Process Innovation

For example, with one of our clients, we collectively decided that the firm needed an operational capability that called, “Voice of the Customer.” This would entail systems, processes and accountabilities for conducing 50 one half-hour interviews each month with customers and partners, describing their engagement journey through our brand interaction lifecycle. This operational capability would post a full-text transcripts to an internal wiki or content database, enabling someone to perform content analysis and build good statistical models of topics, sentiment, brand voice, and trends.

A good Voice of the Customer capability reduces a lot of internal noise and arguments. Content analysis enables everyone to share a baseline reality of what customer think and say about a range of things. Mind you, it does not represent a statistically representative sample; just real people sharing their experience.

Nonetheless, a solid “Voice of the Customer” capability produces a documented trail of customers’ journeys through brand awareness, trial, consideration, purchase, commitment and advocacy.

With a particular client, we found that the Voice of the Customer led to the need for a social media platform and an enabling operational capability that would enable our client to engage more effectively in a conversation with customers and, in particular, with college kids. The enabling operational capability of a social media platform meant that the firm would need to create and put into place new systems, processes and accountabilities for running blogs, forums, and a “how to” wiki or webopedia.

With a Voice of the Customer and social media in place, it then followed that our client needed a way of communicating with customers, often in a very direct and individualized way: dynamic messaging. This would enable them to individualize communication without a lot of manual labor, engaging thousand of customers and partners more effectively.

Following this line of development, this firm identified the need for better analytics, integrating data from operational CRM systems, traffic and behavioral data from Web systems, and conversational and viral video data from social networking sites, blogosphere, forums, and web posts throughout the web. This would entail growing an operational capability that we now call multichannel marketing analytics.

As we have studied multichannel marketing analytics, we found it produces disruptive insights - a rapid-fire cascade of “ah-ha’s!” and “Geez. Then we need to…!” that breaks the traditional planning and campaign management process.

In response, the executive in charge marketing operations would need to think through a more comprehensive engagement strategy as an integrated operational capability — more than just direct mail, newsletters, CRM, and content optimization. This operational capability begins to address how the firm maintains an ongoing dialogue back-and-forth conversation with individual customers.

In the case of our client, this called attention to the need for process orchestration of a marketing supply chain and the mastery of the engagement cycle.

Process orchestration of a marketing supply chain becomes more of a rapid-cycle, ad hoc scheduling and collaboration problem than linear project management of what we call the Marketing Procedural.

Finally, this leads the firm into another operational capability that we call “content optimization.” How do we create content as intelligent subassembly - tagged XML objects with lots of contextual metadata about its content, its likely users, and its formatting parameters for various publishing and presentation systems. Initially, content optimization means that the firm can quickly flow intelligent content subassemblies into XML-based publishing templates that will produce personalized — if not individualized — communications and engagements.

Taken all together — the Voice of the Customer, social media operations, multichannel marketing analytics, process orchestration of a marketing supply chain, and content optimization - these enabling operational capabilities support the mastery of the engagement cycle and realization of a visionary future-state capability.