Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

Gender diversity is directly correlated to IT performance.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Technology has never been more important to organizations, and as a result, recruiting and retaining quality IT employees is increasingly difficult.

• IT unemployment rates continue to hover below 2% in the US.
• The IT talent market has evolved into one where the employer is the seller and the employee is the buyer.

Common Obstacles

• While the number of jobs in IT has increased dramatically, the percentage of women in IT has progressed disproportionately, with only 25% of IT jobs being held by women.*
• The challenge is not a lack of talented women with the competencies to excel within IT, but rather organizations lack an effective strategy to recruit and retain women in IT.

Info-Tech’s Approach

To stay competitive, IT leaders need to radically change the way they recruit and retain talent, and women in IT represent one of the largest untapped markets. CIOs need a targeted strategy to attract and retain the best, and this requires a shift in how leaders currently manage the talent lifecycle. Info-Tech offers a targeted solution to help:

• Build a Recruitment Playbook: Leverage Info-Tech tools to effectively sell to, search for, and secure top talent.
• Build a Retention Strategy: Follow Info-Tech’s step-by-step process to identify initiatives and opportunities to retain your top talent.

Info-Tech Insight

Retaining and attracting top women is good business, not personal. Companies with greater gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability.1 In the war on talent, having a strategy around how you will recruit and retain women in IT is Marketing 101. What influences whether women apply for roles and stay at organizations is different than men; traditional models won’t cut it.

*– McKinsey & Company, 2020; 2 – CIO From IDG, 2021

Diversity & inclusion – it’s good business, not personal

Why should organizations care about diversity?

1. The war for talent is real. Every CIO needs a plan of attack. Unemployment rates are dropping and 54% of CIOs report that the skills shortage is holding them up from meeting their strategic objectives.

Source: Harvey Nash and KPMG, 2020

2. Diversity has clear ROI – both in terms of recruitment and retention. Eighty percent of technology managers experienced increased turnover in 2021. Not only are employee tenures decreasing, the competition for talent is fierce and the average cost of turnover is 150% of an IT worker’s salary.

Source: Robert Half, 2021

3. Inability to recruit and retain talent will reduce business satisfaction. Organizations who are continuously losing talent will be unable to meet corporate objectives due to lost productivity, keeping them in firefighting mode. An engaged workforce is a requirement for driving innovation and project success.

ISACA’s 2020 study shows a disconnect between what men and women think is being done to recruit and retain female employees

Key findings from ISACA’s 2020 Tech Workforce survey

65% of men think their employers have a program to encourage hiring women. But only 51% of women agree.

71% of men believe their employers have a program to encourage the promotion or advancement of women. But only 59% of women agree.

49% of women compared to 44% of men in the survey feel they must work harder than their peers.

22% of women compared to 14% of men feel they are underpaid.

66% of women compared to 72% of men feel they are receiving sufficient resources to sustain their career.

30% of women compared to 23% of men feel they have unequal growth opportunities.

74% of women compared to 64% of men feel they lack confidence to negotiate their salaries.

To see ISACA’s full report click here.

Image: Statista, 2021, CC BY-ND 4.0

The chart to the left, compiled by Statista, (based on self-reported company figures) shows that women held between 23% to 25% of the tech jobs at major tech companies.

Women are also underrepresented in leadership positions: 34% at Facebook, 31% at Apple, 29% at Amazon, 28% at Google, and 26% at Microsoft.

(Statista, 2021)

To help support women in tech, 78% of women say companies should promote more women into leadership positions. Other solutions include:

• Providing mentorship opportunities (72%)
• Offering flexible scheduling (64%)
• Conducting unconscious bias training (57%)
• Offering equal maternity and paternity leave (55%)

(HRD America, 2021)

Traditional retention initiatives target the majority – the drivers that impact the retention of women in IT are different

Ranked correlation of impact of engagement drivers on retention

* Recent data stays consistent, but, the importance of compensation and recognition in retaining women in IT is increasing.

Info-Tech Research Group Employee Engagement Diagnostic; N=1,856 IT employees

The majority of organizations take a one-size-fits-all approach to retaining and engaging employees.

However, studies show that women are leaving IT in significantly higher proportions than men and that the drivers impacting men’s and women’s retention are different. Knowing how men and women react differently to engagement drivers will help you create a targeted retention strategy.

In particular, to increase the retention and engagement of women, organizations should develop targeted initiatives that focus on:

• Organizational culture
• Employee empowerment
• Manager relationships

Why organizations need to focus on the recruitment and retention of women in IT

1. Women expand the talent pool. Women represent a vast, untapped talent pool that can bolster the technical workforce. Unfortunately, traditional IT recruitment processes are targeted toward a limited IT profile – the key to closing the IT skills gap is to look for agile learners and expand your search criteria to cast a larger net.
2. Diversity increases innovation opportunities. Groups with greater diversity solve complex problems better and faster than homogenous groups, and the presence of women is more likely to increase the problem-solving and creative abilities of the group.
3. Women increase your ROI. Research shows that companies with the highest representation of women in their management teams have a 34% higher return on investment than those with few or no women. Further, organizations who are unable to retain top women in their organization are at risk for not being able to deliver to SLAs or project expectations and lose the institutional knowledge needed for continuous improvement.

Source: Bureau of Labour Statistics; Info-Tech Research Group/McLean & Company Analysis

Improving the representation of women in your organization requires rethinking recruitment and retention strategies

Info-Tech’s approach to improving gender diversity at your organization

Info-Tech takes a practical, tactical approach to improving gender diversity at organizations, which starts with straightforward tactics that will help you improve the recruitment and retention of women in your organization.

How we can help

1. Leverage Info-Tech’s tools to define your current challenges and opportunities for gender diversity to improve your recruitment and retention issues.
2. Employ straightforward and tested tactics to increase talent acquisition of women in IT by optimizing how you sell to, search for, and secure top female talent.
3. Take a data-driven approach to measure and increase the retention and engagement of women within your IT organization, and know how and when to involve your staff for optimal results.

Leverage Info-Tech’s customizable deliverables to improve the recruitment and retention of women in your organization

RECRUIT Top Women in IT

If you don’t have a targeted recruitment strategy for women, you are missing out on 50% of the candidate pool. Increase the number of viable candidates by leveraging best practices to sell to, search for, and secure top women in IT.

Key metrics to track:

• Average number of female candidates per posting
• Average time to fill position
• Percentage of new hires still at the organization one year later

RETAIN Top Women in IT

The drivers that impact the retention of men and women are different. Take a data-driven approach to improving retention of women in your organization by using best practices to measure and improve employee engagement.

Key metrics to track:

• Voluntary turnover rates of men and women
• Average tenure of men and women
• Percentage of internal promotions going to men and women
• Employee engagement scores

Info-Tech’s methodology for Recruit and Retain More Women in IT

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our teams knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. A typical GI is 6 calls over the course of 1 to 2 months.

1. Tactics to Recruit More Women in IT

Call #1: Develop a strategy to better sell your organization to diverse candidates.

Call #2: Evaluate your candidate search practices to reach a wider audience.

Call #3: Introduce best practices in your interviews to improve the candidate experience and limit bias.

2. Tactics to Retain More Women in IT

Call #4: Launch focus groups to improve performance of key retention drivers.

Call #5: Measure the employee experience and identify key moments that matter to staff.

Call #6: Conduct stay interviews and establish actions to improve retention.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.

workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Phase 1

Enhance Your Recruitment Strategies

Phase 1

• 1.1 Sell
• 1.2 Search
• 1.3 Secure

Phase 2

• 2.1 Engagement
• 2.2 Employee Experience
• 2.3 Stay Interviews

Consider key factors within the recruitment process

Key Talent Pipeline Opportunities:

• In today’s talent landscape IT leaders need to be highly strategic about how they recruit new talent to the organization.
• IT professionals have a huge number of options to choose from when considering their next career.
• IT leaders need to actively market and expand their search to attract top talent. The “where” and “how” to recruit men and women in IT are different and your strategy should reflect this.
• Partnering with your HR department to help you improve the number of applicants, expand your search criteria, and optimize the interview experience will all directly impact your talent pipeline.

1. Sell

How do you position the value of working for your organization and roles in a meaningful way?

2. Search

How can you expand your key search criteria and sourcing strategies to reach more candidates?

3. Secure

How can you reduce bias in your interview process and create positive candidate experiences?

Info-Tech’s Sell-Search-Secure recruitment model

Follow these steps to increase your pool of female candidates.

1. Sell Tactics:

1. Develop an employee value proposition that will attract female candidates.

2. Understand how your job postings may be deterring female candidates.

2. Search Tactics:

3. Identify opportunities to expand your role analysis for job requisitions.

4. Increase your candidate pool by expanding sourcing programs.

3. Secure Tactics:

5. Identify tactics to improve women’s interview experience.

6. Leverage behavioral interview questions to limit bias in interviews.

Please note, this section is not a replacement or a full talent strategy. Rather, this blueprint will highlight key tactics within talent acquisition practices that the IT leadership team can help to influence to drive greater diversity in recruitment.

Understand where leaks exist in your talent pipeline

Start your recruitment enhancement here.

Work with your HR department to track critical metrics around where you need to make improvements and where you can partner with your recruitment team to improve your recruitment process and build a more diverse pipeline. Identify where you have significant drops or variation in diversity or overall need and select where you’d like to focus your recruitment improvement efforts.

Enhance your recruitment strategies

The way you position the organization impacts who is likely to apply to posted positions. Ensure you are putting a competitive foot forward by developing a unique, meaningful, and aspirational employee value proposition and clear job descriptions.

Sell the organization

What is an employee value proposition?

An employee value proposition (EVP) is a unique and clearly defined set of attributes and benefits that capture an employee’s overall work experience within an organization. An EVP is your opportunity to showcase the unique benefits and opportunities of working at your organization, allowing you to attract a wider pool of candidates.

How is an employee value proposition used?

Your EVP should be used internally and externally to promote the unique benefits of working within the department. As a recruiting tool, you can use it to attract candidates, highlighting the benefits of working for your organization. The EVP is often highlighted where you are most likely to reach your target audience, whether that is through social media, in-person events, or in other advertising activities.

Why tailor this to multiple audiences?

While your employee value proposition should remain constant in terms of the unique benefits of working for your organization, you want to ensure that the EVP appeals to multiple audiences and that it is backed up by relevant stories that support how your organization lives your EVP every day. Candidates need to be able to relate to the EVP and see it as desirable, so ensuring that it is relatable to a diverse audience is key.

Develop a strong employee value proposition

Three key steps

1. Build and Assess the EVP

Assess your existing employee value proposition and/or build a forward-looking, meaningful, authentic, aspirational EVP.

2. Test the EVP

Gather feedback from staff to ensure the EVP is meaningful internally and externally.

3. Adopt the EVP

Identify how and where you will leverage the EVP internally and externally, and integrate the EVP into your candidate experience, job ads, and employee engagement initiatives.

As you build your EVP, keep in mind that while it’s important to brand your IT organization as an inclusive workplace to help you attract diverse candidates, be honest about your current level of diversity and your intentions to improve. Otherwise, new recruits will be disappointed and leave.

What is an employee value proposition?

And what are the key components?

The employee value proposition is your opportunity to showcase the unique benefits and opportunities of working at your organization, allowing you to attract a wider pool of candidates.

Creating a compelling EVP that presents a picture of your employee experience, with a focus on diversity, will attract females to your team. This can lead to many internal and external benefits for your organization.

Collect relevant information

Existing Employee Value Proposition: If your organization or IT department has an existing employee value proposition, rather than starting from scratch, we recommend leveraging that and moving to the testing phase to see if the EVP still resonates with staff and external parties.

Employee Engagement Results: If your organization does an employee engagement survey, review the results to identify the areas in which the IT organization is performing well. Identify and document any key comment themes in the report around why employees enjoy working for the organization or what makes your IT department a great place to work.

Social Media Sites. Prepare for the good, the bad, and the ugly. Social media websites like Glassdoor and Indeed make it easier for employees to share their experiences at an organization honestly and candidly. While postings on these sites won’t relate exclusively to the IT department, they do invite participants to identify their department in the organization. You can search these to identify any positive things people are saying about working for the organization and potentially opportunities for improvement (which you can use as a starting point in the retention section of this report).

Step 1.1

Sell – Assess the current state and develop your employee value proposition

Activities

1.1.1 Gather feedback on unique benefits

1.1.2 Build key messages

1.1.3 Test your EVP

1.1.4 Adopt your EVP

1.1.5 Review job postings for gender bias

1.1.1 Gather feedback

1. Hold a series of focus groups with employees to understand what about the organization attracted them to join and to stay at the organization.
2. Start by identifying if you will interview all employees or a subset. If you are going to use a subset, ensure you have at least one male and one female participating from each team and representation of all levels within the department.
3. Print the EVP Interview Guide to focus your conversation, and ask each individual to take 15 minutes and respond to questions 1-3 in the Guide:
4. Draw a quadrant on the board and mark each quadrant with four categories: Day-to-Day Elements, Organizational Elements, Compensation & Benefits, and Working Conditions. Provide each participant with sticky notes and ask them to brainstorm the top five things they value most about working at the organization. Ask them to place each sticky in the appropriate category and identify any key themes.
5. Ask participants to hand in their EVP Interview Guides and document all of the key findings.

Download the EVP Interview Guide

1.1.2 Build key messages

1. Collect all of the information from the various focus groups and begin to build out the employee value proposition statements.
2. Identify the key elements that staff felt were unique and highly valued by employees and group these into common themes.
3. Identify categories that related to one of the five key drivers* of women’s retention in IT and highlight any key elements related to these:

• Culture: The degree to which an employee identifies with the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the organization.
• Company Potential: An employee’s understanding, commitment, and excitement about the organization’s mission and future.
• Employee Empowerment: The degree to which employees have accountability and control over their work within a supported environment.
• Learning and Development: A cooperative and continuous effort to enhance an employee’s skill set and expertise and meet an employee’s career objectives.
• Manager Relationships: The professional and personal relationship an employee has with their manager, including trust, support, and development.

• Examples of great EVPs: L’Oreal, Home Depot

*See Engagement Driver Handout slides for more details on these five drivers.

Quality test your revised EVP

Use Info-Tech’s EVP Scorecard.

Internally and Externally

Use the EVP Scorecard and EVP Scorecard Handout throughout this step to assess your EVP against:

Internal Criteria:

• Accuracy
• Alignment
• Aspirational
• Differentiation

External Criteria:

• Clear
• Compelling
• Concise
• Differentiation

Ensure your EVP resonates with employees and prospects

Test your EVP with internal and external audiences.

1.1.3 Test your EVP

1. Identify the internal and external individuals who you want to gather feedback from about the EVP.
2. For internal candidates, send a copy of the EVP and ask them to complete the Internal Assessment (ensure that you have at least 50% representation of women).
3. For external candidates, identify first how you will reach out to them; popular options are to have team members in key roles reach out to members of their LinkedIn network who are in similar roles to themselves. Request that they look for a diverse group to gather feedback from.
4. Have the external candidates complete the External Assessment.
5. Collect the feedback around the EVP and enter the findings into the EVP Scorecard Tool.
6. If you are dissatisfied with the scorecard results, go back to the employees you interviewed to ask for additional feedback, focusing on the areas that scored low.
7. Incorporate the feedback and present the revised EVP to see if the changes resonate with stakeholders.
8. If you are satisfied with the results, present to the leadership and HR teams for agreement and proceed to adopting the EVP in your organization.

1.1.4 Adopt your EVP

Identify your target audience and marketing channels.

1. Identify the internal and external individuals who you want to gather feedback from about the EVP.

• The target audience for your employee value proposition
• Internal and/or external
• Local, national, international
• Experience
• Applicant pool (e.g. new graduates, professionals, internship)

• Internal: Town hall meetings, fireside chats
• External: Social media, advertising, job postings
• Global: Professional affiliations, head hunters

Case Study

INDUSTRY: Restaurant

SOURCE: McDonald’s Careers, Canadian Business via McLean & Company

McDonald’s saw a divide between employee experience and its vision. McDonald’s set out to reinvent its employer image and create the reputation it wanted.

Challenge

• Historically, McDonald’s has had a challenging employer brand. Founded on the goal of cost effectiveness, a “McJob” was often associated with lower pay and a poor reputation.
• McDonald’s reached out to employees using a global survey and asked, “What is it you love most about working at McDonald’s?”

Solution

• McDonald’s revaluated its employer brand by creating an EVP focused on the three F’s.

