey Moore Three Models

The least disruptive transformation is to the infrastructure model. This should be managed within the Productivity Zone, where to be fair, the disruption will be considerable, but it should not require much in the way of behavior change from the rest of the enterprise. Moving from data centers to cloud computing is a good example, as are enabling mobile applications and remote work centers. The goal here is to make employees more efficient while lowering total cost of IT ownership. These transformations are well underway, and there is little confusion about what next steps to take.

By contrast, the most disruptive transformation is to the business model. Here a company may be monetizing information derived from its operating model, as the SABRE system did for American Airlines, or overlaying a digital service on top of its core offering, as the automotive makers are seeking to do with in-car entertainment. The challenge here is that the economics of the new model have little in common with the core model, which creates repercussions both with internal systems and external ecosystem relationships. Few of these transformations to date can be said to be truly successful, and my view is they are more the exception than the rule.

The place where digital transformation is having its biggest impact is on the operating model. Virtually every sector of the economy is re-engineering its customer-facing processes to take advantage of ubiquitous mobile devices interacting with applications hosted in the cloud. These are making material changes to everyday interactions with customers and partners in the Performance Zone, where the priority is to improve effectiveness first, efficiency second. The challenge is to secure rapid, consistent, widespread adoption of the new systems from every employee who touches them. More than any other factor, this is the one that separates the winners from the losers in the digital transformation game.

Lesson 2: Re-engineer operating models from the outside in, not the inside out.

A major challenge that digital transformation at the operating model level must overcome is the inertial resistance of the existing operating model, especially where it is embedded in human behaviors. Simply put, people don’t like change. (Well, actually, they all want other people to change, just not themselves.) When we take the approach of internal improvement, things go way too slowly and eventually lose momentum altogether.

The winning approach is to focus on an external forcing function. For competition cultures, the battle cry should be, this new operating model poses an existential threat to our future. Our competitors are eating our lunch. We need to change, and we need to do it now! For collaboration cultures, the call to action should be, we are letting our customers down because we are too hard to do business with. They love our offers, but if we don’t modernize our operating model, they are going to take their business elsewhere. Besides, with this new digital model, we can make our offers even more effective. Let’s get going!

This is where design thinking comes in. Forget the sticky notes and lose the digital whiteboards. This is not about process. It is about walking a mile in the other person’s shoes, be that an end user, a technical buyer, a project sponsor, or an implementation partner, spending time seeing what hoops they have to go through to implement or use your products or simply to do business with you. No matter how good you were in the pre-digital era, there will be a ton of room for improvement, but it has to be focused on their friction issues, not yours. Work backward from their needs and problems, in other words, not forward from your intentions or desires.

Lesson 3: Digital transformations cannot be pushed. They must be pulled.

This is the hardest lesson to learn. Most executive teams have assumed that if they got the right digital transformation leader, gave them the title of Chief Transformation Officer, funded them properly, and insured that the project was on time, on spec, and on budget, that would do the trick. It makes total sense. It just doesn’t work.

The problem is one endemic to all business process re-engineering. The people whose behavior needs to change—and change radically—are the ones least comfortable with the program. When some outsider shows up with a new system, they can find any number of things wrong with it and use these objections to slow down deployment, redirect it into more familiar ways, and in general, diminish its impact. Mandating adoption can lead to reluctant engagement or even malicious compliance, and the larger the population of people involved, the more likely this is to occur.

So what does work? Transformations that are driven by the organization that has to transform. These start with the executive in charge who must galvanize the team to take up the challenge, to demand the digital transformation, and to insert it into every phase of its deployment. In other words, the transformation has to be pulled, not pushed.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is still plenty of work on the push side involved, and that will require a strong leader. But at the end of the day, success will depend more on the leader of the consuming organization than that of the delivery team.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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Scaling-up, the next frontier for innovation organization

Leveraging local and global innovation

Supplementing wisely central techno-pushed innovation with local innovation, closer to the fields and to the user needs, opening new windows of opportunities, is the goal of the open and local innovation approach developed for Orange Africa.

The purpose is to balance the technical expertise from a central innovation division, with the possibility of bottom-up initiatives, experimenting locally up to 100 innovative solutions every semester with the circa 20 countries where Orange operates in Africa and Middles-East.

The local innovation focus is on agility, pragmatism, and value created for the users and for Orange business, while leveraging a key technological asset that Orange can bring to the innovative service.

Smartphone Noir

One emblematic story is the birth of Orange Money, a mobile money service solving the problem of money transfer and payment for unbanked people. The idea was born in Kenya, and it clearly could not have emerged in Europe where everyone is banked, even kids! Orange developed centrally a platform capable of supporting all African countries in their progressive roll-out over 18 countries: ten years later, 50 millions users signed in for Orange Money. Furthermore, the central Orange Money platform enables local developments blossom, tailored to each country needs, and being picked-up, and replicated from one country to another over the region.

This is probably the most brilliant innovation of Orange over the decade, still no cutting-edge tech embedded: it’s low tech (SMS). As it solves a real user problem, it transforms people’s life, and got a massive adoption rate.

