In recent phone calls and virtual meetings with clients, it’s plainly clear that a key challenge facing brands during this time of pandemic and upheaval is uncertainty – the pervasive and punishing realization that the future state is dangerously unclear. No one has a firm grasp on what “business as usual” will look like, let alone how to adapt their marketing and XD organizations to survive and thrive in that future.
Understandably, many marketing leaders have neither the bandwidth nor the inclination to look that far forward right now. At the same time, others have been hard-tasked with ensuring that a healthy and robust business awaits their employees and shareholders on the other side of this mess.
All of which brings to mind an article we published to this blog some time ago.
Back then, the uncertainty we wrote of was not inflicted on companies by a virus. It was the uncertainty of building for CX success, and a lack of clarity caused by the innovations and transformations rapidly accelerating the evolution of CX management.
The original blog quotes an assertion by Adobe CMO Samuel Greengard that, ‘while it’s clear that businesses compete based on customer experience, a good deal of uncertainty exists about what an effective customer experience management strategy looks like,’ and asks: as a CMO, how in the world do you build an organization, culture, practices, and processes to support a major set of operations when you can’t clearly define what those operations will ultimately look like?
In client calls today, marketing leaders are asking the same questions – though under new and somber circumstances. At Filter, we believe the best way we can show up now for our clients and the broader professional community is to do whatever we can to help them come out the other side and build for a robust post-pandemic future.
That looks different depending on each client, including:
- Ramping up a content studio and campaign team to provide additional bandwidth for ongoing marketing while core resources are focused on COVID-related messaging
- Preventing disruption in workflows during a client’s remote-workforce transition, by migrating our processes, management, and infrastructure to continuously deliver in-house solutions even when the “house” goes virtual
- Bringing operational expertise and process optimization to help clients keep marketing while cutting costs due to business retraction and uncertainty around future-state budgets
- Providing a highly flexible, scalable embedded team for UX research and design services that can adapt to wider swings in service cadence and demand due to current circumstances
- Planning for a post-pandemic DTC campaign team, to help a client tackle an indefinite backlog of work that’s been growing as marketing has been suspended and/or shifted to COVID-related messaging
Along the way, we’re also helping clients shift field marketing and event programs to digital channels; shift channel strategies and resources to fill lead-gen gaps; and pivot their campaigns with new content that better reflects the current climate. As an in-housing partner, we help increase operational agility in the service of these clients – bringing velocity, scalability, and flexibility to better serve them through uncertainty and remain focused on their most vital business initiatives.
To help you learn more about what that looks like, we’ve included our original blog post, Agility in the Face of Uncertainty, in its entirety below. Again, the circumstances have changed, but the core attributes and benefits of our approach remain consistent and relevant today.
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The degree of risk facing marketing leaders today is perhaps unprecedented.
Think about it: CMOs are increasingly tasked with driving high-level CX initiatives – and often a major digital transformation to support those initiatives – on which brands are staking the bulk of their business growth.
But nobody has a clear understanding of what successful CX in action really looks like – let alone what it will look like in five or even two or three years down the road. Yikes. As a CMO, how in the world do you build an organization, culture, practices, and processes to support a major set of operations when you can’t clearly define what activities those operations will entail?
That’s a degree of risk vastly different from past and even more recent eras in marketing history. Yes, the proliferation of martech channels and disciplines have accelerated greatly in the past decade. But the explosion of data and data-enabled tools – and their swift-evolving ability to radically reshape marketing strategies and practices core to business growth – raise the level of uncertainty and risk to new heights for CMOs today.
Adobe CMO Samuel Greengard recently highlighted the challenge in an article he penned about CX management, which began with the assertion that “while it’s clear that businesses compete based on customer experience, a good deal of uncertainty exists about what an effective customer experience management strategy looks like.” Regardless of what industry a company competes in, the article notes, “the common theme is that expectations are rising while conditions are changing.”
CMOs leading digital transformation initiatives to uplevel their CX are challenged on how to effectively plan against these changing conditions, and how to efficiently invest in the face of such uncertainties. As HBR observed, “the process of digital transformation is inherently uncertain,” contributing to the fact that “70% of all digital transformation initiatives do not reach their goals.”
The resulting business risk is so great that the Wall Street Journal earlier this year reported on research from NC State, which predicted: “digital transformation will be the biggest risk factor in 2019.”
Similarly, many articles and much research have concluded that, while CX is a growth and differentiation strategy chosen by many companies, there is no real clarity on how to put that strategy into action.