1. Future – career growth and development opportunities
2. Flexibility – flexible working hours and job variety
3. Family & Friends – a people-centric work culture

Results

• As a result of developing and promoting its EVP internally, McDonald’s has experienced higher engagement and a steady decrease in turnover.
• Externally, McDonald’s has been recognized numerous times by the Great Place to Work Institute and has been classified by Maclean’s magazine as one of Canada’s top 50 employers for 13 years running.

Make your job descriptions more attractive to female applicants

10 WAYS TO REMOVE GENDER BIAS FROM JOB DESCRIPTIONS – GLASSDOOR – AN EXCERPT

1. USE GENDER-NEUTRAL TITLES: Male-oriented titles can inadvertently prevent women from clicking on your job in a list of search results. Avoid including words in your titles like “hacker,” “rockstar,” “superhero,” “guru,” and “ninja,” and use neutral, descriptive titles like “engineer,” “project manager,” or “developer.
2. CHECK PRONOUNS: When describing the tasks of the ideal candidate, use “they” or “you.” Example: “As Product Manager for XYZ, you will be responsible for setting the product vision and strategy.
3. AVOID (OR BALANCE) YOUR USE OF GENDER-CHARGED WORDS: Analysis from language tool Textio found that the gender language bias in your job posting predicts the gender of the person you’re going to hire. Use a tool like Textio tool or the free Gender Decoder to identify problem spots in your word choices. Examples: “Analyze” and “determine” are typically associated with male traits, while “collaborate” and “support” are considered female. Avoid aggressive language like “crush it.
4. AVOID SUPERLATIVES: Excessive use of superlatives such as “expert,” “superior,” and “world class” can turn off female candidates who are more collaborative than competitive in nature. Research also shows that women are less likely than men to brag about their accomplishments. In addition, superlatives related to a candidate’s background can limit the pool of female applicants because there may be very few females currently in leading positions at “world-class” firms
5. LIMIT THE NUMBER OF REQUIREMENTS: Identify which requirements are “nice to have” versus “must have,” and eliminate the “nice to haves.” Research shows that women are unlikely to apply for a position unless they meet 100 percent of the requirements, while men will apply if they meet 60 percent of the requirements.

For the full article please click here.

1.1.5 Review job postings

To understand potential gender bias

1. Select a job posting that you are looking to fill, review the descriptions, and identify if any of the following apply:

• Are the titles gender neutral? This doesn’t mean you can’t be creative in your naming, but consider if the name really represents the role you are looking to fill.
• Do you use pronouns? If there are instances where the posting says “he” OR “she” change this to “they” or “you.”
• Are you overusing superlatives? Review the posting and ensure that when words like “expert” or “world class” are used that you genuinely need someone who is at that level.
• Are all of the tasks/responsibilities listed the ones that are absolutely essential to the job? Women are less likely to apply if they don’t have direct experience with 100% of the criteria – if it’s a non-essential, consider whether it’s needed in the posting.
• Is there any organization-specific jargon used? Where possible, avoid using organization-specific jargon in order to create an inclusive posting. Avoid using terms/acronyms that are only known to your organization.

Case Study

INDUSTRY: Social Media

SOURCE: Buffer Open blog

When the social media platform Buffer replaced one word in a job posting, it noticed an increase in female candidates.

Challenge

For the social media platform Buffer, all employees were called “hackers.” It had front-end hackers, back-end hackers, Android hackers, iOS hackers, and traction hackers.

As the company began to grow and ramp up hiring, the Chief Technology Officer, Sunil Sadasivan, noticed that Buffer was seeing a very low percentage of female candidates for these “hacker” jobs.

In researching the challenge in lack of female candidates, the Buffer team discovered that the word “hacker” may be just the reason why.

Solution

Understanding that wording has a strong impact on the type of candidates applying to work for Buffer started a great and important conversation on the Buffer team.

Buffer wanted to be as inviting as possible in job listings, especially because it hires for culture fit over technical skill.

Buffer went through a number of wording choices that could replace “hacker,” and ended on the term “developer.” All external roles were updated to reflect this wording change.

Results

By making this slight change to the wording used in their jobs, Buffer went from seeing a less than 2% female representation of applicants for developer jobs to around 12% female representation for the same job.

Step 1.2

Search – Reach more candidates by expanding key search criteria and sourcing strategies

Activities

1.2.1 Complete role analysis

1.2.2 Expand your sourcing pools

Enhance your recruitment strategies

Sourcing shouldn’t start with an open position; it should start with identifying an anticipated need and building and nurturing a talent pipeline. IT participation in this is critical to effectively promote the employee experience and foster relationships before candidates even apply.

Expand your search

What is a candidate sourcing program?

A candidate sourcing program is one element of the overall HR sourcing approach, which consists of the overall process (steps to source talent), the people responsible for sourcing, and the programs (internal talent mobility, social media, employee referral, alumni network, campus recruitment, etc.).

What is a sourcing role analysis?

Part of the sourcing plan will outline how to identify talent for a role, which includes both the role analysis and the market assessment. The market assessment is normally completed by the HR department and consists of analyzing the market conditions as they relate to specific talent needs. The role analysis looks at what is necessary to be successful in a role, including competencies, education, background experience, etc.

How will this enable you to attract female candidates?

Expanding your sourcing programs and supporting deeper role analysis will allow your HR department to reach a larger candidate pool and better understand the type of talent that will be successful in roles within your organization. By expanding from traditional pools and criteria you will open the organization up to a wider variety of talent options.

Minimize bias in sourcing to hire the right talent and protect against risk

Failure to take an inclusive approach to sourcing will limit your talent pool by sidelining entire groups or discouraging applicants from diverse backgrounds. Address bias in sourcing so that diverse candidates are not excluded from the start. Solutions such as removing biographical data from CVs prior to interviews may reduce bias, but they may come too late to impact diversity.

1.2.1 Role analysis

Customize a sourcing plan for key roles to guide talent pipeline creation.

1. Complete a role analysis to understand key role requirements. If you are hiring for an existing role, start by taking an inventory of who your top and low performers are within the role today.
2. Consider your top performers and identify what a successful employee can do better than a less successful one. Start by considering their alignment with job requirements, and identify the education, designations/certifications, and experiences that are necessary for this job. Do not limit yourself; carefully consider if the requirements you are including are actually necessary or just nice to have.

	Required Entry Criteria	Preferred Entry Criteria
Education	University Degree – Bachelors	University Degree – Masters
Experience	5+) years design, or related, experience Experience leading a team	External consulting experience Healthcare industry experience
Designations/Certifications		ITIL Foundations

3. Review Info-Tech’s Job Competency Library in the Workforce Planning Workbook, identify the key competencies that are ideal for this anticipated role, and write a description of how this would manifest in your organization.

Competency	Level of Proficiency	Behavioral Descriptions
Business Analysis	Level 2: Capable	Demonstrates a basic understanding of business roles, processes, planning, and requirements in the organization. Demonstrates a basic understanding of how technologies assist in business processes. Develop basic business cases using internal environment analysis for the business unit level.

4. Hold a meeting with your HR team or recruiter to highlight the types of experience and competencies you are looking for in a hire to expand the search criteria.

Target diverse talent pools through different sources

When looking to diversify your workforce, it’s critical that you look to attract and recruit talent from a variety of different talent pools.

SOURCING APPROACH

INTERNAL MOBILITY PROGRAM

Positioning the right talent in the right place, at the right time, for the right reasons, and supporting them appropriately. Often tied to succession or workforce planning, mentorship, and learning and development.

SOCIAL MEDIA PROGRAM

The widely accessible electronic tools that enable anyone to publish and access information, collaborate on common efforts, and build relationships. Think beyond the traditional and consider niche social media platforms.

EMPLOYEE REFERRAL PROGRAM

Employees recommend qualified candidates. If the referral is hired, the referring employee typically receives some sort of reward.

ALUMNI PROGRAM

An alumni referral program is a formalized way to maintain ongoing relationships with former employees of the organization.

CAMPUS RECRUITING PROGRAM

A formalized means of attracting and hiring individuals who are about to graduate from schools, colleges, or universities.

EVENTS & ASSOCIATION PROGRAM

A targeted approach for participation in non-profit associations and industry events to build brand awareness of your organization and create a forward-looking talent pipeline.

1.2.2 Expand your sourcing pools

Increase the number of female applicants.

1. Identify where your employees are currently being sourced from and identify how many female candidates you have gotten from each channel as a percentage of applicants.

	# of Candidates From Approach	% of Female Candidates From Approach	Target # of Female Candidates
Internal Talent Mobility
Social Media Program
Employee Referral Program
Alumni Program
Campus Recruiting Program
Events & Non-Profit Affiliations
Other (job databases, corporate website, etc.)

2. Work with your HR partner or organization’s recruiter to identify three recruitment channels from the list that you will work on expanding.
3. Review the following two slides and identify key success factors for the implementation. Identify what role IT will play and what role HR will play in implementing the approach.
4. Following implementation, monitor the impact of the tactics on the number of women candidates and determine whether to add additional tactics.

Different talent sources

Benefits and success factors of using different talent sources

Enhance your recruitment strategies

Work with your HR department to influence the recruitment process by taking a data-driven approach to understand the root cause of applicant drop-off and success and take corrective actions.

Secure top candidates

Why does the candidate experience matter?

Until recently it was an employer’s market, so recruiters and hiring managers were able to get good talent without courting top candidates. Today, that’s not the case. You need to treat your IT candidates like customers and be mindful that this is often one of the first experiences future staff will have with the organization. It will give them their first real sense of the culture of the organization and whether they want to work for the organization.

What can IT leaders do if they have limited influence over the interview process?

Work with your HR department to evaluate the existing recruitment process, share challenges you’ve experienced, and offer additional support in the process. Identify where you can influence the process and if there are opportunities to build service-level agreements around the candidate experience.

Take a data-driven approach

Understand opportunities to enhance the talent selection process.

While your HR department likely owns the candidate experience and processes, if you have identified challenges in diversity we recommend partnering with your HR department or recruitment team to identify opportunities for improvement within the process. If you are attracting a good amount of candidates through your sell and search tactics but aren’t finding that this is translating into more women selected, it’s time to take a look at your selection processes.

SIMPLIFIED CANDIDATE SELECTION PROCESS STEPS

1. Application Received
2. Candidate Selected for Interview
3. Offer Extended
4. Offer Accepted
5. Onboarding of Staff

To understand the challenges within your selection process, start by baselining your drop-off rates throughout selection and comparing the differences in male and female candidates. Use this to pin point the issues within the process and complete a root-cause analysis to identify where to improve.

Step 1.3

Secure – reduce bias in your interview process and create positive candidate experiences

Activities

1.3.1 Identify selection challenges

1.3.1 Identify your selection challenges

Review your candidate data.

1. Hold a meeting with your HR partner to identify trends in your selection data. If you have an applicant tracking system, pull all relevant information for analysis.
2. Start by identifying the total number of candidates that move forward in each stage of the process. Record the overall number of applicants for positions (should have this number from your sourcing analysis), overall number of candidates selected for interviews, overall number of offers extended, overall number of offers rejected, and overall number of employees still employed after one year.
3. Identify the number of female and male candidates in each of those categories and as a percentage of the total number of applicants.

Selection Process Step	Total # of Candidates	Male Candidates		Female Candidates		% Difference Male & Female
	#	#	% of total	#	% of total
Applicants for Posted Position	150	115	76.7%	35	23.3%	70% fewer females
Selected for Interview
(Selected for Second Interview)
(Selected for Final Interview)
Offer Extended
Offer Rejected
Employees Retained for One Year

4. Identify where there are differences in the percentages of male and female candidates and where there are significant drop-off rates between steps in the process.

Note: For larger organizations, we highly recommend analyzing differences in specific teams/roles and/or at different seniority levels. If you have that data available, repeat the analysis, controlling for those factors.

Root-cause analysis can be conducted in a variety of ways

Align your root-cause analysis technique with the problem that needs to be solved and leverage the skills of the root-cause analysis team.

Brainstorming/Process of Elimination

After brainstorming, identify which possible causes are not the issue’s root cause by removing unlikely causes.

The Five Whys

Use reverse engineering to delve deeper into a recruitment issue to identify the root cause.

Ishikawa/Fishbone Diagram

Use an Ishikawa/fishbone diagram to identify and narrow down possible causes by categories.

Process of elimination

Leveraging root-cause analysis techniques.

Using the process of elimination can be a powerful tool to determine root causes.

• To use the process of elimination to determine root cause, gather the participants from within your hiring team together once you have identified where your issues are within the recruitment process and brainstorm a list of potential causes.
• Like all brainstorming exercises, remember that the purpose is to gather the widest possible variety of perspectives, so be sure not to eliminate any suggested causes out of hand.
• Once you have an exhaustive list of potential causes, you can begin the process of eliminating unlikely causes to arrive at a list of likely potential causes.

Example

Problem: Women candidates are rejecting job offers more consistently

Potential Causes

• The process took too long to complete
• Lack of information about the team and culture
• Candidates aren’t finding benefits/salary compelling
• Lack of clarity on role expectations
• Lack of fit between candidate and interviewers
• Candidates offered other positions
• Interview tactics were negatively perceived

As you brainstorm, ensure that you are identifying differentiators between male and female candidate experiences and rationale. If you ask candidates their rationale for turning down roles, ensure that these are included in the discussion.

The five whys

Leveraging root-cause analysis techniques

Repeatedly asking “why” might seem overly simplistic, but it has the potential to be useful.

• It can be useful, when confronting a problem, to start with the end result and work backwards.
• According to Olivier Serrat, a knowledge management specialist at the Asian Development Bank, there are three key components that define successful use of the five whys: “(i) accurate and complete statements of problems, (ii) complete honesty in answering the questions, and (iii) the determination to get to the bottom of problems and resolve them.”
• As a group, develop a consensus around the problem statement. Go around the room and have each person suggest a potential reason for its occurrence. Repeat the process for each potential reason (ask “why?”) until there are no more potential causes to explore.
• Note: The total number of “whys” may be more or less than five.

Example

Ishikawa/fishbone diagram

Leveraging root-cause analysis techniques.

Use this technique to sort potential causes by category and match them to the problem.

• The first step in creating a fishbone diagram is agreeing on a problem statement and populating a box on the right side of a whiteboard or a piece of chart paper.
• Draw a horizontal line left from the box and draw several ribs on either side that will represent the categories of causes you will explore.
• Label each rib with relevant categories. In the recruitment context, consider cause categories like technology, interview, process, etc. Go around the room and ask, “What causes this problem to happen?” Every result produced should fit into one of the identified categories. Place it there, and continue to brainstorm sub-causes.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Avoid naming individuals in the fishbone diagram. The goal of the root-cause exercise is not to lay blame or zero in on a guilty party but rather to identify how you can rectify any challenges.

Leverage behavioral interviews

Use Info-Tech’s Behavioral Interview Questions Library.

Reduce bias in your interviews.

In the past, companies were pushing the boundaries of the conventional interview, using unconventional questions to find top talent, e.g. “what color is your personality?” The logic was that the best people are the ones who don’t necessarily show perfectly on a resume, and they were intent on finding the best.

However, many companies have stopped using these questions after extensive statistical analysis revealed there was no correlation between candidates’ ability to answer them and their future performance on the job. Hiring by intuition – or “gut” – is usually dependent on an interpersonal connection being developed over a very short period of time. This means that people who were naturally likeable would be given preferential treatment in hiring decisions whether they were capable of doing the job.

Asking behavioral interview questions based on the competency needs of the role is the best way to uncover if the candidates will be able to execute on the job.

For more information see Info-Tech’s Behavioral Interview Question Library.

Improve the level of diversity in your organization by considering inclusive candidate selection practices

Key action items to create inclusivity in your candidate selection practices:

1. Managers must be aware of how bias can influence hiring. Encourage your HR department to provide diversity training for recruiters and hiring managers. Ensure those responsible for recruitment are using best practices, are aware of the impact of unconscious bias, and are making decisions in alignment with your DEI strategy.
2. Use a variety of interviewers to leverage multiple/diverse perspectives. Hiring decisions made by a group can offer a more balanced perspective. Include interviewers from multiple levels in the organization and both men and women.
3. Hire for distinguished excellence. Be careful not to simply choose the same kind of people over and over, in the name of cultural fit (Source: Recruiter.com, 2015).

Broaden the notion of fit:

• Hire for skill fit: you might still hire certain types for a specific job (e.g. analytical types for analysis positions), but these candidates can still be diverse.
• Hire for fit with your organization’s DEI values, regardless of whether the candidate is from a diverse background or not.
• It can be tempting for hiring managers to hire individuals who are similar to themselves. However, doing so limits the amount of diversity entering your organization, and as a result, limits your organization’s ability to innovate.

Leverage a third-party tool

Ensure recruiting and onboarding programs are effective by surveying your new hires.

For a deeper analysis of your new hire processes Info-Tech’s sister company, McLean & Company, is an HR research and advisory firm that offers powerful diagnostics to measure HR processes effectiveness. If you are finding diversity issues to be systemic within the organization, leveraging a diagnostic can greatly improve your processes.

Use this diagnostic to get vital feedback on:

• Recruiting efforts. Find out if your job marketing efforts are successful, which paths your candidates took to find you, and whether your company is maintaining an attractive profile.
• Interviewing process. Ensure candidates experience an organized, professional, and ethical process that accurately sets their expectations for the job.
• Onboarding process. Make sure your new hires are being trained and integrated into their team effectively.
• Organizational culture. Is your culture welcoming and inclusive? You need to know if top talent enjoy the environment you have to offer.

For more information on the New Hire Survey click here. If you are interested in referring your HR partner please contact your account manager.

Phase 2

Enhance Your Retention Strategies

Phase 1

• 1.1 Sell
• 1.2 Search
• 1.3 Secure

Phase 2

• 2.1 Engagement
• 2.2 Employee Experience
• 2.3 Stay Interviews

Actively engage female staff to retain them

Employee engagement: the measurement of effective management practices that create a positive emotional connection between the employee and the organization.

Engaged employees do what’s best for the organization: they come up with product/service improvements, provide exceptional service to customers, consistently exceed performance expectations, and make efficient use of their time and resources. The result is happy customers, better products/services, and saved costs.

Today, what we find is that 54% of women in IT are not engaged,* but…

…engaged employees are: 39% more likely to stay at an organization than employees who are not engaged.*

Additionally, engaging your female staff also has the additional benefit of increasing willingness to innovate by 30% and performance by 28%. The good news is that increasing employee engagement is not difficult, it just requires dedication and an effective toolkit to monitor, analyze, and implement tactics.*

* Info-Tech and McLean & Company Diagnostics; N=1,308 IT employees

Don’t seek to satisfy; drive IT success through engagement

Engagement drivers that impact retention for men and women are different – tailor your strategy to your audience

Ranked correlation of impact of engagement drivers on retention

* Recent data stays consistent, but the importance of compensation and recognition in retaining women in IT is increasing.

Info-Tech Research Group Employee Engagement Diagnostic; N=1,856 IT employees.

An analysis of the differences between men and women in IT’s drivers indicates that women in IT are significantly less likely than men in IT to agree with the following statements:

Culture:

• They identify well with the organization’s values.
• The organization has a very friendly atmosphere.

Employee Empowerment:

• They are given the chance to fully leverage their talents through their job.

Manager Relationships:

• They can trust their manager.
• Their manager cares about them as a person

Working Environment:

• They have not seen incidents of discrimination at their organization based on age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity.

Enhance your retention strategies

Employee engagement is one of the greatest predictors of intention to stay. To retain you need to understand not only engagement but also your employee experience – the moments that matter – and actively work to create a positive experience.

Improve employee engagement

What differentiates an engaged employee?

Engaged employees do what’s best for the organization: they come up with product/service improvements, provide exceptional service to customers, consistently exceed performance expectations, and make efficient use of their time and resources. The result is happy customers, better products/services, and saved costs.

Why measure engagement when looking at retention?

Engaged employees report 39%1 higher intention to stay at the organization than disengaged employees. The cost of losing an employee is estimated to be 150% to 200% of their annual salary.2 Can you afford to not engage your staff?

Why should IT leadership be responsible for their staff engagement?

Engagement happens every day, through every interaction, and needs to be tailored to individual team members to be successful. When engagement is owned by IT leadership, engagement initiatives are incorporated into daily experiences and personalized to their employees based on what is happening in real time. It is this active, dynamic leadership that inspires ongoing employee engagement and differentiates those who talk about engagement from those who succeed in engaging their teams.

Sources: 1 - McLean & Company Employee Engagement Survey, 2 - Gallup, 2019

Step 2.1

Improve employee engagement

Activities

2.1.1 Review employee engagement results and trends

2.1.2 Focus on areas that impact retention of women

Take a data-driven approach

Info-Tech’s employee engagement diagnostics are low-effort, high-impact programs that will give you detailed report cards on the organization’s engagement levels. Use these insights to understand your employees’ engagement levels by a variety of core demographics.

For the purpose of improving retention of women in IT, we encourage you to leverage the EXM tool, which will allow you to track how this demographic group’s engagement changes as you implement new initiatives.

Engagement survey

For a detailed breakdown of staff overall engagement priorities.

Overall Engagement Results

• A clear breakdown of employee engagement results by demographic, gender, and team.
• Detailed engagement breakdown and benchmarking.

Priority Matrix and Driver Scores

• A priority matrix specific to your organization.
• A breakdown of question scores by priority matrix quadrant.
• Know what not to focus your effort on – not all engagement drivers will have a high impact on engagement.

EXM dashboard

Reporting to track engagement in real time.

EXM Dashboard

• Leverage Info-Tech’s real-time Employee Experience Monitor dashboard to track your team’s engagement levels over time.
• Track changes in the number of supporters and detractors and slice the data by roles, teams, and gender.

Time Series Trends

• As you implement new initiatives to improve the engagement and retention of staff, track their impact and continuously course correct.
• Empower your leaders to actively manage their team culture to drive innovation, retention, and productivity.

Start your diagnostic now

Leverage your Info-Tech membership to seamlessly launch your employee engagement survey.

Info-Tech’s dedicated team of program managers will facilitate this diagnostic program remotely, providing you with a convenient, low-effort, high-impact experience.

We will guide you through the process with your goals in mind to deliver deep insight into your successes and areas to improve.

Start Now

2.1.1 Review employee engagement results

Identify trends

1. In a call with one of Info-Tech’s executive advisors, review the results of your employee engagement survey.
2. Identify which departments are most and least engaged and brainstorm some high-level reasons.
3. Review the demographic information and highlight any inconsistencies or areas with high levels of variance. Document which demographics have the most and least engaged, disengaged, and indifferent employees.
4. With help from the Info-Tech executive advisor, identify and document any dramatic differences in the demographic data, particularly around gender.
5. Identify if the majority of issues effecting engagement are at an organization or department level and which stakeholders you need to engage to support the process moving forward.
6. Identify next steps.

2.1.2 Focus on areas that impact retention of women

Hold focus groups with IT staff and focus on the five areas with the greatest impact on women’s retention.

1. Review the handout slides on the following pages to get a better understanding of the definition of each of the top five drivers impacting women’s retention. Depending on your team’s size, pick one to three drivers to focus on for your first focus group.
2. Divide the participants into teams and on flip chart paper or using sticky notes have the teams brainstorm what you can stop/start/continue doing to help you improve on your assigned driver.

• Continue: actions that work for the team related to this driver and should proceed.
• Start: actions/initiatives that the team would like to begin.
• Stop: actions/initiatives that the team would like to stop.

Culture

Engagement driver handout

Culture: The degree to which an employee identifies with the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the organization.

Questions:

• I identify well with the organization’s values.
• This organization has a collaborative work environment.
• This organization has a very friendly atmosphere.
• I am a fit for the organizational culture.

Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

• Women in IT: #1
• Men in IT: #2

Company Potential

Engagement driver handout

Company Potential: An employee’s understanding of and commitment to the organization’s mission, and the employee’s excitement about the organization’s mission and future.

Questions:

• This organization has a bright future.
• I am impressed with the quality of people at this organization.
• People in this organization are committed to doing high-quality work.
• I believe in the organization’s overall business strategy.
• This organization encourages innovation.

Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

• Women in IT: #2
• Men in IT: #1

Employee Empowerment

Engagement driver handout

Employee Empowerment: The degree to which employees have accountability and control over their work within a supported environment.

Questions:

• I am not afraid of trying out new ideas in my job.
• If I make a suggestion to improve something in my department I believe it will be taken seriously.
• I am empowered to make decisions about how I do my work.
• I clearly understand what is expected of me on the job.
• I have all the tools I need to do a great job.
• I am given the chance to fully leverage my talents through my job.

Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

• Women in IT: #3
• Men in IT: #6

Learning and Development

Engagement driver handout

Learning and Development: A cooperative and continuous effort between an employee and the organization to enhance an employee’s skill set and expertise and meet an employee’s career objectives and the organization’s needs.

Questions:

• I can advance my career in this organization.
• I am encouraged to pursue career development activities.
• In the last year, I have received an adequate amount of training.
• In the last year, the training I have received has helped me do my job better.

Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

• Women in IT: #4
• Men in IT: #5

Manager Relationships

Engagement driver handout

Manager Relationships: The professional and personal relationship an employee has with their manager. Manager relationships depend on the trust that exists between these two individuals and the extent that a manager supports and develops the employee.

Questions:

• My manager inspires me to improve.
• My manager provides me with high-quality feedback.
• My manager helps me achieve better results.
• I trust my manager.
• My manager cares about me as a person.
• My manager keeps me well informed about decisions that affect me.

Ranked Correlation of Impact of Engagement Driver on Retention:

• Women in IT: #5
• Men in IT: #11

Step 2.2

Examine employee experience

Activities

2.2.1 Identify moments that matter

Understand why and when employees plan to depart

Leverage “psychology of quitting” expertise.

Train your managers to provide them with the skills and expertise to recognize the warning signs of an employee’s departure and know how to re-engage and retain them.

• The majority of resignations are not spur of the moment. They are the result of a compilation of events over a period of time. Normally, these instances are magnified by a stimulant. The final straw or the breaking point drives the employee to make a change. In fact, it has been estimated that a shock jumpstarts 65% of departures.*
  • These shocks could be a lack of promotion, loss of privilege or development opportunity, or a quarrel with a manager.
• Employees rarely leave right away. Most wait until they have confirmed a new job opportunity before leaving. This creates a window in which you can reengage and retain them.
• The majority of employees show signs that they are beginning to think of leaving. Whether that is leaving immediately, putting in the bare minimum of effort, or job searching online at work. Train your managers to know the signs and to keep an eye out for potentially dissatisfied and searching employees.*
• It is easier and less costly to reengage an employee than to start the hiring process from the beginning.

*Source: The Career Café, 2017

Examine employee experience (EX)

Look beyond engagement drivers to drive retention.

Employee experience (EX) is the employee’s perception of their cumulative lived experiences with the organization. It is gauged by how well the employee’s expectations are met within the parameters of the workplace, especially by the “moments that matter” to them. Individual employee engagement is the outcome of a strong overall EX.

Drive a positive employee experience

Identify moments that matter.

Moments that matter are defining pieces or periods in an employee’s experience that create a critical turning point or memory that is of significant importance to them.

These are moments that dramatically change the path of the emotional journey, influence the quality of the final outcome, or end the journey prematurely.

To identify the moment that matters look for significant drops in the emotional journey that your organization needs to improve or significant bumps that your organization can capitalize on. Look for these drops or bumps in the journey and take stock of everything you have recorded at that point in the process. To improve the experience, analyze the hidden needs and how they are or aren’t being met.

Info-Tech Insight

The moment that matters is key and it could be completely separate from organizational life, like the death of a family member. Leaders can more proactively address these moments that matter by identifying them and determining how to make the touchpoint at that moment more impactful.

2.2.1 Identify moments that matter

1. Review your Employee Experience Monitor weekly trends by logging into your dashboard and clicking on “Time Series Trends.”
2. With your management team, identify any weekly trends where your Employee Experience Score has seen changes in the number of detractor, passive, or promoter responses.
3. For each significant change identify:

• Increase in promoters or decrease in detractors:
• What can we do to duplicate positive moments that occurred this week?
• What did I do as a leader to create positive employee experiences?
• What happened in the organization that created a positive employee experience?
• Increase in detractors or decrease in promoters:
• What difficult change was delivered this week?
• What about this change was negatively perceived?
• During the difficult situation how did we as a leadership team support our staff?
• Who did we engage and recognize during the difficult situation?
• Was this situation a one-off issue or is this likely to occur again?

• How did you promote a positive culture and friendly atmosphere?
• How did you empower female staff to leverage their talents?
• How did you interact with staff?
• How did you promote a positive work environment? Where did you see bias in decisions?

Measured benefits of positive employee experience

Positive employee experiences lead to engaged employees, and engaged employees are eight times more likely to recommend the organization (McLean & Company Employee Engagement Database, 2017; N=74,671).

Retention

Employees who indicate they are having a positive experience at work have a 52% higher level of intent to stay (Great Place To Work Institute, 2021)

The bottom line

Organizations that make employee experience a focus have: 23% higher profitability 10% higher customer loyalty (Achievers, 2021)

Case Study

INDUSTRY: Post-Secondary Education

SOURCE: Adam Grant, “Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior”

The future is here! Is your data architecture practice ready?

Challenge

A university call center, tasked with raising scholarship money from potential donors, had high employee turnover and low morale.

Solution

A study led by Grant arranged for a test group of employees to meet and interact with a scholarship recipient. In the five-minute meeting, employees learned what the student was studying.

Results

Demonstrating the purpose behind their work had significant returns. Employees who had met with the student demonstrated:

More than two times longer “talk time” with potential donors.

A productivity increase of 400%: the weekly average in donations went from $185.94 to $503.22 for test-group employees.

Enhance your retention strategies

Do not wait until employees leave to find out what they were unhappy with or why they liked the organization. Instead, perform stay interviews with top and core talent to create a holistic understanding of what they are perceiving and feeling.

Conduct stay interviews

What is a stay interview?

A stay interview is a conversation with current employees. It should be performed on a yearly basis and is an informal discussion to generate deeper insight into the employee’s opinions, perspectives, concerns, and complaints. Stay interviews can have a multitude of uses. In this project they will be used to understand why top and core talent chose to stay with the organization to ensure that organizations understand and build upon their current strengths.

When should you do stay interviews?

We recommend completing stay interviews at least on an annual, if not quarterly, basis to truly understand how staff are feeling about the organization and their job, why they stay at the organization, and what would cause them to leave. Couple the outcomes of these interviews with employee engagement action planning to ensure that you are able to address talent needs.

Step 2.3

Conduct stay interviews and learn why employees stay

Activities

2.3.1 Conduct stay interviews

Conduct regular “stay” or “retention” interviews

Build stay interviews into the regular routine. By incorporating stay interviews into your schedule, they are more likely to stick. This regularity provides several advantages:

1. Ensures that retention issues do not take you by surprise. With a finger on the pulse of the organization you will be aware of potential issues.
2. Acts as a supplement to the engagement survey by providing additional information and context for the current level of emotion within the organization.
3. Begins to build a wealth of information that can be analyzed to identify themes and trends. This can be used to track whether the reasons why individuals stay are consistent or if are they changing. This will ensure that the retention strategy remains up to date.

Stay interview best practices:

• Ideally is performed by managers, but can be performed by HR.
• Ideally completed by managers as they are more familiar with their employees, have a greater reach, can hold meetings in a more informal setting, and will receive information first hand.
• If conducted by managers, it’s a best practice to ensure that there is a central repository of themes so that you can identify if there are any trends in the responses, that consistent questions are asked, and that all of the information is in one place
• Should be an informal conversation.
• Should be conducted in a non-critical time in the business year.
• Ask three types of questions:
• What do you enjoy about working here?
• What would you change about your working environment?
• What would encourage or force you to leave the organization?
• Interview a diverse employee base:
• Demographics
• Role
• Performance level
• Location

Source: Talent Management & HT, 2013

Leverage stay interviews

Use Info-Tech’s Stay Interview Guide.

Proactively identify opportunities to drive retention.

The Stay Interview Guide helps managers conduct interviews with current employees, enabling the manager to understand:

• The employee's current engagement level.
• The employee's satisfaction with current role and responsibilities.
• Suggestions for potential improvements.
• An employee's intent to stay with the organization.

Use this template to help you understand how you can best engage your employees and identify any challenges, in terms of moments that mattered, that negatively impacted their intention to stay at the organization.

2.3.1 Conduct stay interviews

1. If you are using the Employee Experience Monitor, prepare for your stay interviews by reviewing your results and identifying if there have been any changes in the results over the previous six weeks. Identify which demographics have the highest and lowest engagement levels – and identify any changes in experience between different demographics.
2. Identify a meeting schedule and cadence that seems appropriate for your stay interviews. For example, you likely will not do all staff at the same time and it may be beneficial to space out your meetings throughout the year. Select a candidate for your first stay interview and invite them for a one-on-one meeting. If it’s unusual for you to meet with this employee, we recommend providing some light context around the rationale, such as that you are looking for opportunities to strengthen the organizational culture and better understand how you can improve retention and engagement at the organization.
3. Download the Stay Interview Template, review all of the questions beforehand, and identify the key questions that you want to ask in the meeting.

• TIP: Even though this is called a “stay interview,” really it should be more of a conversation, and certainly not an interrogation. Know the questions you want to ask, and ask your staff member if it’s ok if you jot down some notes. It may even be beneficial to have the meeting outside of the office, over lunch, or out for coffee.

Download the Stay Interview Guide

Ten tips for best managing stay interviews

Although stay interviews are meant to be informal, you should schedule them as you would any other meeting. Simply invite the employee for a chat.

1. Step out of the office if possible. Opt for your local coffee shop, a casual lunch destination, or another public but informal location.
2. Keep the conversation short, no more than 15 to 20 minutes. If there are any areas of concern that you think warrant action, ask the employee if they would like to discuss them another time. Suggest another meeting to delve deeper into specific issues.
3. Be clear about the purpose of the conversation. Stay interviews are not performance reviews.
4. Focus on what you can do for them. Ask about the employee’s preferences when it comes to feedback and communication (frequency, method, etc.) as well as development (preferences around methods, e.g. coaching or rotations, and personal goals).
5. Be positive. Ask your employee what they like about their job and use positively framed questions.
6. Ask about what they like doing. People enjoy talking about what they like to do. Ask employees about the talents and skills they would like to incorporate into their work duties.
7. Show that you’re listening – paraphrase, ask for clarification, and use appropriate gestures.
8. Refrain from taking notes during the meeting to preserve a conversational atmosphere.
9. Pay attention to the employee’s body language and tone. If it appears that they are uncomfortable talking to you, stop the interview or pause to let them collect themselves.
10. Be open to suggestions, but remember that you can’t control everything. If the employee brings up issues that are beyond your control, tell them that you will do all you can to improve the situation but can’t guarantee anything.

Related Info-Tech Research

Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

• To stay competitive, IT leaders need to be more involved and commit to a plan to recruit and retain people of color in their departments and organizations. A diverse team is an answer to innovation that can differentiate your company.
• Treat recruiting and retaining a diverse team as a business challenge that requires full engagement. Info-Tech offers a targeted solution that will help IT leaders build a plan to attract, recruit, engage, and retain people of color.

Recruit Top IT Talent

• Changing workforce dynamics and increased transparency have shifted the power from employers to job seekers, stiffening the competition for talent.
• Candidate expectations match high consumer expectations and affect the employer brand, the consumer brand, and overall organizational reputation. Delivering a positive candidate experience (CX2) is no longer optional.

Acquire the Right Hires with Effective Interviewing

• Talk is cheap. Hiring isn’t.
• Gain insight into and understand the need for a strong interview process.
• Strategize and plan your interview process.
• Understand various hiring scenarios and how an interview process may be modified to reflect your organization’s scenario.

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Lucas, Suzanne. “How Much Employee Turnover Really Costs You.” Inc., 30 Aug. 2013. Web.

Marttila, Paula. “5 Step Action Plan To Attract Women Join Tech Startups.” LinkedIn, 10 March 2016. Web.

Mayor, Tracy. “Women in IT: How deep is the bench?” Computerworld, 19 Nov. 2012. Web.

McCracken, Douglas M. “Winning the Talent War for Women: Sometimes It Takes a Revolution.” Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec. 2000. Web.

McDonald’s Careers. McDonald’s, n.d. Web.

McFeely, Shane, and Ben Wigert. “This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion.” Gallup, Inc., 31 March 2019. Accessed 4 March 2022.

Morgan, Jacob. The Employee Experience Advantage: How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces they Want, the Tools they Need, and a Culture They Can Celebrate. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017. Print.

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Tell Your Story With Data Visualization

Build trust with your stakeholders.

Analyst Perspective

Build trust with your stakeholders.

Data visualization refers to graphical representations of data which help an audience understand. Without good storytelling, however, these representations can distract an audience with enormous amounts of data or even lead them to incorrect conclusions.

Good storytelling with data visualization involves identifying the business problem, exploring potential drivers, formulating a hypothesis, and creating meaningful narratives and powerful visuals that resonate with all audiences and ultimately lead to clear actionable insights.

Follow Info-Tech's step-by-step approach to address the business bias of tacit experience over data facts, improve analysts' effectiveness and support better decision making.

Ibrahim Abdel-Kader
Research Analyst,
Data, Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture

Nikitha Patel
Research Specialist,
Data, Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture

Ruyi Sun
Research Specialist,
Data, Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture

Our understanding of the problem

This research is designed for

• Business analysts, data analysts, or their equivalent who (in either a centralized or federated operating model) look to solve challenging business problems more effectively and improve communication with audiences by demonstrating significant insights through visual data storytelling.

This research will also assist

• A CIO or business unit (BU) leader looking to improve reporting and analytics, reduce time to information, and embrace decision making.

This research will help you

• Identify the business problem and root causes that you are looking to address for key stakeholders.
• Improve business decision making through effective data storytelling.
• Focus on insight generation rather than report production.
• Apply design thinking principles to support the collection of different perspectives.

This research will help them

• Understand the report quickly and efficiently, regardless of their data literacy level.
• Grasp the current situation of data within the organization.

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight
As organizations strive to become more data-driven, good storytelling with data visualization supports growing corporate data literacy and helps analysts provide insights that improve organizational decision-making and value-driving processes, which ultimately boosts business performance.

Glossary

• Data: Facts or figures, especially those stored in a computer, that can be used for calculating, reasoning, or planning. When data is processed, organized, structured, or presented in a given context to make it useful, it is called information. Data leaders are accountable for certain data domains and sets.
• Data storytelling: The ability to create a narrative powered by data and analytics that supports the hypothesis and intent of the story. Narrators of the story should deliver a significant view of the message in a way easily understood by the target audience. Data visualization can be used as a tactic to enhance storytelling.
• Data visualization: The ability to visually represent a complete story to the target audience powered by data & analytics, using data storytelling as an enabling mechanism to convey narratives. Typically, there are two types of visuals used as part of data visualization: explanatory/informative visuals (the entire story or specific aspects delivered to the audience) and exploratory visuals (the collected data used to clarify what questions must be answered).
• Data literacy: The ability to read, work with, analyze, and argue with data. Easy access to data is essential to exercising these skills. All organizational employees involved with data-driven decisions should learn to think critically about the data they use for analytics and how they assess and interpret the results of their work.
• Data quality: A measure of the condition of data based on factors such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, reliability, and being up-to-date. This is about how well-suited a data set is to serve its intended purpose, therefore business users and stakeholders set the standards for what is good enough. The governance function along with IT ensures that data quality measures are applied, and corrective actions taken.
• Analytics/Business intelligence (BI): A technology-driven process for analyzing data and delivering actionable information that helps executives, managers, and workers make informed business decisions. As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, run queries against the data, and create data visualizations.
  Note: In some frameworks, analytics and BI refer to different types of analyses (i.e. analytics predict future outcomes, BI describes what is or has been).

Getting value out of effective storytelling with data visualization

Data storytelling is gaining wide recognition as a tool for supporting businesses in driving data insights and making better strategic decisions.

92% of respondents agreed that data storytelling is an effective way of communicating or delivering data and analytics results.

87% of respondents agreed that if insights were presented in a simpler/clearer manner, their organization's leadership team would make more data-driven decisions.

93% of respondents agreed that decisions made based on successful data storytelling could potentially help increase revenue.

Source: Exasol, 2021

Despite organizations recognizing the value of data storytelling, issues remain which cannot be remedied solely with better technology.

61% Top challenges of conveying important insights through dashboards are lack of context (61%), over-communication (54%), and inability to customize contents for intended audiences (46%).

49% of respondents feel their organizations lack storytelling skills, regardless of whether employees are data literate.

Source: Exasol, 2021

Info-Tech Insight
Storytelling is a key component of data literacy. Although enterprises are increasingly investing in data analytics software, only 21% of employees are confident with their data literacy skills. (Accenture, 2020)

Prerequisite Checklist

Before applying Info-Tech's storytelling methodology, you should have addressed the following criteria:

• Select the right data visualization tools.
• Have the necessary training in statistical analysis and data visualization technology.
• Have competent levels of data literacy.
• Good quality data founded on data governance and data architecture best practices.

To get a complete view of the field you want to explore, please refer to the following Info-Tech resources:

Select and Implement a Reporting and Analytics Solution

Build a Data Architecture Roadmap

Establish Data Governance

Build Your Data Quality Program

Foster Data-Driven Culture With Data Literacy

Info-Tech's Storytelling With Data Visualization Framework

Info-Tech Insight
As organizations strive to become more data-driven, good storytelling with data visualization supports growing corporate data literacy and helps analysts provide insights that improve organizational decision-making and value-driving processes, which ultimately boosts business performance.

Research Benefits

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Define Service Desk Metrics That Matter

Look beyond benchmarks and rely on internal metrics to drive success.

Analyst Perspective

Don’t get paralyzed by benchmarks when establishing metrics

When establishing a suite of metrics to track, it’s tempting to start with the metrics measured by other organizations. Naturally, benchmarking will enter the conversation. While benchmarking is useful, measuring you organization against others with a lack of context will only highlight your failures. Furthermore, benchmarks will highlight the norm or common practice. It does not necessarily highlight best practice.

Keeping the limitations of benchmarking in mind, establish your own metrics suite with action-based metrics. Define the audience, cadence, and actions for each metric you track and pair them with business goals. Measure only what you need to.

Slowly improve your metrics process over time and analyze your environment using your own data as your benchmark.

Benedict Chang

Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations

Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Measure the business value provided by the service desk.
• Consolidate your metrics and assign context and actions to ones currently tracked.
• Establish tension metrics to see and tell the whole story.
• Split your metrics for each stakeholder group. Assign proper cadences for measurements as a first step to building an effective dashboard or effective dashboards.

Common Obstacles

• Becoming too focused on benchmarks or unidimensional metrics (e.g. cost, first-contact resolution, time to resolve) can lead to misinterpretation of the data and poorly informed actions.
• Sifting through the many sources of data post hoc can lead to stalling in data analysis or slow reaction times to poor metrics.
• Dashboards can quickly become cluttered with uninformative metrics, thus reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of meaningful data.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Use metrics that drive productive change and improvement. Track only what you need to report on.
• Ensure each metric aligns with the desired business goal, is action-based, and includes the answers to what, why, how, and who.
• Establish internal benchmarks by analyzing the trends from your own data to set baselines.
• Act on the results of your metrics by adjusting targets and measuring success.

Info-Tech Insight

Identify the metrics that serve a real purpose and eliminate the rest. Establish a formal review process to ensure metrics are still valid, continue to provide the answers needed, and are at a manageable and usable level.

Improve your metrics to align IT with strategic business goals

The right metrics can tell the business how hard IT works and how well they perform.

• Only 19% of CXOs feel that their organization is effective at measuring the success of IT projects with their current metrics.
• Implementing the proper metrics can facilitate communication between the business division and IT practice.
• The proper metrics can help IT know what issues the business has and how the CEO and CIO should tackle them.
• If the goals above resonate with your organization, our blueprint Take Control of Infrastructure and Operations Metrics will take you through the right steps.

Current Metrics Suite

19% Effective

36% Some Improvement Necessary

45% Significant Improvement Necessary

Source: Info-Tech Research Group’s CEO/CIO Alignment Diagnostic, 2019; N=622

CXOs stress that value is the most critical area for IT to improve in reporting

• You most likely have to improve your metrics suite by addressing business value.
• Over 80% of organizations say they need improvement to their business value metrics, with 32% of organizations reporting that significant improvement is needed.
• Of course, measuring metrics for service desk operations is important, but don’t forget business-oriented metrics such as measuring knowledgebase articles written for shift-left enablement, cost (time and money) of service desk tickets, and overall end-user satisfaction.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group’s CEO/CIO Alignment Diagnostic, 2019; N=622

Benchmarking used in isolation will not tell the whole story

Benchmarks can be used as a step in the metrics process

They can be the first step to reach an end goal, but if benchmarks are observed in isolation, it will only highlight your failures.

Benchmarking relies on standardized models

This does not account for all the unique variables that make up an IT organization.

For example, benchmarks that include cost and revenue may include organizations that prioritize first-call resolution (FCR), but the variables that make up this benchmark model will be quite different within your own organization.

Info-Tech Insight

Benchmarks reflect the norm and common practice, not best practice.

Benchmarks are open to interpretation

Taking the time to establish proper metrics is often more valuable time spent than going down the benchmark rabbit hole.

Being above or below the norm is neither a good nor a bad thing.

Determining what the results mean for you depends on what’s being measured and the unique factors, characteristics, and priorities in your organization.

If benchmark data is a priority within your IT organization, you may look up organizations like MetricNet, but keep the following in mind:

Review the collected benchmark data

See where IT organizations in your industry typically stand in relation to the overall benchmark.

Assess the gaps

Large gaps between yourself and the overall benchmark could indicate areas for improvement or celebration. Use the data to focus your analysis, develop deeper self-awareness, and prioritize areas for potential concern.

Benchmarks are only guidelines

The benchmark source data may not come from true peers in every sense. Each organization is different, so always explore your unique context when interpreting any findings.

Rely on internal metrics to measure and improve performance

Measure internal metrics over time to define goals and drive real improvement

• Internally measured metrics are more reliable because they provide information about your actual performance over time. This allows for targeted improvements and objective measurements of your milestones.
• Whether a given metric is the right one for your service desk will depend on several different factors, including:
  • The maturity and capability of your service desk processes
  • The volume of service requests and incidents
  • The complexity of your environment when resolving tickets
  • The degree to which your end users are comfortable with self-service

Take Info-Tech’s approach to metrics management

Use metrics that drive productive change and improvement. Track only what you need to report on.

Ensure each metric aligns with the desired business goal, is action-based, and includes the answers to what, why, how, and who.

Establish internal benchmarks by analyzing the trends from your own data to set baselines.

Act on the results of your metrics by adjusting targets and measuring success.

Define action-based metrics to cut down on analysis paralysis

Every metric needs to be backed with the following criteria:

• Defining audience, cadence, goal, and action for each metric allows you to keep your tracked metrics to a minimum while maximizing the value.
• The audience and cadence of each metric may allow you to define targeted dashboards.

Audience - Who is this metric tracked for?

Goal - Why are you tracking this metric? This can be defined along with the CSFs and KPIs.

Cadence - How often are you going to view, analyze, and action this metric?

Action - What will you do if this metric spikes, dips, trends up, or trends down?

Activity 1. Define your critical success factors and key performance indicators

Critical success factors (CSFs) are high-level goals that help you define the direction of your service desk. Key performance indicators (KPIs) can be treated as the trend of metrics that will indicate that you are moving in the direction of your CSFs. These will help narrow the data you have to track and action (metrics).

CSFs, or your overall goals, typically revolve around three aspects of the service desk: time spent on tickets, resources spent on tickets, and the quality of service provided.

1. As a group, brainstorm the CSFs and the KPIs that will help narrow your metrics. Use the Service Desk Metrics Workbook to record the results.
2. Look at the example to the right as a starting point.

Example metrics:

Download the Service Desk Metrics Workbook

Activity 2. Define action-based metrics that align with your KPIs and CSFs

1. Now that you have defined your goals, continue to fill the workbook by choosing metrics that align with those goals.
2. Use the chart below as a guide. For every metric, define the cadence of measurement, audience of the metric, and action associated with the metric. There may be multiple metrics for each KPI.
3. If you find you are unable to define the cadence, audience, or action associated with a metric, you may not need to track the metric in the first place. Alternatively, if you find that you may action a metric in the future, you can decide to start gathering data now.

Example metrics:

Download the Service Desk Metrics Workbook

Activity 3. Define the data ownership, metric viability, and dashboards

1. For each metric, define where the data is housed. Ideally, the data is directly in the ticketing tool or ITSM tool. This will make it easy to pull and analyze.
2. Determine how difficult the metric will be to pull or track. If the effort is high, decide if the value of tracking the metric is worth the hassle of gathering it.
3. Lastly, for each metric, use the cadence and audience to place the metric in a reporting dashboard. This will help divide your metrics and make them easier to report and action.
4. You may use the output of this exercise to add your tracked metrics to your service desk SOP.
5. A full suite of metrics can be found in our Infrastructure & Operations Metrics Library in the Take Control of Infrastructure Metrics Storyboard. The metrics have been categorized by low, medium, and advanced capabilities for you.