Orange Money map

Conducting short experiments in connection with business units

I created Orange intrapreneurship program 5 years ago, with a view to help innovative ideas transition more fluently into business, with the help of a sponsoring business unit, and to open the innovation doors to every Orange employee, letting them benefit from a tunnel of goodwill around their idea. The program acted like an innovation center of expertise or incubator. It clearly involved the business units very upstream: I’m a strong believer in co-developing innovations that create opportunities for business units, giving them a competitive advantage or solving one of their problems. “Find out the business unit problem that your innovation is solving”, I kept saying to the innovators I mentored!

Now we are adapting the process for the 20 countries of Orange Africa taking into account contextual particularities. We keep the employees participation and the business unit ownership aspects, but we also try to test refinements on the exploration stage. The key here is to conduct innovation exploration with short experiments in connection with business units:

achieving quick business wins with innovative process improvement, impacting internal organization, and not only new product and services: for instance, streamlining the authentification process for new customers;
mixing employees and business representatives with startups that help experimenting quickly; this has been pioneered by Orange Belgium, and these teams are called innovation squads like in the Spotify vocabulary;
keeping the process nimble, in a stretched time frame of a few weeks, so as to conduct a high number of experiments, confronting mock-ups to users, and collecting a maximum of users’ feedback, finding The Right IT before any product development.

Our target is to build proximity with our target users, rather than falling in love with our product, to explore and conduct short experiments, and pave the way to exploitation capitalizing on users’ feedback.

Personne Pointant Sur Un Appareil Photo Noir Et Gris Près De Macbook Pro

Designing innovation program, boosting innovation community

I’ve been through 10 steps to design an corporate entrepreneur program in my book The Intrapreneurs’ Factory. These 10 milestones are also an appropriate framework to design the innovation process with the countries of Orange Africa.

10 steps

It’s important first of all to define the reason why you start the program, what problem you’re trying to solve, what goals and KPIs will make the management team satisfied if they are reached. Then, some delicate gates are:

Finding out the right sponsor, both visible and accessible; sometimes a deputy sponsor can compensate a lack of avaibility!
Involving the business side soon enough in the process to trigger ownership, and further facilitate the exit, aka the transition from exploration to exploitation;
Closely coaching the process along the way, sharing the innovation tools from design thinking and lean start-up, bespoke tools to design mock-ups, and conduct experiment, but also the very peculiar mindset of the successful innovator: flexible and stubborn at the same time as says Jeff Bezos, as the key relies in the management of iteration in short cycles.

To operate this innovation process, we move together with a community of 20 staggering innovation champions, representing the countries of Orange Africa. Not only we discuss the innovation process to test locally, but we share view on innovation organization, and share success stories during a weekly Radio Innovation.

Radio Innovation

Weekly Radio Innovation also puts forward tremendous testimonials to inspire the innovation community:

from innovation managers and communities connected to Africa: Seedstars startups competition and programs for African entrepreneurs; Make Sense Africa incubator and the Dakar Citylab; Norrsken Kigali innovation hub, the startups gateway to East Africa; YUX Design Agency from Senegal, validating innovation ideas with users; innovation in the informal sector in Africa with GoodPoint/Archipel-co.com; Total Africa open innovation in Chad; Entrepreneurship Communities for innovation in Africa, with Archipel&Co and Africa Farmers Club; Liferay digital platform, and an Africa’s approach to tech and innovation; Innovation in Africa with Vodafone;
from startups growing their business in Africa: cloud telephony for SMEs, with Mteja from Kenya, and AfricaTalks; South-African MFS Africa: moving money across countries with one API that makes Africa look like one country; Kenya Pezesha loan marketplace for small African businesses; Chari.ma from Morocco, market place for local businesses; African startups investment report by Briter Bridges;
from Orange collaborators illustrating the group assets: Orange Ventures Africa seeds challenge; Social listening with Orange Data Studio in Guinea; Orange Fab Belgium innovation squads; Orange Senegal design thinking toolbox; Orange Slovakia open innovation; Orange Amman innovation team; First 100% digital mobile offer Flex by Orange Polska; Orange Romania innovation ecosystem, and cooperation with startups;
from broader innovation experts: innovation community management at Gefco; Booster incubation studio at Total; innovation in the energy industry, Innovation Vesta Wind Systems; collaborating with startups through the Venture Client Model, by 27pilots.

For these innovation champions in charge of setting-up an organization for innovation in their country, the challenge is to seek for integration (integrating seamlessly innovation with the business) before seeking for success. These mind-boggling testimonials feed them, upgrade their skills, and consolidate their innovation culture.

Scaling-up innovation oragnization

Once the innovation program gets traction, the next step is about scaling-up the approach, engaging progressively all participants. If all Orange countries commit to the innovation process in Africa, that will lead to the tremendous portfolio of 100 creative solutions experimented per semester, 200 on a yearly basis on the regional footprint: what a eye-catching achievement!

At the innovation project level, one can use the scale-up canvas to check whether the project is ready to grow, and move from a start-up to a scale-up stage.

At the program level, Is your innovation organization resilient? is the topic of a short assessment I have designed to know how your innovation organization fare across 10 key areas, and cements its resilience. Whether you are leading open innovation, internal innovation, participative innovation and intrapreneurship, digital factory or disruptive labs, you will learn from this tool which works like an innovation calculator, it’s actually quite fun to run it! To start, click here, see how you rank, and get pieces of advice for improvement.

Image credits: Pexels.com 1, Pexels.com 2