Why delay when you can accelerate value realisation? 5 tips to fast-track the journey

In today’s digital universe, where experience is everything (everywhere, all at once), how do you measure customer success beyond a transactional metric? How do you up your success metric from a finite number of sales to infinite lifetime customer value?

Yes, the bottom-line numbers are what drive your year-on-year growth, but in an ecosystem with multiple customer touchpoints—from microsite launches to social media influencer-led activations, the term ‘customer success’ has become hard to define.

It is brand awareness, reach, engagement, open rates, app downloads, viewership, repeat viewership, and much more. In fact, a Forrester Consulting study also revealed a positive correlation between happy employees and customer satisfaction. It is evident that the business impact for any experience-driven organisation starts long before a sale—and continues long after.

Having a strategy in place is good but not enough

To deliver customer success—and measure it, your business strategy and campaign execution need to go hand-in-hand. Without a strategy, execution is aimless, and without execution, strategy is useless—and most companies never achieve the full value of their strategy.

Bringing together your people, processes, and technology to align business outcomes with every step of the customer journey is paramount. And to know whether or not you’ve met your business goals, you need a plan that can not only define the potential value of your goal but also measure it for data-driven insights that in turn deliver meaningful customer experiences.

Redefining customer success can make a difference

Value realisation is an enterprise-wide phenomenon, where every team—from product to marketing works together to ensure your customers get the most value in the most efficient and agile way.

Think of it like a treasure hunt where customer success is the coveted gold that keeps everyone going in pursuit of discovery. The objectives and key results (OKRs) of every team need to be set in a way that they act as check posts along the way to ensure everyone stays on track. The collective KPIs of your customer experience management (CXM) strategy can serve as key milestones, guiding your teams to advance rapidly toward their set goal.

5 steps to making your digital strategy drive greater ROI.

Here are the five steps to initiate, discover, create, deploy, and scale your digital initiatives so that your business can get more value.

1. Discover and validate

It is crucial to bring all stakeholders on the same page and lay down the business goals and customer priorities at the very beginning of any strategic planning. In many ways, this phase acts as the foundation for driving greater success with your digital strategy. It establishes why your organisation needs to implement value realisation and helps build trust and credibility with those you choose to partner with to achieve the desired results.

At this stage itself, it pays to engage an expert who’s been there and done that. Who understands your investment’s purpose and needs, can decode your marketing ecosystem, and help navigate your business goals to set relevant KPIs for your value realisation initiative. The fundamentals of this engagement include extensive industry research to dig out customer insights, mapping key stakeholders, and laying out a high-level digital strategy approach for the next phase.

2. Assess and prioritise

Once you have the strategy firmed up, it’s time to identify opportunities, both in your consumers’ behaviour and your business operations, that can be influenced to drive value and define this path. By the end of this phase, you should ideally have your customer goals, KPI framework, and performance targets benchmarked.

Map your customer journeys and build customised use cases, each tied with a specific measurement framework and KPI. Prioritise the use cases according to their value and complexity and narrow down on what’s truly important for your customers. This step will help bridge the gap between your business strategy and campaign execution as you move ahead to the implementation phase.

3. Prepare your organisation

To bring about long-term change in the way your business defines customer success in an experience-driven world, it is important to ensure your organisation is well-equipped to adopt and adapt. Think of this step as the fulcrum for your entire customer experience management strategy.

Asses your operating models, skills, and capabilities required to execute the value realisation framework. Consult experts who can help you through change management and provide the best practices to prepare your organisation with an optimal customer experience value chain. In certain cases, this can also include going back to step two and realigning your project KPIs to fit within your current organisational capabilities—making room to scale in the future.

4. Drive customer value

With the strategy part covered, it’s now time to execute and bring together your people, processes, and technology to deploy your digital initiative.

This involves leveraging the right capabilities and optimising your operational teams during the go-live phase. Onboard partners who can assist your technical teams with real-time training to better business outcomes and ensure seamless execution of customer use cases. Monitor the use case performance on a timely basis with deployment reports and optimise them as required to ensure you are on track with your value realisation objectives.

5. Iterate and scale

Here’s where you validate your strategy based on its performance and review the results with the help of the data you’ve gathered. Decode the learnings to identify use cases that have proved to deliver value and understand the return on investment of your value realisation initiative.

Based on what you find, go back to the drawing board to optimise your roadmap and resources, recalibrate your value realisation framework to deliver better customer experiences, and repeat the steps to keep driving customer success.

Maximise value. Take the next step now.

Adobe Professional Services helps customers realise the true value of their Adobe applications with a flexible, scalable, and proven methodology that generates powerful business outcomes based on customer priorities.

Looking for a trusted partner to guide your customer success with measurable business outcomes? Contact us to build and scale DX initiatives that drive real value.