We're back with our popular Speaker Spotlight series! Over the past year, we've gathered frequently asked questions from attendees and posed them to several of our speakers. We'll be sending portions of their answers out through the Gilbane Conference email and will be posting them in their entirety, here.

 

We spoke with Philip Wisniewski, EVP, Client Development, Kanban, about his views on challenges with customer experience technology strategies. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience technology strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Customer experience today is built on a number of key technology principles, each with their own set of challenges.  This includes delivering performant experiences over mobile connections, aggregating data for purposes of personalization, and unifying content and commerce platforms.  All of these have a fundamental underlying requirement, content and data integration.  And that challenge rests often in the hands of enterprise architects and their craft.  Though enterprise architecture (EA) is not new by any means, it’s prominence in enabling customer experience has increased significantly as of late.  Multiple, distributed systems are now responsible for serving brand-differentiating experiences. Bi-directional data and content flow between systems of record is becoming the norm.  And with SaaS and PaaS technology adoption at all-time high, integration architecture may soon be the talk of executive boardrooms.   Go out and hug your enterprise architects.  Seriously.  Make friends and engage them.  They’ll be excited to have someone take interest in their work.  If you are on the business side, collaborate with enterprise architects to align your business capabilities vision with a technology roadmap. Involve them in technology vetting and selection.  IT organizations should also find ways to ensure that marketing and business teams understand the value of enterprise architecture in moving the business forward.  Modern enterprise architects can often balance business and technology objectives, bringing new levels of value to customer experience and the engineering disciplines that enable them.

Hear more from Philip at the Gilbane Conference: Thursday, December 3, 2015 2:00 p.m. - 3:20 p.m. C11. How to Integrate the Content and Commerce Experience
This week we we had a chance to speak with, Jay Brodsky, Principal, Align Digital. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience technology strategy today, and what should organizations do about it?    A. Too many companies fail to think through their technology strategy and fall into the trap of selecting best-of-breed technologies without taking into account how they’ll integrate with one another. The best customer experiences are built on the data that flows from touchpoint to touchpoint, but too many solutions fail to talk to one another, leaving islands of information. Organizations delivering content in the most effective way have a fully integrated view of their prospects and customers and are able to see their every interaction with the company and its products. From this comes better messaging, improved products, and happier customers. But this only comes with careful planning and the selection of vendors who provide access to the data generated at each touchpoint — and a recognition that you’re going to need a technology strategy to succeed in digital businesses.	Connect with Jay
Hear more from Jay at the Gilbane Conference: Wednesday, December 2, 2015 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. P1. New Frontiers in Digital Content Distribution

 

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This week we had a chance to speak with, Kristina Podnar, Vice President, Consulting Services, ActiveStandards, Inc. With over fifteen years of management consulting experience - specializing in deploying complex digital projects for Fortune 500, government, and not-for-profit organizations - Kristina ensures the effective delivery of all customer-facing digital governance services at ActiveStandards. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience content strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. These days organizations focus on getting the right message to customers, focusing on providing a great online experience through the most appropriate tone and voice and best visual design of content. However, few organizations pay attention to the legal and liability framework and structures that often govern the very channels into which organizations are publishing content. Policies and standards can ensure a sound online content strategy, but they are simply not as exciting as UX or similar areas of focus. Thus organizations frequently forego the opportunity not only to drive risk-free content publishing, but to harness competitive advantage opportunities that arise from policies and standards – fundamental ingredients of digital governance.

This week we're chatting with, returning speaker, Bruno Herrmann, Director Of Globalization and Localization, The Nielsen Company. Bruno joined The Nielsen Company in 2003 and is now responsible for global content operations across 6 regions and more than 100 countries. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience marketing strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Considering and embracing customer understanding holistically and upfront. Customers are disruptive, diverse and demanding in the digital age whether it is locally or globally. They walk through multiple channels and make their decisions based on a 360° experience. Therefore, they have to be engaged in a meaningful and personal way while addressing customer experience enablers and drivers related to where they are geographically and digitally. Organizations should definitely invest money in understanding all facets of their customers from day one, i.e. what they aspire to as clients and users, how they receive and perceive marketing messages, when/how/where they make their purchase decisions and what influences their behavior consciously or not. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience technology strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Incorporating data, insights and reports into one single solution. There are many tools enabling to turn big data into smart data, to access insights and to create reports separately. However there are very few solutions combing all these assets into a single and consistent experience. As executives have to ensure and measure customer experience holistically and make better and faster decisions in a digital world, they have to resort to a number of tools or applications covering more or less aspects of customer experience. So all too often they do not have the one solution they need actually. Organizations should really invest wisely in an end-to-end solution that may appear more expensive to deploy and maintain at first sight but turns out to be more time and cost effective over time. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience content strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Covering all steps of the global content life cycle and linking these steps to each other in terms of impact on the overall experience. In addition to synchronizing content life cycles with product life cycles it is crucial to design and develop content in an agile fashion to make deployment, curation and maintenance easier. Organizations should think about design and development efforts to make content as structured and shareable as possible and to make it ready for the omnichannel experience most customers expect today. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience design strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Designing experience for a global and digital consumption. Experience for global audiences must be designed according to rules and guidelines driving international customer experience. If it is not done from the outset a number of corrections and adjustments have to be made when it is (too) late and at a higher cost. In some cases such gaps even break the experience by making customers leave or share their poor experience around them. There is no great local experience without global excellence. It has to be designed for the digital age too. The experience must not be adapted for digital customers, it must be designed for them as they build and rate their experience within digital environments including tasks that were done offline in past decades such as support and learning. Organizations should look at every customer driver and enable it globally and digitally.

Connect with Bruno

Hear more from Bruno at the Gilbane Conference:

Tuesday, December 1, 2015
1:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Workshop F. Digital is Global in Nature, Not By Default: Leveraging Digital Globalization to Increase Global Customer Experience

 Thursday, December 3, 2015
9:40 a.m. - 10:40 a.m.
C5. Global Experience Management: Making It Work in the Real World

 

 

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We had a chance to speak with Georgy Cohen, Associate Creative Director, Content Strategy, OHO Interactive. Georgy is a frequent speaker, including keynote addresses at HighEdWeb Pittsburgh 2014 and HighEdWeb Arkansas 2011. Georgy's background is in journalism, including a three-year stint working in the fast-paced online newsroom of The Boston Globe. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience content strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. It's dealing with the people. At the end of the day, our content owners, authors, editors, and approvers are the ones who make the motor of our content strategy go. They are the ones who can make a perfect-on-paper process a success or a flop, and who we count on as the footsoldiers of our content strategy to help achieve our communications and business goals. That's a lot of responsibility! So it's important, at all phases of the digital lifecycle, to make them feel engaged, to address their pain points (through training, documentation, guidelines, community, and communication), to value them as stakeholders and sources of information. It's also important to create a structure in which they can meaningfully contribute, assigning roles, tasks, and timeframes for executing a specific process. That means establishing an ownership structure that reinforces decision-making and accountability. This can be difficult for myriad reasons - politics, legacy processes, organizational silos, fear of change, knowledge gaps, and so on - but through thoughtful governance, we can create a culture  that supports the successful follow-through of our content strategy, moving the organization and all of its members forward as a result.

Here's where you can catch up with Georgy at the Gilbane Conference:

Thursday, December 3, 2015
8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.
P4: Executing Content Strategies

 

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This week we spoke with, Martin Amm, the Founder of adenin TECHNOLOGIES Inc. With over 30 years of experience in creating productivity software, Martin has made a decisive shift towards the digital workplace which is less monolithic and more inclusive in its architecture. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience technology strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. When we think about apps, while there are many great ones that inform and entertain us, apps that serve us leave something to be desired. Booking a room at the Hilton through their app is more a story about ‘cannot’ then ‘can’. While you can see your reservation, there are so many more things you cannot do which would otherwise be considered essential to your customer experience: You can’t see if your room has already been cleaned, you cannot order more pillows, you cannot chat with your concierge, you cannot order a late check-out, reserve a bike, a spa treatment, etc. When you book a restaurant reservation through OpenTable, you cannot order your food, order flowers, get a wine recommendation, pay your check or call a cab after dinner that will take you straight home, etc. When you use a modern car with a companion telematics app, you can check the location and open/close the vehicle. But you cannot make an appointment at the dealer, you cannot order spare parts based on vehicle diagnostics, cannot share your ETA with friends, cannot order a valet at the mall. You get the idea. The products we experience everyday are surrounded by so many accompanying services that, if we think about it, it’s really inconsistent to not see such services represented in the apps that are meant to make things easier for us. The most under-appreciated challenge to change this constraint is tearing down data silos companies are trapped in. There are very limited possibilities to take your workflows outside the company, let alone offer such integrations as part of an app. But it shouldn’t have to be this way. Our data silos do not have to stay so silo-ed. The Cloud was a great first step in this direction; with its standardized API infrastructure it is easy for other cloud applications to exchange information with one another. Things get a little less standardized if we look to on-premise business applications, which is where most business critical data still resides. There is no infrastructure similar to APIs there, to help standardize the whole siloed mess of legacy software, proprietary interfaces and a hotchpotch of databases.. Well, at least not yet. In the future, facilitating so called ‘Service Layers' will lead the way to standardized and shared data access. Service Layers are a common way for applications from different manufacturers to exchange information with other sources – be it in the the cloud, on-premise or both. If you think of different APIs, databases and backends as different languages, than you can imagine a Service Layer as the interpreter that seamlessly translates every request on the fly as it routes it to the correct source. Once companies have found a way to unite their data silos, this will open up endless new possibilities to create better customer experiences within their apps. Standardization will further help create new business models in the Enterprise as a Service economy, through incorporating third parties into your apps for anything from making suggestions, taking payments, to entirely handling the fulfillment while the broker receives a commission fee for exposing these services to their customers.

 

 

See Martin at the Gilbane Conference:

Wednesday, December 2, 2015
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
T3. New Web and Mobile Technologies: Web Components and Polymer; Deep Linking and App Indexing

 

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This week we spoke with, Pawan Deshpande, Founder and CEO of Curata. Pawan's work has been recognized through the 2010 Boston Business Journal's 40 under 40 Award, and through the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's 2012 Sales & Marketing Technology of the Year Award. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience content strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. 76% of companies are increasing their investment in content marketing in the coming year; therefore, there’s no doubt that marketers are charging full steam ahead to tap into the value of content marketing.  However, there’s one challenge additional funding and staff will not necessarily resolve: determining the impact of content on leads and revenue to help drive content strategy.   Marketers have relatively easy access to social media, page view data and gated content download stats for their assets.  Unfortunately this information is insufficient to drive a multi-channel customer experience content strategy.   Marketers need to work across functions to develop the processes and integrate the related marketing and sales technologies to better track the interaction between content, leads and sales opportunities.  Only in this manner can a more data-driven approach be taken to develop content strategy. First steps to accomplish these goals include:   * Assign direct accountability for content marketing strategy development and execution. * Align content marketing, social media, digital marketing and marketing operations teams to collaborate on common processes. (e.g., lead stage definitions, content strategy) * Tap into new content marketing applications that integrate all the data silos that capture customer touchpoints, be they web analytics, or marketing and sales automation, to enable a more holistic view of contents’ impact on pipeline and revenue.

Connect with Pawan

See Pawan at the Gilbane Conference:

 

Thursday, December 3, 2015
2:00 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
C7. Content Marketing - Strategies for Success

 

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We spoke with, Lisa Welchman, President, Digital Governance Solutions, ActiveStandards, about her opinion on challenges confronting today's customer experience marketing strategies. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience marketing strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. The integration of digital marketing with traditional marketing communications is a pervasive challenge for organizations. In some organizations, marketing was already challenged with trying to understand and manage to the pros and cons of centralized vs decentralized approaches to marketing execution. Digital intensifies that challenge considerably as the ease of digital implementation, particularly with social media and websites, leads to multiple and dispersed online contributors (often with different ideas about what ought to go online). This can lead to poor quality and a disintegrated online brand and, in worst cases, real corporate risk. Digital governance helps to tame and tune the dynamics of decentralized development and communications by clarifying decision-making and making sure that there are specific and enforceable protocols for online development. See Lisa at the Gilbane Conference:   Thursday, December 3, 2015 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. C10. Operational and Governance planning for Successful Large-scale Digital Transformation

 

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We spoke with, Jake DiMare, Digital Strategist, Agency Oasis, about his views on the challenges of customer experience marketing strategies today. Jake is a Digital Strategist and Marketing Technologist who has spent the last fifteen years specifying, designing and building custom digital experiences in a variety of industries including entertainment, lifestyle, transportation, government, publishing, health and higher education. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience marketing strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Many truly gifted marketers who experienced tremendous success making the shift from traditional to digital now find themselves floundering with the shift from broadcast to personalization. Although the adoption of complex new marketing technology is necessary to deliver implicit and explicit, personalized customer experience, it’s only the beginning. Organizations must also adopt new processes, train existing personnel, and, in most cases, acquire additional headcount to fulfill roles which previously didn’t exist. They must also think about their content and digital experiences in an entirely new, non-linear way and deliver it to a plethora of new devices.   Unfortunately, these latter requirements are never mentioned when an organization is going through the process of purchasing experience management platforms. Marketers need a strategy which deemphasizes the acquisition of new technology and focuses on developing the skills and processes necessary to accomplish their goals. I’m not suggesting new technology is unnecessary, in many cases it may be. What I am suggesting is that with the right skills and support, I think many people would be incredibly surprised at what they are capable of achieving with current or planned technology. On the other hand, I have no shortage of stories about organizations who pinned all their hopes for success on the purchase of some new platform which they were ultimately as incapable of leveraging as their current solution.

Connect with Jake

Hear from Jake at the Gilbane Conference:   Wednesday, December 2, 2015 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. T1. Mobile App Development and Management  Wednesday, December 2, 2015 2:40 p.m. - 3:50 p.m. C2. Making Omni-channel Work Thursday, December 3, 2015 11:40 a.m. - 12:40 p.m. T7. Modern Multichannel Strategies

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We caught up with, In Koo Kim, Enterprise Solutions Architect, EY. A returning Gilbane Conference speaker, In Koo has many years of experience in involvement with the deployment of enterprise applications and the implementation of content management systems. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience technology strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Technology strategies frequently begin with a business idea followed by a solution implementation.  Perhaps it is to introduce AB testing on the homepage or a replatforming effort away from a legacy CMS.  A technical need is identified, a solution is selected, budgets are allocated, and a project is kicked off and then launched.  Voilà, problem solved.  But an under-appreciated element is the need for post-launch iterations that measure success, tune the solution, and adapt as conditions change.  This last step is essentially an optimization.  All the hard work has been done in migrating data or integrating one system with another, but after launch, the project typically enters a support phase and is considered complete.  In many cases, even a small investment in post-launch optimization can lead to dramatic improvements in customer experience.  Organizations would benefit in considering post-launch monitoring and optimization efforts as a critical element of any technology initiative. Further, as technology continues its increasing footprint in all business activities, the traditional mindset of a discrete IT project needs to evolve into something that is more iterative, moving beyond the boundaries of kick-off and launch.

Connect with In Koo

 

 

See In Koo at the Gilbane Conference:

 

Thursday, December 3, 2015
2:00 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
T8. How to Plan for Complex Multichannel Projects

 

 

 

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Hear What Other Speakers are Saying 

We had a chance to speak with Emily Witt, Manager, Digital Engagements & Project Strategy, Brightfind. Emily takes on the business analysis and strategy work for web engagements and has lead the successful launches of many websites. She speaks on Brightfind's behalf at various events and conferences about web strategy, web project management, and the Crossover role. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience design strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. The biggest, yet underappreciated challenge being faced by design strategy is the evolution of design itself. Design, formerly visual design, is now the design of information, interaction, function, and technology. It is no longer the component that starts an engagement; it’s now the component that ties all phases of an engagement together. Design – and the professionals who execute it – through visuals represent the information architecture of a website, the experience felt and owned by the users, and express function, which will be implemented and maintained through technology. Organizations should be prepared to facilitate team communication that centers on the design of the website by providing opportunities for cross-functional teams to engage with each other at atypical times, such as including technical team members early on during the content analysis and information architecture development, or by encouraging participation from visual designers during the implementation phase, validating the execution of design patterns. Using design as a lens for working through the process will result in a website that focuses on user engagement, enabling an emotional experience, but also influences the governance of content, empowering internal stakeholders.

Connect with Emily

Hear more from Emily at the Gilbane Conference:

Thursday, December 3, 2015
2:00 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
C9. Reconfiguring Roles for Modern Marketing Organizations

 

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We caught up with Scott Rosenburg, Director of Digital Governance and Operations, Digital Marketing & Media, Intel Corporation, to get his insights about customer experience content challenges. With years of experience in the industry, Scott now successfully leads Intel's evolution of digital governance and operations. He has transformed operations into a strategic marketing asset by driving best-in-class operational excellence and increasing innovation for Intel's marketing community. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience content strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Especially in larger and more complex organizations in which marketing teams are dispersed throughout the company, providing a consistent end user experience aligned to your marketing strategy is a huge challenge.  As marketing channels continue to grow and provide for deeper opportunities for end user interactions, it has become quick and relatively easy for anyone to get content out – however, that content doesn’t necessarily always align to your larger corporate strategies.  Taking the time to develop a robust governance framework which includes clear definition of roles and responsibilities across the company, documented policies and standards for how each marketing vehicle should be used in compliance with your brand and external regulations, and accountability for compliance to your governance framework will help enable a marketing organization which can scale high quality content relevant for your intended audience.

Hear more from Scott at the Gilbane Conference:

Thursday, December 3, 2015
3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
C10. Operational and Governance planning for Successful Large-scale Digital Transformation

 

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We had a chance to speak with Rohit Prabhakar, Head of Digital Strategy and Marketing Technologies, McKesson. Rohit has a strong background in Technology, Sales and Marketing. He is very passionate about enabling business with the right technology, people and processes. He loves to wear his business hat before wearing the technology hat as he believes that technology is to enable business/need and not vice versa. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience technology strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. The most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience technology strategy is the data silos. As you know that great customer experience needs strong understanding of the customer and customer behavior. Strong customer understanding is based on an ability to track the customer across all technology stacks, marketing and sales channels. Many complex organizations have data silos created by various CRM and Marketing Automation Systems. On the top of these silos now we have ever growing category of marketing technologies which are creating more data silos. It is getting more and more challenging to get one view of the customer. Organizations who are seriously interested in strong customer experience should avoid data silos by sticking to minimum instances of CRM, marketing automation systems,  strong integration of customer data among various marketing technologies and hiring right people with right data mindset.

Connect with Rohit

See Rohit at the Gilbane Conference:

Wednesday, December 2, 2015
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
C1. Building a Case for Marketing Transformation

 

 

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We had a chance to speak with Deb Lavoy, Founder and CEO of Narrative Builders, about her take on customer experience marketing challenges in organizations today. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience marketing strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. The most under appreciated challenge in Marketing Strategy is realizing that the first audience for your message is your own employees. Convince and convert them to what makes you better, and you will have a stronger product, a stronger company, and a much bigger market impact. Leave them out of the message and the strategy, and you’ll never have a coherent customer experience that makes your customers feel as though your company is there for them.

Hear more from Deb at the Gilbane Conference:

 

Wednesday, December 2, 2015
2:40 p.m. - 3:50 p.m.
E2. Critical Considerations for Building a Modern Intranet

Thursday, December 3, 2015
8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.
E4. Growth without compromise: Using intranets to scale what makes you great

 

 

