Market Trends: Chief Digital Officer
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:
