Most likely you’ve read your fair share of CX Marketing whitepapers, attended several industry conferences and even run a few Human Centered Design, or Journey Mapping workshops, but all that knowledge and effort still doesn’t seem to accelerate change fast enough to keep up with annual sales projections - making it hard to keep justifying the investments of people and time into Agency or Enterprise Customer Experience programs. This is when being an agent of transformation becomes a pivotal career choice.
Making change happen means lots of teamwork.
Steve Moon and I recently spoke at an annual, agencywide meeting about the role everyone plays in transformation of agency and client success. The message? “Transformation” isn’t the job of any single person or group. In fact, anyone and every should bring something unique and powerful to accelerate positive change.
CX Transformation means embracing game changers
As a leading agent of transformation, here you see Steve teaching class on a new Human Centered Design process. Steve likes to call it “Experience Design” and it’s an agency discipline that reimagines how cross functional teams work together in sprints, over the course of an advertising or marketing campaign. Each “Experience Design” sprint aligns customer desires with cultural relevance fueled by creative inspiration. This is where big ideas are born and in turn, make a financial difference to the bottom lines of our clients.
Moreover, our Experience Design practice, and process is the very glue that binds every campaign throughout the year into a holistic brand experience stitched together by data.
Essentially, Steve starts with integrated, annual CX planning informed by 1st, 2nd and 3rd party, aligned to corporate sales projections and departmentmental budgets. Then during each week of the year he focuses the creative team’s talent and effort on specific campaign/audience sprints, delivering relevant, personalized, content that accelerates transactions over the Living, Looking and Buying spectrums.
Each week, the campaign connects seamlessly with sales performance by delivering relevant and engaging experiences that address week over week / year over year comparable sales and content performance goals.
Easier said than done
Pioneering a entirely new way for creativity to be fueled by culture yet beholden to data is no easy feat in an industry where, for the last 100 years were all a bit more “art” than ”science”. Times have changed.
For you to be successful, you’ll need to find at least one visionary creative leader who can spark the right kind of inspiration across design, advertising and creative teams, and then, lead everyone toward a customer centric creative culture.
Beyond that, CX transformation requires eager students and passionate teachers
Almost every day we teach CX methodologies like “Commerce Alignment” or “Customer Experience Accounting Practices” to groups of 1 to 250 agency, client or industry professionals who start to embrace change a culture using new customer centric perspectives.
We encourage teams to collaborate, work in teams, break down silos and foster transparency Because at the end of the day, we all are agents of transformation, pioneering a way of doing business that finally connects creativity directly to revenue, profit and margin.
It truly is a brave new world and you're critical to to everyone's success. =)