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We had a chance to speak with Gerry Murray, Research Manager, IDC, about his thoughts on today's customer experience design strategy challenges. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience design strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. There are two big challenges with CX design. The first is that CX design is like lead scoring - you may have some instincts about what is important, but you don’t really know until the data comes in. Like optimal lead scores, customer experiences are derived from empirical evidence. To really understand them, you need the ability to track customers through their journeys in real time so you can continually assess when and how to intervene with who. As they flow through your interactions with them, customers may be moved into different segments, justify higher or lower levels of investment, and display changing signs of intent. That takes a lot of data and analytics and expertise to master. The other, bigger challenge with CX design is that it is not an enterprise activity. It is typically done in marketing, possibly extending a step or two into sales; or by a small specialized team that lacks the political capital needed to effect change across customer facing functions. As bad as that sounds it is merely symptomatic of the hierarchical organizational structures large companies have perfected over the last 100 years. That model is very effective at managing a linear customer journey through a set of purchasing steps defined by the seller. When sellers were the primary source of information for customer decisions that model ruled the world. Unfortunately, the hierarchical organization is extremely ineffective at managing today’s connected customer. Attempts to layer CX design on top of a structure that is quickly becoming obsolete will fail until the underlying structure is fundamentally changed. I’m not suggesting every company has to go all Zappos and blow up the notion of defined roles and lines of authority. But customer facing employees no matter what their function must be as connected to each other as customers are. They need to be able to subscribe to or follow a customer within their internal community so they are up to date on how anyone from the company has interacted with them. That requires a very open social capability to be integrated with traditional org structure. It also requires a high level of authority and accountability for everyone. Companies that add the social DNA into their customer culture will be far more responsive, have deeper levels of engagement, and achieve much higher levels of customer satisfaction, net promoter scores etc. Why? Because customers do not want to have to retell their stories every time they change communications channels (text, email, voice, in-person, etc.) or points of contact (marketing, sales, billing, call center, etc.) But the social connectivity is only part of the solution. Processes, metrics, compensation, reporting and budgets must also share significant components designed to foster and reward enterprise socialization of customer relationships. That means an executive and board level commit is required. The big opportunity here is to create new levels of customer service that lagging competitors simply cannot match. That will translate into revenue growth, higher customer lifetime value, and market share dominance.

 

Hear more from Gerry at the Gilbane Conference:

 

Thursday, December 3, 2015
2:00 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
C9: Reconfiguring Roles for Modern Marketing Organizations

 

 

 

 

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We spoke with Anand Rao, Senior Consultant, Digital Business & Customer Engagement Group, Mindtree. With over 11 years of experience in the industry, he is passionate about creating effective digital experiences and using data to inform creative decisions Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience marketing technology strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. The challenges marketers face today are not significantly different than the ones they faced a decade ago, however the volume of consumer, competitors & channels; the growth opportunity & innovation; the proliferation of brand offerings and the cost to achieving optimal results from marketing has amplified considerably. Consumers today are increasingly demanding a consistent level of experience regardless of channel or mode. Such consumers avoid organisations who are unlikely to deliver a seamless brand experience online and offline, both consistently and continuously. In short, Consumers are driving the demand. Marketing today is about consumer empowerment, and understanding the always-on, always-connected consumers. As a result of the growing trends with the internet of things and addressing the always-on, always-connected consumers, many organisations now see digital marketing as an engine for business growth and engagement. But, more often, without a clear leadership or direction it remains as set of disparate function without an integrated marketing approach and solid program management foundation. This absence of a mature operation and lack of alignment amongst people, process and platform confines digital marketing motivations. What organisations need is a clear plan, a budget for innovation, a buy-in from management that aligns digital initiatives with that the organization goals, and most importantly building a solid team of digital rockstars.

Connect with Anand

 

 

Hear more from Anand at the Gilbane Conference:

 

Wednesday, December 2, 2015
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
C1. Building a Case for Marketing Transformation

 

 

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We caught up with, Reid Lappin, Founder and CEO of Vokal, to hear about his thoughts on marketing, technology, and design strategy challenges within organizations today. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience marketing strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Marketing is no longer able to operate in a silo and must shift to become data informed across the entire organization. Action: Coordinate and collaborate with various groups (design, tech, sales, etc.) to get a fully informed view of the audience, their need, and your positioning/value-adds. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience technology strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. How are you selecting and integrating technology platforms such that they provide and extend value throughout your organization (APIs, connections, logic, etc.) and further improve the employee experience? Action: Ensure that the experience and/or UX teams are involved when exploring new platforms, frameworks, solutions; allowing them to speak on behalf of the employees to produce a cohesive experience. Q. What is the most under-appreciated challenge confronting customer experience design strategy today, and what should organizations do about it? A. Creating the overall experience first, then selecting the delivery methods, platforms, and frameworks used to achieve; too often do experience teams start with a tactical solution without thinking larger. Action: Work to create an experience design team that examines all factors before starting to create the solution - thinking about business, user, and brand goals first.

  See Reid at the Gilbane Conference:

 

Wednesday, December 2, 2015
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
T1. Mobile App Development and Management

 

 

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