06-12 operational centers

What comprise the operational capabilities of customer engagement, emphasizing 12 potential centers of excellence and 24-plus partnerships?

OPERATIONAL CAPABILITIES

An operational capability defines how firm get things done, using systems, processes, and accountabilities to produce value.

The figure below depicts a generalized framework for the key operational capabilities of customer engagement—how firms attract, serve, and keep profitable customers for life.

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Personal interaction-fulfillment encompasses a range of activities at various brand-customer touchpoints, including customer portals, instant workspaces, digital signage and kiosks, engagement monitoring platforms, dynamic configuration and bidding systems and networked packaging.

Individualized email and services function in a manner similar to a service or magazine subscription, inducing and managing a variety of interactions and transactions over what we call the customer management life cycle. This requires a robust subscription management system and an agile transaction management platform. See interview.

Multichannel analytics incorporate all the major analytic disciplines: business intelligence, database analytics, campaign analytics, attitudinal and behavior analytics (including Web and email analytics), social media analytics, Web content analytics, and voice-of-customer content analytics. Soon mobile analytics will bring social networking and location-based analytics into the fold.

Customer experience management has emerged from Web site monitoring, ecommerce, and traditional survey research, adding new dimensions of enterprise feedback management, dynamic routing of online customers, etc.

Social media monitoring tracks the mood of the market, voice of the customer, and patterns of engagement, summarizing comments and sentiments of customers, buyers, intermediaries, and competitors across 100 million blogs, forums, social network pages, and twitstreams. Social media monitoring represents a primary “listening tool” and a way to understand how best to enter into discussions and dialogs with customers, producing an inventory of keywords and phrases that express awareness, consideration, trial, purchase, commitment, loyalty, and advocacy of customers.

Voice-of-customer content analysis add semantic tagging of verbatim transcripts of call-center conversations, long-form customer interviews, and inb0und customer communications, including emails, web posts, and written correspondence and business forms. Semantic summarization of keywords and phrases of customers, by stage of customer engagement life cycles and consumption cohort, produces dialog maps—an open-ended communications brief that should inform content creation.

Agile content creation applies a software development methodology and “scrum” techniques to the creation of fully profiled and tagged digital assets (media and metadata) as well as embedded interactive applications or widgets. Agile content creation requires an enterprise-class digital asset management repository, media workflow management, and a specialized XML database for storing copywritten material (also referred to as “product claims” or “marketing claims”) that enable concurrent localization processes. Agile content creation entails a significant change in how most firms and agencies create content.

Content optimization expands beyond web pages and tagging content for search engines—organic search. Content optimization entails extensive automation: text mining and semantic tagging of product or marketing claims for use in printed brochures, catalogs, Web pages, mobile apps, and packaging, enabling brand and product managers to create and manage “one version of the brand and marketing truth”. Content optimization also semantically tags user personas, ad inventories, paid-search adwords, and widgets, enabling engagement mangers to identify and manage available digital assets.

Marketing content management also expands the boundaries of traditional content management to include dynamic publishing of printed  material, web pages, microsites, and mobile feeds from one infrastructure and database. In some cases, marketing operations will outsource marketing content management to specialized firms, smart collateral factories, harnessing the economies and speed-to-market advantages of a center of excellence—a highly automated factory driven by continuous improvement methodologies and best practices.

eCommerce and Website management will undergo significant expansion of its capabilities and scope, emphasizing a new content governance model (management of single pixels with metadata and data policies, including offsite snippets from social network pages, blogs, and discussion threads) and persona-driven individualization of content presentation, faceted navigation, and personal tag clouds and collections.

Sales force automation and customer service platforms, while separate for now, will merge into an integrated platform with one infrastructure, datastore, business intelligence, and  process management suite of tools. This infrastructure will include “transaction content processing” of inbound customer and trading partner communications and physical mail (digital mailrooms), including business forms, faxes, purchase orders, invoices, and receipts.

MARKETING OPERATIONS AS HUB

Marketing operations management will evolve from an administrative and project management focus to something far more strategic and central to how their firms attract and keep customers for life.

However, this new role will require an executive in charge of marketing operations to have strong technology integration, data management, and change management skill sets, calling attention to the larger IT transformation of marketing into a IT service delivery group.

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