How best, then, can marketing leaders plan and build in the face of such uncertainty?
In-Housing Partners Provide Agility Against An Uncertain Future
Without a clear picture of the future state, CMOs need to quickly and effectively adapt to whatever changes might come their way. Some of those changes will be driven by advancements in martech and data platforms, and related shifts across channels touchpoints. Customer engagement habits will also shift, with resulting impacts on the nature and complexity of engagements at each touchpoint – especially when marketers gain visibility into the myriad variables involved with delivering a connected customer experience for products and services of different value, length of utilization, competitive differentiation, etc.
Whew. Even the best CX programs will be constantly learning, tuning, and improving their strategies and tactics – and will never stop optimizing.
This is where CMOs can leverage the benefits of an in-housing partner for maximum agility. IHPs like Filter can swiftly deploy an embedded solution of nearly any configuration, and can rapidly grow or adjust that solution to match new business dynamics, leverage new technology investments, or uplevel new CX strategies.
In addition to a higher level of veteran expertise, in-housing partners bring processes, infrastructure, and service delivery models that are also designed to scale and adapt to change. Program management, project management, account management, and other engagement functions can be added, dropped, or restructured as needed. Solutions and their supporting processes can be quickly re-designed to optimize for new conditions.
This kind of approach is quite distinct from other collocated solutions. Staff augmentation is not nearly so robust or advanced in its expertise. And traditional agencies may be able to build a dedicated team for their client – but few if any have the operational capabilities to rapidly stand up a second or third team (and its supporting infrastructure) when needed, duplicate that team in other markets, or absorb any rapid up- or down-scaling of those teams. Nor can they typically shift delivery service models – e.g., between fully outsourced, managed services, consulting contracts, etc. – as a client’s needs evolve.
Through their unique agility, in-housing partners help clients overcome barriers to adoption by de-risking the upfront investment against an uncertain future, effectively apportioning control and accountability, and supporting rapid business transformation as circumstances change over time.
In-Housing Partners Give CMOs Greater Control To Act, React
Beyond flexible and scalable teams, in-housing partners improve a client’s agility by giving CMOs and CXOs greater visibility and control over the activities they manage.
Given the uncertainty inherent in any CXM model, these leaders need to precisely track spend, effort, and return on their CX investments for continuous optimization through time and change. In-housing partners help them to better connect those dots with direct access to data, control of resources, visibility into ongoing activities, and trust in their own metrics.
This enables CMOs to more accurately apportion credit to the myriad touchpoints in a modern marketing mix – and to more successfully identify the worth of specific marketing strategies, both as a whole and across channels independently (e.g., to choose when and where to inject money into a campaign, or to cut spending from an inefficient channel or tactic.)
Compared to working with an outside agency, in-housing partners also remove the barriers that separate the work of marketing and experience design from the data, insights, and ideas that fuel them – further increasing command and control of the customer experience through the uncertainty of CX growth and evolution.
From Uncertainty To Success: Winning in the Turns
While many brands embrace agility as a critical means to navigate the ambiguities of an evolving CXM landscape, companies who haven’t yet committed to a CX transformation may be thinking of waiting for stronger guidelines and clarity to emerge.
But these companies may miss an important opportunity to build competitive advantage out of this current uncertainty.
In a recent post to their own blog, Gartner recalled an epic Olympics race to illustrate how times of uncertainty may be the best moments to strike out for success:
“U.S. speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno was trailing three competitors when he rounded the final turn of the men’s 1,500-meter short track at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Ohno jostled fiercely with two skaters who then wiped out, leaving Ohno to take second place, and his eighth Olympic medal. As an elite competitor, Ohno knows that heading into a turn — when momentum is shifting, visibility is poor and the outcome uncertain — is his single best shot to pursue and seize the lead.”
Gartner supported this observation by noting that their “research shows this ‘winning in the turns’ dynamic also plays out in business…But winning in the turns takes discipline, confidence, and preparation.”
Embedded and integrated with a client’s own people and processes, culture, and business organization, in-housing partners work at the front lines of a client’s customer experience initiatives. From this vantage they are ideally positioned to help CMOs not only counter uncertainty with agility – but also to ‘win in the curves’ by building that agility into future-forward strategy and decision making. And beyond agility, in-housing partners like Filter bring speed, specialized expertise, best practices, and operational innovation to launch clients out of uncertainty and into a winning position when the smoke finally clears.
“Winners spur innovation, change strategy and take risks, while others are eaten away by conservatism and cost-cutting”
– Gartner, May 2019
