This is part of the FirstRain Persona Series.
Customers are demanding more of a digital experience, and the rise of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) has soared to fulfill the need. Providing customers with the most valuable digital experience is a CDO’s primary objective.
In the past, executives with digital oversight roles concentrated on magnifying a company’s online presence and brand. Today, however, the role of a Chief Digital Officer is truly focused on the customer experience.
The fact of the matter is that buyers are no longer making purchasing decisions, or accessing portals solely from a desktop computer, but rather via mobile platforms, emails, and social media —on the go. Thus, CDO’s are challenged with meeting the demands of a fast-paced consumer society that is always moving.
Customers access platforms and consume vast amounts of product information via different touch points: cell phones, tablets, emails, internal enterprise platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the web, video streams, vines, Periscope, etc. Today’s digital market demands seamless execution from all these platforms and CDO’s are leading that charge.
Coupled with a strong, robust digital strategy a CDO facilitates the customer experience, but how can that help grow your business?
A deep understanding of market trends and consumer behavior must be leveraged across all customer touch points; from small marketing campaigns, to large scale product launches. This often involves leaders in business development, and becomes fundamental to helping a business evolve in today’s marketplace.
A recent McKinsey article on “The Transformer in Chief” stresses, “It’s up to the CDO to identify those functions where digital is critical: for example, investing in automation capabilities to rapidly respond to customer interactions, developing sophisticated reporting and analytics capabilities to interpret customer needs, building innovative interfaces to gather customer data (for example, an alternative payment method), and creating mechanisms to deliver content and offers across all relevant channels.”
Chief Digital Officers must identify the customer facing journey, drive customer engagement, and make sure that the dashboard touch points that she decides to implement for her company responds to market demands in real time. They are responsible for putting the tools in place to interpret customer insights with a main strategic goal of responding to customer engagement needs.
Customer intelligence tools such as FirstRain, helps interpret customer behavior via market trends, industry changes, and social media. Target market analysis of what is trending in relationship to business goals and objectives are crucial for driving a business forward. After all, the customer is always right, right?
Fundamentally understanding customer needs and how they intersect with revenue goals can make or break a digital strategy, making the role of a Chief Digital Officer pivotal for any industry. A CDO must demonstrate agility to respond and adapt quickly to customer demands/needs, and are often faced with making bold decisions.
Wired.com asserts, “The CDO will drive the digital functional excellence from strategy to infrastructure and ensure that we have the right competence and capabilities to support and leverage the business from a digital perspective.”
CDO’s are not only the liaison between customer and product but become key partners with CIOs, CMOs, Sales Officers and CFOs. They communicate the intricacies of market trends, new technology developments and customer behavior to create a digital strategy that is mindful of all these shifting plates, with the end goal to meet revenue objectives.
In today’s hyperactive commerce market, a strong digital strategy is necessary. If done successfully, a CDO can move their company’s business platform to not only meet the demands of the customer, but also revenue goals of the enterprise.
For further reading from our C-Suite buyer persona series:
It’s a new year and everyone is looking for digital trends that will optimize business strategy this year. We trust that things are already in full swing your business initiatives and we want to recap on our favorites brought to you from our friends at Altimeter.
CEO, Charlene Li, thinks, “Agile customization of experiences becomes a priority” in 2016, and we could not agree more.
Industry Analyst, Ed Terpening, acknowledges a rising complexity in the digital ecosystem.
Today’s business world is not static and your digital strategies must address not only volume of data but recency based on the specific role and need of the ‘consumer’ of that data. That is why our FirstRain Business Web Graph continually scans the structure of the living Web and the topics, triggers and business lines continually change over time, evolving and expanding based on system input and customer feedback.
FirstRain is an enterprise leader in providing a competitive analysis of target market analysis that will help optimize your business strategy this year.
Feel free to contact us for a free demo, and show you how actionable insights can empower your digital strategy this year.
This is part of the FirstRain Persona Series.