Example metrics:

Download the Service Desk Metrics Workbook

Keep the following considerations in mind when defining which metrics matter

Keep the customer in mind

Metrics are typically focused on transactional efficiency and process effectiveness and not what was achieved against the customers’ need and satisfaction.

Understand the relationships between performance and metrics management to provide the end-to-end service delivery picture you are aiming to achieve.

Don’t settle for tool defaults

ITSM solutions offer an abundance of metrics to choose from. The most common ones are typically built into the reporting modules of the tool suite.

Do not start tracking everything. Choose metrics that are specifically aligned to your organization’s desired business outcomes.

Establish tension metrics to achieve balance

Don’t ignore the correlation and context between the suites of metrics chosen and how one interacts and affects the other.

Measuring metrics in isolation may lead to an incomplete picture or undesired technician behavior. Tension metrics help complete the picture and lead to proper actions.

Adjust those targets

An arbitrary target on a metric that is consistently met month over month is useless. Each metric should inform the overall performance by combining capable service level management and customer experience programs to prove the value IT is providing to the organization.

Related Info-Tech Research

Standardize the Service Desk

This project will help you build and improve essential service desk processes, including incident management, request fulfillment, and knowledge management, to create a sustainable service desk.

Take Control of Infrastructure and Operations Metrics

Make faster decisions and improve service delivery by using the right metrics for the job.

Analyze Your Service Desk Ticket Data

Take a data-driven approach to service desk optimization.

IT Diagnostics: Build a Data-Driven IT Strategy

Our data-driven programs ask business and IT stakeholders the right questions to ensure you have the inputs necessary to build an effective IT strategy.

Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management

Design an end-to-end technology strategy to enhance marketing effectiveness, drive sales, and create compelling customer service experiences.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

Technology is the catalyst to create – and keep! – your customers.

"Customers want to interact with your organization on their own terms, and in the channels of their choice (including social media, mobile applications, and connected devices). Regardless of your industry, your customers expect a frictionless experience across the customer lifecycle. They desire personalized and well-targeted marketing messages, straightforward transactions, and effortless service. Research shows that customers value – and will pay more for! – well-designed experiences.

Strong technology enablement is critical for creating customer experiences that drive revenue. However, most organizations struggle with creating a cohesive technology strategy for customer experience management (CXM). IT leaders need to take a proactive approach to developing a strong portfolio of customer interaction applications that are in lockstep with the needs of their marketing, sales, and customer service teams. It is critical to incorporate the voice of the customer into this strategy.

When developing a technology strategy for CXM, don’t just “pave the cow path,” but instead move the needle forward by providing capabilities for customer intelligence, omnichannel interactions, and predictive analytics. This blueprint will help you build an integrated CXM technology roadmap that drives top-line revenue while rationalizing application spend."

Ben Dickie

Research Director, Customer Experience Strategy

Info-Tech Research Group

Framing the CXM project

This Research Is Designed For:

• IT leaders who are responsible for crafting a technology strategy for customer experience management (CXM).
• Applications managers who are involved with the selection and implementation of critical customer-centric applications, such as CRM platforms, marketing automation tools, customer intelligence suites, and customer service solutions.

This Research Will Help You:

• Clearly link your technology-enablement strategy for CXM to strategic business requirements and customer personas.
• Build a rationalized portfolio of enterprise applications that will support customer interaction objectives.
• Adopt standard operating procedures for CXM application deployment that address issues such as end-user adoption and data quality.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• Business leaders in marketing, sales, and customer service who want to deepen their understanding of CXM technologies, and apply best practices for using these technologies to drive competitive advantage.
• Marketing, sales, and customer service managers involved with defining requirements and rolling out CXM applications.

This Research Will Help Them:

• Work hand-in-hand with counterparts in IT to deploy high-value business applications that will improve core customer-facing metrics.
• Understand the changing CXM landscape and use the art of the possible to transform the internal technology ecosystem and drive meaningful customer experiences.

Executive summary

Situation

• Customer expectations for personalization, channel preferences, and speed-to-resolution are at an all-time high.
• Your customers are willing to pay more for high-value experiences, and having a strong customer CXM strategy is a proven path to creating sustainable value for the organization.

Complication

• Technology is a fundamental enabler of an organization’s CXM strategy. However, many IT departments fail to take a systematic approach to building a portfolio of applications to support Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service.
• The result is a costly, ineffective, and piecemeal approach to CXM application deployment (including high profile applications like CRM).

Resolution

• IT must work in lockstep with their counterparts in marketing, sales, and customer service to define a unified vision, strategic requirements and roadmap for enabling strong customer experience capabilities.
• In order to deploy applications that don’t simply follow previously established patterns but are aligned with the specific needs of the organization’s customers, IT leaders must work with the business to define and understand customer personas and common interaction scenarios. CXM applications are mission critical and failing to link them to customer needs can have a detrimental effect on customer satisfaction – and ultimately revenue.
• IT must act as a valued partner to the business in creating a portfolio of CXM applications that are cost effective.
• Organizations should create a repeatable framework for CXM application deployment that addresses critical issues, including the integration ecosystem, customer data quality, dashboards and analytics, and end-user adoption.

Info-Tech Insight

1. IT can’t hide behind the firewall. IT must understand the organization’s customers to properly support marketing, sales, and service efforts.
2. IT – or Marketing – must not build the CXM strategy in a vacuum if they want to achieve a holistic, consistent, and seamless customer experience.
3. IT must get ahead of shadow IT. To be seen as an innovator within the business, IT must be a leading enabler in building a rationalized and integrated CXM application portfolio.

Guide to frequently used acronyms

CXM - Customer Experience Management

CX - Customer Experience

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

CSM - Customer Service Management

MMS - Marketing Management System

SMMP - Social Media Management Platform

RFP - Request for Proposal

SaaS - Software as a Service

Customers’ expectations are on the rise: meet them!

Today’s consumers expect speed, convenience, and tailored experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Successful organizations strive to support these expectations.

67% of end consumers will pay more for a world-class customer experience. 74% of business buyers will pay more for strong B2B experiences. (Salesforce, 2018)

5 CORE CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

1. More personalization
2. More product options
3. Constant contact
4. Listen closely, respond quickly
5. Give front-liners more control

(Customer Experience Insight, 2016)

Customers expect to interact with organizations through the channels of their choice. Now more than ever, you must enable your organization to provide tailored customer experiences.

Realize measurable value by enabling CXM

Providing a seamless customer experience increases the likelihood of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and boosts customer loyalty and retention. IT can contribute to driving revenue and decreasing costs by providing the business with the right set of tools, applications, and technical support.

Contribute to the bottom line

Cross-sell, up-sell, and drive customer acquisition.

67% of consumers are willing to pay more for an upgraded experience. (Salesforce, 2018)

80%: The margin by which CX leaders outperformer laggards in the S&P 500.(Qualtrics, 2017)

59% of customers say tailored engagement based on past interactions is very important to winning their business. (Salesforce, 2018)

Enable cost savings

Focus on customer retention as well as acquisition.

It is 6-7x more costly to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer. (Salesforce Blog, 2019)

A 5% increase in customer retention has been found to increase profits by 25% to 95%. (Bain & Company, n.d.)

Strategic CXM is gaining traction with your competition

Organizations are prioritizing CXM capabilities (and associated technologies) as a strategic investment. Keep pace with the competition and gain a competitive advantage by creating a cohesive strategy that uses best practices to integrate marketing, sales, and customer support functions.

87% of customers share great experiences they’ve had with a company. (Zendesk, n.d.)

61% of organizations are investing in CXM. (CX Network, 2015)

53% of organizations believe CXM provides a competitive advantage. (Harvard Business Review, 2014)

Top Investment Priorities for Customer Experience

1. Voice of the Customer
2. Customer Insight Generation
3. Customer Experience Governance
4. Customer Journey Mapping
5. Online Customer Experience
6. Experience Personalization
7. Emotional Engagement
8. Multi-Channel Integration/Omnichannel
9. Quality & Customer Satisfaction Management
10. Customer/Channel Loyalty & Rewards Programs

(CX Network 2015)

Omnichannel is the way of the future: don’t be left behind

Get ahead of the competition by doing omnichannel right. Devise a CXM strategy that allows you to create and maintain a consistent, seamless customer experience by optimizing operations within an omnichannel framework. Customers want to interact with you on their own terms, and it falls to IT to ensure that applications are in place to support and manage a wide range of interaction channels.

Omnichannel is a “multi-channel approach to sales that seeks to provide the customer with a seamless transactional experience whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a bricks and mortar store.” (TechTarget, 2014)

97% of companies say that they are investing in omnichannel. (Huffington Post, 2015)

23% of companies are doing omnichannel well.

CXM applications drive effective multi-channel customer interactions across marketing, sales, and customer service

The success of your CXM strategy depends on the effective interaction of various marketing, sales, and customer support functions. To deliver on customer experience, organizations need to take a customer-centric approach to operations.

From an application perspective, a CRM platform generally serves as the unifying repository of customer information, supported by adjacent solutions as warranted by your CXM objectives.

CXM ECOSYSTEM

Customer Relationship Management Platform

• Web Experience Management Platform
• E-Commerce & Point of Sale Solutions
• Social Media Management Platform
• Customer Intelligence Platform
• Customer Service Management Tools
• Marketing Management Suite

Application spotlight: Customer experience platforms

Description

CXM solutions are a broad range of tools that provide comprehensive feature sets for supporting customer interaction processes. These suites supplant more basic applications for customer interaction management. Popular solutions that fall under the umbrella of CXM include CRM suites, marketing automation tools, and customer service applications.

Features and Capabilities

• Manage sales pipelines, provide quotes, and track client deliverables.
• View all opportunities organized by their current stage in the sales process.
• View all interactions that have occurred between employees and the customer, including purchase order history.
• Manage outbound marketing campaigns via multiple channels (email, phone, social, mobile).
• Build visual workflows with automated trigger points and business rules engine.
• Generate in-depth customer insights, audience segmentation, predictive analytics, and contextual analytics.
• Provide case management, ticketing, and escalation capabilities for customer service.

Highlighted Vendors

Microsoft Dynamics

Adobe

Marketo

sprinklr

Salesforce

SugarCRM

Application spotlight: Customer experience platforms

Key Trends

• CXM applications have decreased their focus on departmental silos to make it easier to share information across the organization as departments demand more data.
• Vendors are developing deeper support of newer channels for customer interaction. This includes providing support for social media channels, native mobile applications, and SMS or text-based services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
• Predictive campaigns and channel blending are becoming more feasible as vendors integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence into their applications.
• Content blocks are being placed on top of scripting languages to allow for user-friendly interfaces. There is a focus on alleviating bottlenecks where content would have previously needed to go through a specialist.
• Many vendors of CXM applications are placing increased emphasis on strong application integration both within and beyond their portfolios, with systems like ERP and order fulfillment.

Link to Digital Strategy

• For many organizations that are building out a digital strategy, improving customer experience is often a driving factor: CXM apps enable this goal.
• As part of a digital strategy, create a comprehensive CXM application portfolio by leveraging both core CRM suites and point solutions.
• Ensure that a point solution aligns with the digital strategy’s technology drivers and user personas.

CXM KPIs

Strong CXM applications can improve:

• Lead Intake Volume
• Lead Conversion Rate
• Average Time to Resolution
• First-Contact Resolution Rate
• Customer Satisfaction Rate
• Share-of-Mind
• Share-of-Wallet
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Aggregate Reach/Impressions

IT is critical to the success of your CXM strategy

Technology is the key enabler of building strong customer experiences: IT must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the business to develop a technology framework for CXM.

Top 5 Challenges with CXM for Marketing

1. Maximizing customer experience ROI
2. Achieving a single view of the customer
3. Building new customer experiences
4. Cultivating a customer-focused culture
5. Measuring CX investments to business outcomes

Top 5 Obstacles to Enabling CXM for IT

1. Systems integration
2. Multichannel complexity
3. Organizational structure
4. Data-related issues
5. Lack of strategy

(Harvard Business Review, 2014)

Only 19% of organizations have a customer experience team tasked with bridging gaps between departments. (Genesys, 2018)

IT and Marketing can only tackle CXM with the full support of each other. The cooperation of the departments is crucial when trying to improve CXM technology capabilities and customer interaction and drive a strong revenue mandate.

CXM failure: Blockbuster

CASE STUDY

Industry Entertainment

Source Forbes, 2014

Blockbuster

As the leader of the video retail industry, Blockbuster had thousands of retail locations internationally and millions of customers. Blockbuster’s massive marketing budget and efficient operations allowed it to dominate the competition for years.

Situation

Trends in Blockbuster’s consumer market changed in terms of distribution channels and customer experience. As the digital age emerged and developed, consumers were looking for immediacy and convenience. This threatened Blockbuster’s traditional, brick-and-mortar B2C operating model.

The Competition

Netflix entered the video retail market, making itself accessible through non-traditional channels (direct mail, and eventually, the internet).

Results

Despite long-term relationships with customers and competitive standing in the market, Blockbuster’s inability to understand and respond to changing technology trends and customer demands led to its demise. The organization did not effectively leverage internal or external networks or technology to adapt to customer demands. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010.

Customer Relationship Management

• Web Experience Management Platform
• E-Commerce & Point of Sale Solutions
• Social Media Management
• Customer Intelligence
• Customer Service
• Marketing Management

Blockbuster did not leverage emerging technologies to effectively respond to trends in its consumer network. It did not optimize organizational effectiveness around customer experience.

CXM success: Netflix

CASE STUDY

Industry Entertainment

Source Forbes, 2014

Netflix

Beginning as a mail-out service, Netflix offered subscribers a catalog of videos to select from and have mailed to them directly. Customers no longer had to go to a retail store to rent a video. However, the lack of immediacy of direct mail as the distribution channel resulted in slow adoption.

The Situation

In response to the increasing presence of tech-savvy consumers on the internet, Netflix invested in developing its online platform as its primary distribution channel. The benefit of doing so was two-fold: passive brand advertising (by being present on the internet) and meeting customer demands for immediacy and convenience. Netflix also recognized the rising demand for personalized service and created an unprecedented, tailored customer experience.

The Competition

Blockbuster was the industry leader in video retail but was lagging in its response to industry, consumer, and technology trends around customer experience.

Results

Netflix’s disruptive innovation is built on the foundation of great CXM. Netflix is now a $28 billion company, which is tenfold what Blockbuster was worth.

Customer Relationship Management Platform

• Web Experience Management Platform
• E-Commerce & Point of Sale Solutions
• Social Media Management Platform
• Customer Intelligence Platform
• Customer Service Management Tools
• Marketing Management Suite

Netflix used disruptive technologies to innovatively build a customer experience that put it ahead of the long-time, video rental industry leader, Blockbuster.

Leverage Info-Tech’s approach to succeed with CXM

Creating an end-to-end technology-enablement strategy for CXM requires a concerted, dedicated effort: Info-Tech can help with our proven approach.

Build the CXM Project Charter

Conduct a Thorough Environmental Scan

Build Customer Personas and Scenarios

Draft Strategic CXM Requirements

Build the CXM Application Portfolio

Implement Operational Best Practices

Why Info-Tech’s Approach?

Info-Tech draws on best-practice research and the experiences of our global member base to develop a methodology for CXM that is driven by rigorous customer-centric analysis.

Our approach uses a unique combination of techniques to ensure that your team has done its due diligence in crafting a forward-thinking technology-enablement strategy for CXM that creates measurable value.

A global professional services firm drives measurable value for CXM by using persona design and scenario development

CASE STUDY

Industry Professionals Services

Source Info-Tech Workshop

The Situation

A global professional services firm in the B2B space was experiencing a fragmented approach to customer engagement, particularly in the pre-sales funnel. Legacy applications weren’t keeping pace with an increased demand for lead evaluation and routing technology. Web experience management was also an area of significant concern, with a lack of ongoing customer engagement through the existing web portal.

The Approach

Working with a team of Info-Tech facilitators, the company was able to develop several internal and external customer personas. These personas formed the basis of strategic requirements for a new CXM application stack, which involved dedicated platforms for core CRM, lead automation, web content management, and site analytics.

Results

Customer “stickiness” metrics increased, and Sales reported significantly higher turnaround times in lead evaluations, resulting in improved rep productivity and faster cycle times.

Follow Info-Tech’s approach to build your CXM foundation

Create the Project Vision

• Identify business and IT drivers
• Outputs:
  • CXM Strategy Guiding Principles

Structure the Project

• Identify goals and objectives for CXM project
• Form Project Team
• Establish timeline
• Obtain project sponsorship
• Outputs:
  • CXM Strategy Project Charter

Scan the External Environment

• Create CXM operating model
• Conduct external analysis
• Create customer personas
• Outputs:
  • CXM Operating Model

• Conduct PEST analysis
• Create persona scenarios
• Outputs:
  • CXM Strategic Requirements

Assess the Current State of CXM

• Conduct SWOT analysis
• Assess application usage and satisfaction
• Conduct VRIO analysis
• Outputs:
  • CXM Strategic Requirements

Create an Application Portfolio

• Map current processes
• Assign business process owners
• Create channel map
• Build CXM application portfolio
• Outputs:
  • CXM Application Portfolio Map

Develop Deployment Best Practices

• Develop CXM integration map
• Create mitigation plan for poor data quality
• Outputs:
  • Data Quality Preservation Map

Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

• Create risk management plan
• Identify work initiative dependencies
• Create roadmap
• Outputs:
  • CXM Initiative Roadmap

Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

• Identify success metrics
• Create stakeholder communication plan
• Present CXM strategy to stakeholders
• Outputs:
  • Stakeholder Presentation

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Build a Strong Technology Foundation for CXM – project overview

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

Phase 1

Drive Measurable Value With a World-Class CXM Program

Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management

Phase 1 outline

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Guided Implementation 1: Drive Measurable Value With a World-Class CXM Program

Proposed Time to Completion: 2 weeks

Step 1.1: Create the Project Vision

Start with an analyst kick-off call:

• Review key drivers from a technology and business perspective for CXM
• Discuss benefits of strong technology enablement for CXM

Then complete these activities…

• CXM Fireside Chat
• CXM Business and Technology Driver Assessment
• CXM Vision Statement

With these tools & templates:

• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

Step 1.2: Structure the Project

Review findings with analyst:

• Assess the CXM vision statement for competitive differentiators
• Determine current alignment disposition of IT with different business units

Then complete these activities…

• Team Composition and Responsibilities
• Metrics Definition

With these tools & templates:

• CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

Phase 1 Results & Insights:

• Defined value of strong technology enablement for CXM
• Completed CXM project charter

Step 1.1: Create the Project Vision

Phase 1

1.1 Create the Project Vision

1.2 Structure the Project

Phase 2

2.1 Scan the External Environment

2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

Phase 3

3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

Activities:

• Fireside Chat: Discuss past challenges and successes with CXM
• Identify business and IT drivers to establish guiding principles for CXM

Outcomes:

• Business benefits of a rationalized technology strategy to support CXM
• Shared lessons learned
• Guiding principles for providing technology enablement for CXM

Building a technology strategy to support customer experience isn’t an option – it’s a mission-critical activity

• Customer-facing departments supply the lifeblood of a company: revenue. In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, it’s becoming increasingly imperative to enable customer experience processes with a wide range of technologies, from lead automation to social relationship management. CXM is the holistic management of customer interaction processes across marketing, sales, and customer service to create valuable, mutually beneficial customer experiences. Technology is a critical building block for enabling CXM.
• The parallel progress of technology and process improvement is essential to an efficient and effective CXM program. While many executives prefer to remain at the status quo, new technologies have caused major shifts in the CXM environment. If you stay with the status quo, you will fall behind the competition.
• However, many IT departments are struggling to keep up with the pace of change and find themselves more of a firefighter than a strategic partner to marketing, sales, and service teams. This not only hurts the business, but it also tarnishes IT’s reputation.

An aligned, optimized CX strategy is:

Rapid: to intentionally and strategically respond to quickly-changing opportunities and issues.

Outcome-based: to make key decisions based on strong business cases, data, and analytics in addition to intuition and judgment.

Rigorous: to bring discipline and science to bear; to improve operations and results.

Collaborative: to conduct activities in a broader ecosystem of partners, suppliers, vendors, co-developers, and even competitors.

(The Wall Street Journal, 2013)

Info-Tech Insight

If IT fails to adequately support marketing, sales, and customer service teams, the organization’s revenue will be in direct jeopardy. As a result, CIOs and Applications Directors must work with their counterparts in these departments to craft a cohesive and comprehensive strategy for using technology to create meaningful (and profitable) customer experiences.

Fireside Chat, Part 1: When was technology an impediment to customer experience at your organization?

1.1.1 30 minutes

Input

• Past experiences of the team

Output

• Lessons learned

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Core Team

Instructions

1. Think about a time when technology was an impediment to a positive customer experience at your organization. Reflect on the following:
   • What frustrations did the application or the technology cause to your customers? What was their reaction?
   • How did IT (and the business) identify the challenge in the first place?
   • What steps were taken to mitigate the impact of the problem? Were these steps successful?
   • What were the key lessons learned as part of the challenge?

Fireside Chat, Part 2: What customer success stories has your organization created by using new technologies?

1.1.2 30 minutes

Input

• Past experiences of the team

Output

• Lessons learned

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Core Team

Instructions

1. Think about a time when your organization successfully leveraged a new application or new technology to enhance the experience it provided to customers. Reflect on this experience and consider:
   • What were the organizational drivers for rolling out the new application or solution?
   • What obstacles had to be overcome in order to successfully deploy the solution?
   • How did the application positively impact the customer experience? What metrics improved?
   • What were the key lessons learned as part of the deployment? If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Develop a cohesive, consistent, and forward-looking roadmap that supports each stage of the customer lifecycle

When creating your roadmap, consider the pitfalls you’ll likely encounter in building the IT strategy to provide technology enablement for customer experience.

There’s no silver bullet for developing a strategy. You can encounter pitfalls at a myriad of different points including not involving the right stakeholders from the business, not staying abreast of recent trends in the external environment, and not aligning sales, marketing, and support initiatives with a focus on the delivery of value to prospects and customers.

Common Pitfalls When Creating a Technology-Enablement Strategy for CXM

Senior management is not involved in strategy development.

Not paying attention to the “art of the possible.”

“Paving the cow path” rather than focusing on revising core processes.

Misalignment between objectives and financial/personnel resources.

Inexperienced team on either the business or IT side.

Not paying attention to the actions of competitors.

Entrenched management preferences for legacy systems.

Sales culture that downplays the potential value of technology or new applications.

IT is only one or two degrees of separation from the end customer: so take a customer-centric approach

IT →Marketing, Sales, and Service →External Customers

Internal-Facing Applications

• IT enables, supports, and maintains the applications used by the organization to market to, sell to, and service customers. IT provides the infrastructural and technical foundation to operate the function.

Customer-Facing Applications

• IT supports customer-facing interfaces and channels for customer interaction.
• Channel examples include web pages, mobile device applications and optimization, and interactive voice response for callers.

Info-Tech Insight

IT often overlooks direct customer considerations when devising a technology strategy for CXM. Instead, IT leaders rely on other business stakeholders to simply pass on requirements. By sitting down with their counterparts in marketing and sales, and fully understanding business drivers and customer personas, IT will be much better positioned to roll out supporting applications that drive customer engagement.

A well-aligned CXM strategy recognizes a clear delineation of responsibilities between IT, sales, marketing, and service

• When thinking about CXM, IT must recognize that it is responsible for being a trusted partner for technology enablement. This means that IT has a duty to:
  • Develop an in-depth understanding of strategic business requirements for CXM. Base your understanding of these business requirements on a clear conception of the internal and external environment, customer personas, and business processes in marketing, sales, and customer service.
  • Assist with shortlisting and supporting different channels for customer interaction (including email, telephony, web presence, and social media).
  • Create a rationalized, cohesive application portfolio for CXM that blends different enabling technologies together to support strategic business requirements.
  • Provide support for vendor shortlisting, selection, and implementation of CXM applications.
  • Assist with end-user adoption of CXM applications (i.e. training and ongoing support).
  • Provide initiatives that assist with technical excellence for CXM (such as data quality, integration, analytics, and application maintenance).
• The business (marketing, sales, customer service) owns the business requirements and must be responsible for setting top-level objectives for customer interaction (e.g. product and pricing decisions, marketing collateral, territory management, etc.). IT should not take over decisions on customer experience strategy. However, IT should be working in lockstep with its counterparts in the business to assist with understanding business requirements through a customer-facing lens. For example, persona development is best done in cross-functional teams between IT and Marketing.

Activity: Identify the business drivers for CXM to establish the strategy’s guiding principles

1.1.3 30 minutes

Input

• Business drivers for CXM

Output

• Guiding principles for CXM strategy

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Define the assumptions and business drivers that have an impact on technology enablement for CXM. What is driving the current marketing, sales, and service strategy on the business side?

Activity: Identify the IT drivers for CXM to establish the strategy’s guiding principles

1.1.4 30 minutes

Input

• IT drivers for CXM

Output

• Guiding principles for CXM strategy

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Define the assumptions and IT drivers that have an impact on technology enablement for CXM. What is driving the current IT strategy for supporting marketing, sales, and service initiatives?

Activity: Use IT and business drivers to create guiding principles for your CXM technology-enablement project

1.1.5 30 minutes

Input

• Business drivers and IT drivers from 1.1.3 and 1.1.4

Output

• CXM mission statement

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Core Team

Instructions

1. Based on the IT and business drivers identified, craft guiding principles for CXM technology enablement. Keep guiding principles in mind throughout the project and ensure they support (or reconcile) the business and IT drivers.

2. Summarize the guiding principles above by creating a CXM mission statement. See below for an example.

Example: CXM Mission Statement

To ensure our marketing, sales and service team is equipped with tools that will allow them to reach out to a large volume of contacts while still providing a solution-selling approach. This will be done with secure, on-premise systems to safeguard customer data.

Ensure that now is the right time to take a step back and develop the CXM strategy

Determine if now is the right time to move forward with building (or overhauling) your technology-enablement strategy for CXM.

Not all organizations will be able to proceed immediately to optimize their CXM technology enablement. Determine if the organizational willingness, backbone, and resources are present to commit to overhauling the existing strategy. If you’re not ready to proceed, consider waiting to begin this project until you can procure the right resources.

Do not proceed if:

• Your current strategy for supporting marketing, sales, and service is working well and IT is already viewed as a strategic partner by these groups. Your current strategy is well aligned with customer preferences.
• The current strategy is not working well, but there is no consensus or support from senior management for improving it.
• You cannot secure the resources or time to devote to thoroughly examining the current state and selecting improvement initiatives.
• The strategy has been approved, but there is no budget in place to support it at this time.

Proceed if:

• Senior management has agreed that technology support for CXM should be improved.
• Sub-divisions within IT, sales, marketing, and service are on the same page about the need to improve alignment.
• You have an approximate budget to work with for the project and believe you can secure additional funding to execute at least some improvement initiatives.
• You understand how improving CXM alignment will fit into the broader customer interaction ecosystem in your organization.

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

1.1.3; 1.1.4; 1.1.5 - Identify business and IT drivers to create CXM guiding principles

The facilitator will work with stakeholders from both the business and IT to identify implicit or explicit strategic drivers that will support (or pose constraints on) the technology-enablement framework for the CXM strategy. In doing so, guiding principles will be established for the project.

Step 1.2: Structure the Project

Phase 1

1.1 Create the Project Vision

1.2 Structure the Project

Phase 2

2.1 Scan the External Environment

2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

Phase 3

3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

Activities:

• Define the project purpose, objectives, and business metrics
• Define the scope of the CXM strategy
• Create the project team
• Build a RACI chart
• Develop a timeline with project milestones
• Identify risks and create mitigation strategies
• Complete the strategy project charter and obtain approval

Outcomes:

CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

• Purpose, objectives, metrics
• Scope
• Project team & RACI
• Timeline
• Risks & mitigation strategies
• Project sponsorship

Use Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template to outline critical components of the CXM project

1.2.1 CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

Having a project charter is the first step for any project: it specifies how the project will be resourced from a people, process, and technology perspective, and it clearly outlines major project milestones and timelines for strategy development. CXM technology enablement crosses many organizational boundaries, so a project charter is a very useful tool for ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Sections of the document:

1. Project Drivers, Rationale, and Context
2. Project Objectives, Metrics, and Purpose
3. Project Scope Definition
4. Project Team Roles and Responsibilities (RACI)
5. Project Timeline
6. Risk Mitigation Strategy
7. Project Metrics
8. Project Review & Approvals

INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

CXM Strategy Project Charter Template

Populate the relevant sections of your project charter as you complete activities 1.2.2-1.2.8.

Understand the roles necessary to complete your CXM technology-enablement strategy

Understand the role of each player within your project structure. Look for listed participants on the activities slides to determine when each player should be involved.

Info-Tech Insight

Do not limit project input or participation to the aforementioned roles. Include subject matter experts and internal stakeholders at particular stages within the project. Such inputs can be solicited on a one-off basis as needed. This ensures you take a holistic approach to creating your CXM technology-enablement strategy.

Activity: Kick-off the CXM project by defining the project purpose, project objectives, and business metrics

1.2.2 30 minutes

Input

• Activities 1.1.1 to 1.1.5

Output

• Drivers & rationale
• Purpose statement
• Business goals
• Business metrics
• CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, sections 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Sponsor
• Project Manager
• Business Lead
• Steering Committee

Instructions

Hold a meeting with IT, Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations, and any other impacted business stakeholders that have input into CXM to accomplish the following:

1. Discuss the drivers and rationale behind embarking on a CXM strategy.
2. Develop and concede on objectives for the CXM project, metrics that will gauge its success, and goals for each metric.
3. Create a project purpose statement that is informed by decided-upon objectives and metrics from the steps above. When establishing a project purpose, ask the question, “what are we trying to accomplish?”

• Example: Project Purpose Statement
  • The organization is creating a CXM strategy to gather high-level requirements from the business, IT, and Marketing, Sales, and Service, to ensure that the selection and deployment of the CXM meets the needs of the broader organization and provides the greatest return on investment.

Info-Tech Insight

Going forward, set up a quarterly review process to understand changing needs. It is rare that organizations never change their marketing and sales strategy. This will change the way the CXM will be utilized.

Establish baseline metrics for customer engagement

In order to gauge the effectiveness of CXM technology enablement, establish core metrics:

1. Marketing Metrics: pertaining to share of voice, share of wallet, market share, lead generation, etc.
2. Sales Metrics: pertaining to overall revenue, average deal size, number of accounts, MCV, lead warmth, etc.
3. Customer Service Metrics: pertaining to call volumes, average time to resolution, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction, etc.
4. IT Metrics: pertaining to end-user satisfaction with CXM applications, number of tickets, contract value, etc.

Understand the importance of setting project expectations with a scope statement

Be sure to understand what is in scope for a CXM strategy project. Prevent too wide of a scope to avoid scope creep – for example, we aren’t tackling ERP or BI under CXM.

In Scope

Establishing the parameters of the project in a scope statement helps define expectations and provides a baseline for resource allocation and planning. Future decisions about the strategic direction of CXM will be based on the scope statement.

Scope Creep

Well-executed requirements gathering will help you avoid expanding project parameters, drawing on your resources, and contributing to cost overruns and project delays. Avoid scope creep by gathering high-level requirements that lead to the selection of category-level application solutions (e.g. CRM, MMS, SMMP, etc.), rather than granular requirements that would lead to vendor application selection (e.g. Salesforce, Marketo, Hootsuite, etc.).

Out of Scope

Out-of-scope items should also be defined to alleviate ambiguity, reduce assumptions, and further clarify expectations for stakeholders. Out-of-scope items can be placed in a backlog for later consideration. For example, fulfilment and logistics management is out of scope as it pertains to CXM.

Activity: Define the scope of the CXM strategy

1.2.3 30 minutes

Input

• N/A

Output

• Project scope and parameters
• CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 3.0

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Sponsor
• Project Manager
• Business Lead

Instructions

1. Formulate a scope statement. Decide which people, processes, and functions the CXM strategy will address. Generally, the aim of this project is to develop strategic requirements for the CXM application portfolio – not to select individual vendors.
2. Document your scope statement in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 3.0.

To form your scope statement, ask the following questions:

• What are the major coverage points?
• Who will be using the systems?
• How will different users interact with the systems?
• What are the objectives that need to be addressed?
• Where do we start?
• Where do we draw the line?

Identify the right stakeholders to include on your project team

Consider the core team functions when composing the project team. Form a cross-functional team (i.e. across IT, Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations) to create a well-aligned CXM strategy.

Info-Tech Insight

Don’t let your project team become too large when trying to include all relevant stakeholders. Carefully limiting the size of the project team will enable effective decision making while still including functional business units such as marketing, sales, service, and finance, as well as IT.

Activity: Create the project team

1.2.4 45 minutes

Input

• Scope Statement (output of Activity 1.2.3).

Output

• Project Team
• CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 4.0

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Manager
• Business Lead

Instructions

1. Review your scope statement. Have a discussion to generate a complete list of key stakeholders that are needed to achieve the scope of work.
2. Using the previously generated list, identify a candidate for each role and determine their responsibilities and expected time commitment for the CXM strategy project.
3. Document the project team in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 4.0.

Define project roles and responsibilities to improve progress tracking

Build a list of the core CXM strategy team members, and then structure a RACI chart with the relevant categories and roles for the overall project.

Responsible - Conducts work to achieve the task

Accountable - Answerable for completeness of task

Consulted - Provides input for the task

Informed - Receives updates on the task

Info-Tech Insight

Avoid missed tasks between inter-functional communications by defining roles and responsibilities for the project as early as possible.

Benefits of Assigning RACI Early:

• Improve project quality by assigning the right people to the right tasks.
• Improve chances of project task completion by assigning clear accountabilities.
• Improve project buy-in by ensuring that stakeholders are kept informed of project progress, risks, and successes.

Activity: Build a RACI chart

1.2.5 30 minutes

Input

• Project Team (output of Activity 1.2.4)

Output

• RACI chart
• CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 4.2

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Manager
• Business Lead

Instructions

1. Identify the key stakeholder teams that should be involved in the CXM strategy project. You should have a cross-functional team that encompasses both IT (various units) and the business.
2. Determine whether each stakeholder should be responsible, accountable, consulted, and/or informed with respect to each overarching project step.
3. Confirm and communicate the results to relevant stakeholders and obtain their approval.
4. Document the RACI chart in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 4.2.

Activity: Develop a timeline in order to specify concrete project milestones

1.2.6 30 minutes

Input

• N/A

Output

• Project timeline
• CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 5.0

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Manager
• Business Lead

Instructions

1. Assign responsibilities, accountabilities, and other project involvement to each project team role using a RACI chart. Remember to consider dependencies when creating the schedule and identifying appropriate subtasks.
2. Document the timeline in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 5.0.

Assess project-associated risk by understanding common barriers and enablers

Common Internal Risk Factors

Activity: Identify the risks and create mitigation strategies

1.2.7 45 minutes

Input

• N/A

Output

• Risk mitigation strategy
• CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 6.0

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Manager
• Business Lead
• Project Team

Instructions

1. Brainstorm a list of possible risks that may impede the progress of your CXM project.
2. Classify risks as strategy based (related to planning) or systems based (related to technology).
3. Brainstorm mitigation strategies to overcome each risk.
4. On a scale of 1 to 3, determine the impact of each risk on project success and the likelihood of each risk occurring.
5. Document your findings in Info-Tech’s CXM Strategy Project Charter Template in section 6.0.

Likelihood:

1 - High/Needs Focus

2 - Can Be Mitigated

3 - Unlikely

Impact

1 - High Impact

2 - Moderate Impact

3 - Minimal Impact

Example: Risk Register and Mitigation Tactics

Activity: Complete the project charter and obtain approval

1.2.8 45 minutes

Input

• N/A

Output

• Project approval
• CXM Strategy Project Charter Template, section 8.0

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Manager
• Business Lead
• Project Team

Instructions

Before beginning to develop the CXM strategy, validate the project charter and metrics with senior sponsors or stakeholders and receive their approval to proceed.

1. Schedule a 30-60 minute meeting with senior stakeholders and conduct a live review of your CXM strategy project charter.
2. Obtain stakeholder approval to ensure there are no miscommunications or misunderstandings around the scope of the work that needs to be done to reach a successful project outcome. Final sign-off should only take place when mutual consensus has been reached.
   • Obtaining approval should be an iterative process; if senior management has concerns over certain aspects of the plan, revise and review again.

Info-Tech Insight

In most circumstances, you should have your CXM strategy project charter validated with the following stakeholders:

• Chief Information Officer
• IT Applications Director
• CFO or Comptroller (for budget approval)
• Chief Marketing Office or Head of Marketing
• Chief Revenue Officer or VP of Sales
• VP Customer Service

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

1.2.2 Define project purpose, objectives, and business metrics

Through an in-depth discussion, an analyst will help you prioritize corporate objectives and organizational drivers to establish a distinct project purpose.

1.2.3 Define the scope of the CXM strategy

An analyst will facilitate a discussion to address critical questions to understand your distinct business needs. These questions include: What are the major coverage points? Who will be using the system?

1.2.4; 1.2.5; 1.2.6 Create the CXM project team, build a RACI chart, and establish a timeline

Our analysts will guide you through how to create a designated project team to ensure the success of your CXM strategy and suite selection initiative, including project milestones and team composition, as well as designated duties and responsibilities.

Phase 2

Create a Strategic Framework for CXM Technology Enablement

Build a Strong Technology Foundation for Customer Experience Management

Phase 2 outline: Steps 2.1 and 2.2

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Guided Implementation 2: Create a Strategic Framework for CXM Technology Enablement

Proposed Time to Completion: 4 weeks

Step 2.1: Scan the External Environment

Start with an analyst kick-off call:

• Discuss external drivers
• Assess competitive environment
• Review persona development
• Review scenarios

Then complete these activities…

• Build the CXM operating model
• Conduct a competitive analysis
• Conduct a PEST analysis
• Build personas and scenarios

With these tools & templates:

CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

Step 2.2: Assess the Current State for CRM

Review findings with analyst:

• Review SWOT analysis
• Review VRIO analysis
• Discuss strategic requirements for CXM

Then complete these activities…

• Conduct a SWOT analysis
• Conduct a VRIO analysis
• Inventory existing applications

With these tools & templates:

CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

Phase 2 outline: Steps 2.3 and 2.4

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Guided Implementation 2: Create a Strategic Framework for CXM Technology Enablement

Proposed Time to Completion: 4 weeks

Step 2.3: Create an Application Portfolio

Start with an analyst kick-off call:

• Discuss possible business process maps
• Discuss strategic requirements
• Review application portfolio results

Then complete these activities…

• Build business maps
• Execute application mapping

With these tools & templates:

CXM Portfolio Designer

CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool

Step 2.4: Develop Deployment Best Practices

Review findings with analyst:

• Review possible integration maps
• Discuss best practices for end-user adoption
• Discuss best practices for customer data quality

Then complete these activities…

• Create CXM integration ecosystem
• Develop adoption game plan
• Create data quality standards

With these tools & templates:

CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template

Phase 2 Results & Insights:

• Application portfolio for CXM
• Deployment best practices for areas such as integration, data quality, and end-user adoption

Step 2.1: Scan the External Environment

Phase 1

1.1 Create the Project Vision

1.2 Structure the Project

Phase 2

2.1 Scan the External Environment

2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

Phase 3

3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

Activities:

• Inventory CXM drivers and organizational objectives
• Identify CXM challenges and pain points
• Discuss opportunities and benefits
• Align corporate and CXM strategies
• Conduct a competitive analysis
• Conduct a PEST analysis and extract strategic requirements
• Build customer personas and extract strategic requirements

Outcomes:

• CXM operating model
  • Organizational drivers
  • Environmental factors
  • Barriers
  • Enablers
• PEST analysis
• External customer personas
• Customer journey scenarios
• Strategic requirements for CXM

Develop a CXM technology operating model that takes stock of needs, drivers, barriers, and enablers

Establish the drivers, enablers, and barriers to developing a CXM technology enablement strategy. In doing so, consider needs, environmental factors, organizational drivers, and technology drivers as inputs.

CXM Strategy

• Barriers
  • Lack of Resources
  • Cultural Mindset
  • Resistance to Change
  • Poor End-User Adoption
• Enablers
  • Senior Management Support
  • Customer Data Quality
  • Current Technology Portfolio
• Business Needs (What are your business drivers? What are current marketing, sales, and customer service pains?)
  • Acquisition Pipeline Management
  • Live Chat for Support
  • Social Media Analytics
  • Etc.
• Organizational Goals
  • Increase Profitability
  • Enhance Customer Experience Consistency
  • Reduce Time-to-Resolution
  • Increase First Contact Resolution
  • Boost Share of Voice
• Environmental Factors (What factors that affect your strategy are out of your control?)
  • Customer Buying Habits
  • Changing Technology Trends
  • Competitive Landscape
  • Regulatory Requirements
• Technology Drivers (Why do you need a new system? What is the purpose for becoming an integrated organization?)
  • System Integration
  • Reporting Capabilities
  • Deployment Model

Understand your needs, drivers, and organizational objectives for creating a CXM strategy

Info-Tech Insight

A common organizational driver is to provide adequate technology enablement across multiple channels, resulting in a consistent customer experience. This driver is a result of external considerations. Many industries today are highly competitive and rapidly changing. To succeed under these pressures, you must have a rationalized portfolio of enterprise applications for customer interaction.

Activity: Inventory and discuss CXM drivers and organizational objectives

2.1.1 30 minutes

Input

• Business needs
• Exercise 1.1.3
• Exercise 1.1.4
• Environmental factors

Output

• CXM operating model inputs
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Info-Tech examples
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Brainstorm the business needs, organizational drivers, technology drivers, and environmental factors that will inform the CXM strategy. Draw from exercises 1.1.3-1.1.5.
2. Document your findings in the CXM operating model template. This can be found in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Understand challenges and barriers to creating and executing the CXM technology-enablement strategy

Take stock of internal challenges and barriers to effective CXM strategy execution.

Example: Internal Challenges & Potential Barriers

Activity: Identify CXM challenges and pain points

2.1.2 30 minutes

Input

• Challenges
• Pain points

Output

• CXM operating model barriers
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Info-Tech examples
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Brainstorm the challenges and pain points that may act as barriers to the successful planning and execution of a CXM strategy.
2. Document your findings in the CXM operating model template. This can be found in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Identify opportunities that can enable CXM strategy execution

Existing internal conditions, capabilities, and resources can create opportunities to enable the CXM strategy. These opportunities are critical to overcoming challenges and barriers.

Example: Opportunities to Leverage for Strategy Enablement

Activity: Discuss opportunities and benefits

2.1.3 30 minutes

Input

• Opportunities
• Benefits

Output

• Completed CXM operating model
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Info-Tech examples
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Brainstorm opportunities that should be leveraged or benefits that should be realized to enable the successful planning and execution of a CXM strategy.
2. Document your findings in the CXM operating model template. This can be found in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Ensure that you align your CXM technology strategy to the broader corporate strategy

A successful CXM strategy requires a comprehensive understanding of an organization’s overall corporate strategy and its effects on the interrelated departments of marketing, sales, and service, including subsequent technology implications. For example, a CXM strategy that emphasizes tools for omnichannel management and is at odds with a corporate strategy that focuses on only one or two channels will fail.

Corporate Strategy

• Conveys the current state of the organization and the path it wants to take.
• Identifies future goals and business aspirations.
• Communicates the initiatives that are critical for getting the organization from its current state to the future state.

CXM Strategy

• Communicates the company’s budget and spending on CXM applications and initiatives.
• Identifies IT initiatives that will support the business and key CXM objectives, specific to marketing, sales, and service.
• Outlines staffing and resourcing for CXM initiatives.

Unified Strategy

• The CXM implementation can be linked, with metrics, to the corporate strategy and ultimate business objectives.

Info-Tech Insight

Your organization’s corporate strategy is especially important in dictating the direction of the CXM strategy. Corporate strategies are often focused on customer-facing activity and will heavily influence the direction of marketing, sales, customer service, and consequentially, CXM. Corporate strategies will often dictate market targeting, sales tactics, service models, and more.

Review sample organizational objectives to decipher how CXM technologies can support such objectives

Identifying organizational objectives of high priority will assist in breaking down CXM objectives to better align with the overall corporate strategy and achieve buy-in from key stakeholders.

Activity: Review your corporate strategy and validate its alignment with the CXM operating model

2.1.4 30 minutes

Input

• Corporate strategy
• CXM operating model (completed in Activity 2.1.3)

Output

• Strategic alignment between the business and CXM strategies

Materials

• Info-Tech examples
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Brainstorm and create a list of organizational objectives at the corporate strategy level.
2. Break down each organizational objective to identify how CXM may support it.
3. Validate CXM goals and organizational objectives with your CXM operating model. Be sure to address the validity of each with the business needs, organizational drivers, technology drivers, and environmental factors identified as inputs to the operating model.

Amazon leverages customer data to drive decision making around targeted offers and customer experience

CASE STUDY

Industry E-Commerce

Source Pardot, 2012

Situation

Amazon.com, Inc. is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company. It is the largest e-commerce retailer in the US.

Amazon originated as an online book store, later diversifying to sell various forms of media, software, games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and more.

By taking a data-driven approach to marketing and sales, Amazon was able to understand its customers’ needs and wants, penetrate different product markets, and create a consistently personalized online-shopping customer experience that keeps customers coming back.

Technology Strategy

Use Browsing Data Effectively

Amazon leverages marketing automation suites to view recent activities of prospects on its website. In doing so, a more complete view of the customer is achieved, including insights into purchasing interests and site navigation behaviors.

Optimize Based on Interactions

Using customer intelligence, Amazon surveys and studies standard engagement metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribes to ensure the optimal degree of marketing is being targeted to existing and prospective customers, depending on level of engagement.

Results

Insights gained from having a complete understanding of the customer (from basic demographic characteristics provided in customer account profiles to observed psychographic behaviors captured by customer intelligence applications) are used to personalize Amazon’s sales and marketing approaches. This is represented through targeted suggestions in the “recommended for you” section of the browsing experience and tailored email marketing.

It is this capability, partnered with the technological ability to observe and measure customer engagement, that allows Amazon to create individual customer experiences.

Scan the external environment to understand your customers, competitors, and macroenvironmental trends

Do not develop your CXM technology strategy in isolation. Work with Marketing to understand your STP strategy (segmentation, targeting, positioning): this will inform persona development and technology requirements downstream.

Market Segmentation

• Segment target market by demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics
• What does the competitive market look like?
• Who are the key customer segments?
• What segments are you going to target?

Market Targeting

• Evaluate potential and commercial attractiveness of each segment, considering the dynamics of the competition
• How do you target your customers?
• How should you target them in the future?
• How do your products/services differ from the competition?

Product Positioning

• Develop detailed product positioning and marketing mixes for selected segments
• What is the value of the product/service to each segment of the market?
• How are you positioning your product/service in the market?

Info-Tech Insight

It is at this point that you should consider the need for and viability of an omnichannel approach to CXM. Through which channels do you target your customers? Are your customers present and active on a wide variety of channels? Consider how you can position your products, services, and brand through the use of omnichannel methodologies.

Activity: Conduct a competitive analysis to understand where your market is going

2.1.5 1 hour

Input

• Scan of competitive market
• Existing customer STP strategy

Output

• Strategic CXM requirements
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team
• Marketing SME

Instructions

1. Scan the market for direct and indirect competitors.
2. Evaluate current and/or future segmentation, targeting, and positioning strategies by answering the following questions:

• What does the competitive market look like?
• Who are the key customer segments?
• What segments are you going to target?
• How do you target your customers?
• How should you target them in the future?
• How do your products/services differ from the competition?
• What is the value of the product/service to each segment of the market?
• How are you positioning your product/service in the market?
• Other helpful questions include:
  • How formally do you target customers? (e.g. through direct contact vs. through passive brand marketing)
  • Does your organization use the shotgun or rifle approach to marketing?
    • Shotgun marketing: targets a broad segment of people, indirectly
    • Rifle marketing: targets smaller and more niche market segments using customer intelligence

Activity: Conduct a competitive analysis (cont’d)

2.1.5 30 minutes

Input

• Scan of competitive market

Output

• Competitive analysis
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team
• Marketing SME (e.g. Market Research Stakeholders)

Instructions

1. List recent marketing technology and customer experience-related initiatives that your closest competitors have implemented.
2. For each identified initiative, elaborate on what the competitive implications are for your organization.
3. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Example: Competitive Implications

Conduct a PEST analysis to determine salient political, economic, social, and technological impacts for CXM

A PEST analysis is a structured planning method that identifies external environmental factors that could influence the corporate and IT strategy.

Political - Examine political factors, such as relevant data protection laws and government regulations.

Economic - Examine economic factors, such as funding, cost of web access, and labor shortages for maintaining the site(s).

Technological - Examine technological factors, such as new channels, networks, software and software frameworks, database technologies, wireless capabilities, and availability of software as a service.

Social - Examine social factors, such as gender, race, age, income, and religion.

Info-Tech Insight

When looking at opportunities and threats, PEST analysis can help to ensure that you do not overlook external factors, such as technological changes in your industry. When conducting your PEST analysis specifically for CXM, pay particular attention to the rapid rate of change in the technology bucket. New channels and applications are constantly emerging and evolving, and seeing differential adoption by potential customers.

