Why do we innovate?
There is a lot of buzz around IT transformation, the customer experience (CX) and digital marketing as tools for improving alignment to customer needs, overall competitiveness, financial standing and long-term survivability. This transformation requires innovation, and it is why we ask ourselves the question. Innovation may have the long-term goal of future-proofing businesses to keep up with transformative, digital trends in our business, as well as improving our processes, IT systems, work environment for our staff and ultimately driving more revenue, but these are not the real drivers of innovation.
Innovation itself sits at an intersection with IT, CX and marketing. If an organization can improve the customer’s experience with the brand, we can drive all of the aforementioned goals. This often involves the online experience but is not the same a e-commerce or UX (User Experience), though those are part of online CX. We prefer to set our goal to align our entire process to most easily route the right customer to the right item, service or information at the right time, then make the purchase and delivery process, as well as any follow-up, as seamless as possible. To deliver this kind of CX which can improve customer satisfaction, increase loyalty and increase referrals, alignment between marketing and innovation is critical.
This cannot be accomplished without vision, and it’s important that the vision not be a divided one or isolated to one department. This kind of alignment requires vision from the top down – as addressed here in a recent LinkedIn article by Mike Vandall. It’s centralized vision, not micromanagement, that aligns and empowers groups around the core goal of applying IT, innovation and marketing resources to drive CX that works, and it’s what we seek to do here with our clients’ brands, so that their customers have an experience that delivers value at every step of their interaction.