Seven Immediate Questions To Accelerate Your 2016 Commitments And Prepare 2017 Digital Experience Priorities

Celebrate 2016, Prepare For 2017

Here we are in September. Where did the year go?  It has been a great one. Now is the time to start looking at your digital customer, employee and business partner experiences and capabilities to consolidate or achieve 2016 gains and prepare for 2017.

The summer holiday season is officially over so we at Customer Results have been fielding calls from marketing, sales, service and experience leadership asking the following top 7 questions. You may want to ask yourself the same questions.

Contact me at graham@customerresults or text me at +1-404-660-1609 if you want to chat about how members of the Customer Results Experience Advocacy Network can help.

1. How have our customer, employee and partner journeys and experience expectations changed this year especially in light of competitive action? Do we need to adjust / create new journey maps to support 2017?
2. How has our 2016 experience improvement plan been progressing and what are the top 5 or 10 priorities / changes / adjustments in 2017?
3. What do we need to do in the next 30-45 days to ensure we are prepared for the annual budget process and the following 30-45 days to capture budget and prepare for annual kickoff?
4. How is our business and technology platform and services vendor / partner ecosystem performing? Do we need to make changes in channel or experience management tools, data, integration or digital innovation strategy?
5. What new innovations do we need to concept, trial in the next 120 days to be ready and how to do we do when our resources are all committed to current projects and we do not want to disturb their focus?
6. Do we need to enhance program and project leadership and resources now to accelerate milestones or reduce risk of meeting our 2016 commitments? Can we add additional Sprints in the closing months?
7. How do I do this with limited short term budget availability until next years money becomes available?

These same questions seem to be coming from both our client community members as well as the services and technology providers who are trying to capture new client business or close our proof of concept /demo phases to convert to the larger relationship and while everyone is different the discussions seem to mostly focus on 6 things.

• 30-45 day audits targeting quick hits and short term actions.
• Budget and business case preparation and update
• Improving 360 degree data driven marketing and engagement campaigns with new data sources, analytics and engagement tools that build on existing capabilities and investments.
• Improving mobile, social media and messaging / engagement strategies and continued move to “the cloud”.
• Improving multichannel strategies especially continued alignment of field, contact center and digital channels.
• Addition of key acceleration and improvement resources including expertise to define and improve budget preparation.
• Robotic process automation and artificial intelligence.

As I said contact me at graham@customerresults or text me at +1-404-660-1609 if you want to chat about how members of the Customer Results experience advocacy network can help you think through these items or action them.