The C-Suite has a new kid on the block; the Chief Data Officer and they are here to stay. Many had predicted the roles of VPs and Directors of Analytics would rise to the C-Suite, and they certainly have. Forrester reports an increase of 45% in the adoption of a CDO in 2015 and predicts a 16% increase in 2016.
So why is this role on the rise? The far-reaching collection of data in the enterprise has lead to the need for an executive leader that sits within the C-Suite to establish and preserve the infrastructure around the ever-growing volume of data, and leverage it as a weapon for business development and customer success.
In the past, strategists were left guessing what people preferred and imagination ruled over data, but the times of the Don Draper’s are gone. Now, there is customer intelligence software that reveals customers’ inclinations and can accordingly shape impactful insights that strengthen a company’s business strategy and allows them to scale quickly.
Currently, there is an array of customer intelligence tools and social media platforms that track customer likes, dislikes and measure engagement. If you feel like someone is watching you, well, they are! More than ever, business technology has become an expert in capturing human behavior.
A problem many enterprises face is, what to do with all that data. Gartner identifies this as a core issue; “Business and IT executives regularly claim that information is one of their companies’ greatest assets, but they fail to measure or fully leverage its value”.
Companies have become thorough about collecting information, but many have yet to take the extra step of recognizing data as a bargaining chip. Too often, a gold mine of information sits in the cloud or is stored in drives waiting for someone to make use of it and connect the dots, but often it is too late.
Digital strategies evolve at a fast-pace and require real-time attention, to market trends, patterns, and changes and have created a demand for Chief Data Officers. CDOs are responsible for bridging the gap between information management and toward actionable insights. Many companies have adopted the role, but many are being left behind in the data-driving race. It’s not just about collecting data, but rather doing something about it.
CDOs are responsible for promoting data access across a company structure and creating awareness in the value within. Forrester explains, “CDOs typically address one or more of four main functions along the data value chain: data management, data governance, data analytics, and insights delivery.”
Data management and data governance
Chief Data Officer’s are responsible for setting a strong, clear foundation for data governance that will foster competitive digital strategies in the next stages of their company’s growth. CDO’s often partner up with CIOs to implement an infrastructure that facilitates data accessibility. The first step of data collection will ultimately measure the results of future business goals and initiatives and has become a key priority in the role of a CDO.
The accuracy and integrity of customer data reports rest in the hands of CDOs and can become a stepping stone to business development plans, strategies, and marketing campaigns. If the first step of data collection is flawed, future information will have a falling domino effect.
Data analytics and insights
Chief Data Officer’s are not only responsible for the systems and practices in reading data, but also analyzing data, and using analytics to find new revenue streams and growth opportunities. Everyone has a lot of data, but how you use it can revolutionize your business and create better-informed decisions that can grow revenue.
CDO’s must partner with technology business leaders to increase agility and reduce risk but, more importantly, this partnership must be coupled with actionable insights to drive innovation. Research suggests, “As companies shift their focus from collecting data to driving innovation, new business models will emerge in which companies subscribe to insights and business outcomes rather than data and analytics solutions.”
CDO’s are not waiting for market disruptions to react but rather using business technology like FirstRain’s platform to anticipate. FirstRain delivers relevant real-time information coupled with actionable insights and triggers that help mitigate risks and help CDOs help their employees to dive deeper into niche markets and competitors, giving them a 360-degree view of industry analysis and better preparing them for market changes.
CDO’s play a large role in the business optimization strategy. Not only does data allow a business to reach a niche audience and engage with customers, but it can propel product development teams to create a better platform, website, product and app for a target audience.
Depending on the phase an enterprise is at, the role of a CDO will foster different priorities. For a younger company, the focus might rest around growth and finding a niche customer market, producing aggressive marketing strategy and organic promotion. For a global brand, the focus might rest around customer satisfaction and engagement. But regardless of the stage an enterprise is at, one thing remains imperative; responding to analytics and reports demands the attention of a Chief Data Officer. Welcome to the club!
For further reading on C-Suite persona:
