Read. Gather Ideas. Discuss.

In last week’s blog, we introduced you to the brand new scan we developed to help you find out exactly how digitally mature your customer communications are. If you haven’t had the chance yet to check it out, you can complete the scan in five minutes here. Try it out, as it will also help you to determine what aspects you can improve to boost your digital communication transformation.

The wave of technological revolutions and digital opportunities is gaining momentum and all modern companies and organizations must try to surf it. Some digital laggards fail to catch this wave all together, other companies are having a hard time to stay on their feet, and some digital champions are speeding ahead as they surf the crest towards the sunny beach of digital maturity.

In our previous blog ‘Give business control with Resource Promotion’ we gave an overview of capabilities and benefits of our Resource Promotion, an easy to use tool that allows business users to push changes all the way into production, making them independent from IT to deploy emails, push notifications and other communications. Give it a quick look to refresh your insights on promotion, tasks, environments, and more.

Did you enjoy playing with Legos when you were a kid? If so, then you most certainly did one of two things whenever you’d start a new build. Either you would just rip open the bags and pour the pieces on the floor, which led to digging in the pile for minutes on end in search for a specific piece over and over again.

When you meet someone special, you pull out all the stops to be the best possible version of yourself. You dress nice, hold open the door, pay for drinks and laugh at every joke that person makes. After some time however, when all goes well, you might start putting in less of an effort. There are dirty socks on the floor, you don’t hold back as many burps as before and the parents-in-law are no longer as funny as they were when you first met them.

In many regards, customer communications over the course of the customer journey can be very similar. As a result, the difference between marketing and service communications can be day and night. However, they both have specific benefits which, if combined, allow you to engage with your customers in ways that seemed impossible before.

When you look at modern advertising you’ll notice that a lot of today’s billboards, tv ads and print commercials are focused on persuading and courting new customers. That’s because in the eyes of most companies, extra customers quickly translate into extra revenue. While gaining customers indeed boosts revenue, not losing any is proven to do so faster and at a much lower cost. When someone is not familiar with what you have to offer, it will take a lot of persuading to get him to buy your products. But when somebody already knows you and has taken a liking to your products, it will not cost you a huge effort to get him or her to come back for more.

How do you communicate as a business? How do you reach out to your customers? And what tools do you need to safely navigate through the labyrinth of individual customer needs and expectations that continue to grow more complex?

They say in sports self-belief and strength of character are what separate the good from the best. You could argue that this applies to the world of business as well. Businesses worldwide approach the market claiming and believing that they know best, convinced that their own capabilities will eventually lead to success. This is the Inside-Out approach: systems, tools, processes, and products are designed with the company and its needs in mind and decisions are made based on what's best for the company and not the customer.

Just like a well-functioning team is made up of quality players who know what to do on the pitch, a company’s success is determined by the efficiency and strengths of its different departments, each completing different tasks with different skills, but all striving towards the same goal: company growth through best practices and continuously improving products and services.

Recently, I was at a two-day team time-out with the engineering team of Inventive Designers. Yes, I know, team building has a bad reputation, especially so among the typically cynical software engineering crowd. Generally, people start replaying old episodes of “The Office” in their heads and they realise that in real life it’s not nearly as funny if they are in the middle of it. However, despite its reputation I want to make the case that team building is the most important investment you can make for your people.