Activity: Conduct and review the PEST analysis

2.1.6 30 minutes

Input

• Political, economic, social, and technological factors related to CXM

Output

• Completed PEST analysis

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Identify your current strengths and weaknesses in managing the customer experience.
2. Identify any opportunities to take advantage of and threats to mitigate.

Example: PEST Analysis

Political

• Data privacy for PII
• ADA legislation for accessible design

Economic

• Spending via online increasing
• Focus on share of wallet

Technological

• Rise in mobile
• Geo-location based services
• Internet of Things
• Omnichannel

Social

• Increased spending power by millennials
• Changing channel preferences
• Self-service models

Activity: Translate your PEST analysis into a list of strategic CXM technology requirements to be addressed

2.1.7 30 minutes

Input

• PEST Analysis conducted in Activity 2.1.6.

Output

• Strategic CXM requirements
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

For each PEST quadrant:

1. Document the point and relate it to a goal.
2. For each point, identify CXM requirements.
3. Sort goals and requirements to eliminate duplicates.
4. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Example: Parsing Requirements from PEST Analysis

Technological Trend: There has been a sharp increase in popularity of mobile self-service models for buying habits and customer service access.

Goal: Streamline mobile application to be compatible with all mobile devices. Create consistent branding across all service delivery applications (e.g. website, etc.).

Strategic Requirement: Develop a native mobile application while also ensuring that resources through our web presence are built with responsive design interface.

IT must fully understand the voice of the customer: work with Marketing to develop customer personas

Creating a customer-centric CXM technology strategy requires archetypal customer personas. Creating customer personas will enable you to talk concretely about them as consumers of your customer experience and allow you to build buyer scenarios around them.

A persona (or archetypal user) is an invented person that represents a type of user in a particular use-case scenario. In this case, personas can be based on real customers.

Activity: Build personas for your customers

2.1.8 2 hours

Input

• Customer demographics and psychographics

Output

• List of prioritized customer personas
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Info-Tech examples
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

Project Team

Instructions

1. In 2-4 groups, list all the customer personas that need to be built. In doing so, consider the people who interact with your organization most often.
2. Build a demographic profile for each customer persona. Include information such as age, geographic location, occupation, annual income, etc.
3. Augment the persona with a psychographic profile of each customer. Consider the goals and objectives of each customer persona and how these might inform buyer behaviors.
4. Introduce your group’s personas to the entire group, in a round-robin fashion, as if you are introducing your persona at a party.
5. Summarize the personas in a persona map. Rank your personas according to importance and remove any duplicates.

Info-Tech Insight

For CXM, persona building is typically used for understanding the external customer; however, if you need to gain a better understanding of the organization’s internal customers (those who will be interacting with CXM applications), personas can also be built for this purpose. Examples of useful internal personas are sales managers, brand managers, customer service directors, etc.

Sample Persona Templates

Fred, 40

The Family Man

Post-secondary educated, white-collar professional, three children

Goals & Objectives

• Maintain a stable secure lifestyle
• Progress his career
• Obtain a good future for his children

Behaviors

• Manages household and finances
• Stays actively involved in children’s activities and education
• Seeks potential career development
• Uses a cellphone and email frequently
• Sometimes follows friends Facebook pages

Services of Interest

• SFA, career counselling, job boards, day care, SHHS
• Access to information via in-person, phone, online

Traits

General Literacy - High

Digital Literacy - Mid-High

Detail-Oriented - High

Willing to Try New Things - Mid-High

Motivated and Persistent - Mid-High

Time Flexible - Mid-High

Familiar With [Red.] - Mid

Access to [Red.] Offices - High

Access to Internet - High

Ashley, 35

The Tourist

Single, college educated, planning vacation in [redacted], interested in [redacted] job opportunities

Goals & Objectives

• Relax after finishing a stressful job
• Have adventures and try new things
• Find a new job somewhere in Canada

Behaviors

• Collects information about things to do in [redacted]
• Collects information about life in [redacted]
• Investigates and follows up on potential job opportunities
• Uses multiple social media to keep in touch with friends
• Shops online frequently

Services of Interest

• SFA, job search, road conditions, ferry schedules, hospital, police station, DL requirements, vehicle rental
• Access to information via in-person, phone, website, SMS, email, social media

Traits

General Literacy - Mid

Digital Literacy - High

Detail-Oriented - Mid

Willing to Try New Things - High

Motivated and Persistent - Mid

Time Flexible - Mid-High

Familiar With [Red.] - Low

Access to [Red.] Offices - Low

Access to Internet - High

Bill, 25

The Single Parent

15-year resident of [redacted], high school education, waiter, recently divorced, two children

Goals & Objectives

• Improve his career options so he can support his family
• Find an affordable place to live
• Be a good parent
• Work through remaining divorce issues

Behaviors

• Tries to get training or experience to improve his career
• Stays actively involved in his children’s activities
• Looks for resources and supports to resolve divorce issues
• Has a cellphone and uses the internet occasionally

Services of Interest

• Child care, housing authority, legal aid, parenting resources
• Access to information via in person, word-of mouth, online, phone, email

Traits

General Literacy - Mid

Digital Literacy - Mid-Low

Detail-Oriented - Mid-Low

Willing to Try New Things - Mid

Motivated and Persistent - High

Time Flexible - Mid

Familiar With [Red.] - Mid-High

Access to [Red.] Offices - High

Access to Internet - High

Marie, 19

The Regional Youth

Single, [redacted] resident, high school graduate

Goals & Objectives

• Get a good job
• Maintain ties to family and community

Behaviors

• Looking for work
• Gathering information about long-term career choices
• Trying to get the training or experience that can help her develop a career
• Staying with her parents until she can get established
• Has a new cellphone and is learning how to use it
• Plays videogames and uses the internet at least weekly

Services of Interest

• Job search, career counselling
• Access to information via in-person, online, phone, email, web applications

Traits

General Literacy - Mid

Digital Literacy - Mid

Detail-Oriented - Mid-Low

Willing to Try New Things - Mid-High

Motivated and Persistent - Mid-Low

Time Flexible - High

Familiar With [Red.] - Mid-Low

Access to [Red.] Offices - Mid-Low

Access to Internet - Mid

Build key scenarios for each persona to extract strategic requirements for your CXM application portfolio

A scenario is a story or narrative that helps explore the set of interactions that a customer has with an organization. Scenario mapping will help parse requirements used to design the CXM application portfolio.

A Good Scenario…

• Describes specific task(s) that need to be accomplished
• Describes user goals and motivations
• Describes interactions with a compelling but not overwhelming amount of detail
• Can be rough, as long as it provokes ideas and discussion

Scenarios Are Used To…

• Provide a shared understanding about what a user might want to do, and how they might want to do it
• Help construct the sequence of events that are necessary to address in your user interface(s)

To Create Good Scenarios…

• Keep scenarios high level, not granular in nature
• Identify as many scenarios as possible. If you’re time constrained, try to develop 2-3 key scenarios per persona
• Sketch each scenario out so that stakeholders understand the goal of the scenario

Activity: Build scenarios for each persona and extract strategic requirements for the CXM strategy

2.1.9 1.5 hours

Input

• Customer personas (output of Activity 2.1.5)

Output

• CX scenario maps
• Strategic CXM requirements
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. For each customer persona created in Activity 2.1.5, build a scenario. Choose and differentiate scenarios based on the customer goal of each scenario (e.g. make online purchase, seek customer support, etc.).
2. Think through the narrative of how a customer interacts with your organization, at all points throughout the scenario. List each step in the interaction in a sequential order to form a scenario journey.
3. Examine each step in the scenario and brainstorm strategic requirements that will be needed to support the customer’s use of technology throughout the scenario.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for each persona. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Example: Scenario Map

Persona Name: Brand Loyal Linda

Scenario Goal: File a complaint about in-store customer service

Look up “[Store Name] customer service” on public web. →Reach customer support landing page. →Receive proactive notification prompt for online chat with CSR. →Initiate conversation: provide order #. →CSR receives order context and information. →Customer articulates problem, CSR consults knowledgebase. →Discount on next purchase offered. →Send email with discount code to Brand Loyal Linda.

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

2.1.1; 2.1.2; 2.1.3; 2.1.4 - Create a CXM operating model

An analyst will facilitate a discussion to identify what impacts your CXM strategy and how to align it to your corporate strategy. The discussion will take different perspectives into consideration and look at organizational drivers, external environmental factors, as well as internal barriers and enablers.

2.1.5 Conduct a competitive analysis

Calling on their depth of expertise in working with a broad spectrum of organizations, our facilitator will help you work through a structured, systematic evaluation of competitors’ actions when it comes to CXM.

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

2.1.6; 2.1.7 - Conduct a PEST analysis

The facilitator will use guided conversation to target each quadrant of the PEST analysis and help your organization fully enumerate political, economic, social, and technological trends that will influence your CXM strategy. Our analysts are deeply familiar with macroenvironmental trends and can provide expert advice in identifying areas of concern in the PEST and drawing strategic requirements as implications.

2.1.8; 2.1.9 - Build customer personas and subsequent persona scenarios

Drawing on the preceding exercises as inputs, the facilitator will help the team create and refine personas, create respective customer interaction scenarios, and parse strategic requirements to support your technology portfolio for CXM.

Step 2.2: Assess the Current State of CXM

Phase 1

1.1 Create the Project Vision

1.2 Structure the Project

Phase 2

2.1 Scan the External Environment

2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

Phase 3

3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

Activities:

• Conduct a SWOT analysis and extract strategic requirements
• Inventory existing CXM applications and assess end-user usage and satisfaction
• Conduct a VRIO analysis and extract strategic requirements

Outcomes:

• SWOT analysis
• VRIO analysis
• Current state application portfolio
• Strategic requirements

Conduct a SWOT analysis to prepare for creating your CXM strategy

A SWOT analysis is a structured planning method that evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats involved in a project.

Strengths - Strengths describe the positive attributes that are within your control and internal to your organization (i.e. what do you do better than anyone else?)

Weaknesses - Weaknesses are internal aspects of your business that place you at a competitive disadvantage; think of what you need to enhance to compete with your top competitor.

Opportunities - Opportunities are external factors the project can capitalize on. Think of them as factors that represent reasons your business is likely to prosper.

Threats - Threats are external factors that could jeopardize the project. While you may not have control over these, you will benefit from having contingency plans to address them if they occur.

Info-Tech Insight

When evaluating weaknesses of your current CXM strategy, ensure that you’re taking into account not just existing applications and business processes, but also potential deficits in your organization’s channel strategy and go-to-market messaging.

Activity: Conduct a SWOT analysis

2.2.1 30 minutes

Input

• CXM strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

Output

• Completed SWOT analysis

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Identify your current strengths and weaknesses in managing the customer experience. Consider marketing, sales, and customer service aspects of the CX.
2. Identify any opportunities to take advantage of and threats to mitigate.

Example: SWOT Analysis

Strengths

• Strong customer service model via telephony

Weaknesses

• Customer service inaccessible in real-time through website or mobile application

Opportunities

• Leverage customer intelligence to measure ongoing customer satisfaction

Threats

• Lack of understanding of customer interaction platforms by staff could hinder adoption

Activity: Translate your SWOT analysis into a list of requirements to be addressed

2.2.2 30 minutes

Input

• SWOT Analysis conducted in Activity 2.2.1.

Output

• Strategic CXM requirements
• CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

For each SWOT quadrant:

1. Document the point and relate it to a goal.
2. For each point, identify CXM requirements.
3. Sort goals and requirements to eliminate duplicates.
4. Document your outputs in the CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Example: Parsing Requirements from SWOT Analysis

Weakness: Customer service inaccessible in real-time through website or mobile application.

Goal: Increase the ubiquity of access to customer service knowledgebase and agents through a web portal or mobile application.

Strategic Requirement: Provide a live chat portal that matches the customer with the next available and qualified agent.

Inventory your current CXM application portfolio

Applications are the bedrock of technology enablement for CXM. Review your current application portfolio to identify what is working well and what isn’t.

Understand Your CXM Application Portfolio With a Four-Step Approach

Build the CXM Application Inventory →Assess Usage and Satisfaction →Map to Business Processes and Determine Dependencies →Determine Grow/Maintain/ Retire for Each Application

When assessing the CXM applications portfolio, do not cast your net too narrowly; while CRM and MMS applications are often top of mind, applications for digital asset management and social media management are also instrumental for ensuring a well-integrated CX.

Identify dependencies (either technical or licensing) between applications. This dependency tracing will come into play when deciding which applications should be grown (invested in), which applications should be maintained (held static), and which applications should be retired (divested).

Info-Tech Insight

Shadow IT is prominent here! When building your application inventory, ensure you involve Marketing, Sales, and Service to identify any “unofficial” SaaS applications that are being used for CXM. Many organizations fail to take a systematic view of their CXM application portfolio beyond maintaining a rough inventory. To assess the current state of alignment, you must build the application inventory and assess satisfaction metrics.

Understand which of your organization’s existing enterprise applications enable CXM

Review the major enterprise applications in your organization that enable CXM and align your requirements to these applications (net-new or existing). Identify points of integration to capture the big picture.

Info-Tech Insight

When assessing the current application portfolio that supports CXM, the tendency will be to focus on the applications under the CXM umbrella, relating mostly to marketing, sales, and customer service. Be sure to include systems that act as input to, or benefit due to outputs from, CRM or similar applications. Examples of these systems are ERP systems, ECM (e.g. SharePoint) applications, and more.

Assess CXM application usage and satisfaction

Having a portfolio but no contextual data will not give you a full understanding of the current state. The next step is to thoroughly assess usage patterns as well as IT, management, and end-user satisfaction with each application.

Example: Application Usage & Satisfaction Assessment

Info-Tech Insight

When evaluating satisfaction with any application, be sure to consult all stakeholders who come into contact with the application or depend on its output. Consider criteria such as ease of use, completeness of information, operational efficiency, data accuracy, etc.

Use Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment to gather end-user feedback on existing CXM applications

2.2.3 Application Portfolio Assessment: End-User Feedback

Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment: End-User Feedback diagnostic is a low-effort, high-impact program that will give you detailed report cards on end-user satisfaction with an application. Use these insights to identify problems, develop action plans for improvement, and determine key participants.

Application Portfolio Assessment: End-User Feedback is an 18-question survey that provides valuable insights on user satisfaction with an application by:

• Performing a general assessment of the application portfolio that provides a full view of the effectiveness, criticality, and prevalence of all relevant applications.
• Measuring individual application performance with open-ended user feedback surveys about the application, organized by department to simplify problem resolution.
• Providing targeted department feedback to identify end-user satisfaction and focus improvements on the right group or line of business.

INFO-TECH DIAGNOSTIC

Activity: Inventory your CXM applications, and assess application usage and satisfaction

2.2.4 1 hour

Input

• List of CXM applications

Output

• Complete inventory of CXM applications
• CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. List all existing applications that support the creation, management, and delivery of your customer experience.
2. Identify which processes each application supports (e.g. content deployment, analytics, service delivery, etc.).
3. Identify technical or licensing dependencies (e.g. data models).
4. Assess the level of application usage by IT, management, and internal users (high/medium/low).
5. Assess the satisfaction with and performance of each application according to IT, management, and internal users (high/medium/low). Use the Info-Tech Diagnostic to assist.

Example: CXM Application Inventory

Conduct a VRIO analysis to identify core competencies for CXM applications

A VRIO analysis evaluates the ability of internal resources and capabilities to sustain a competitive advantage by evaluating dimensions of value, rarity, imitability, and organization. For critical applications like your CRM platform, use a VRIO analysis to determine their value.

(Strategic Management Insight, 2013)

Activity: Conduct a VRIO analysis on your existing application portfolio

2.2.5 30 minutes

Input

• Inventory of existing CXM applications (output of Activity 2.2.4)

Output

• Completed VRIO analysis
• Strategic CXM requirements
• CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template

Materials

• VRIO Analysis model
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Evaluate each CXM application inventoried in Activity 2.2.4 by answering the four VRIO questions in sequential order. Do not proceed to the following question if “no” is answered at any point.
2. Record the results. The state of your organization’s competitive advantage, based on each resource/capability, will be determined based on the number of questions with a “yes” answer. For example, if all four questions are answered positively, then your organization is considered to have a long-term competitive advantage.
3. Document your outputs in the CXM Stakeholder Presentation Template.

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide your through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

2.2.1; 2.2.2 Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Our facilitator will use a small-team approach to delve deeply into each area, identifying enablers (strengths and opportunities) and challenges (weaknesses and threats) relating to the CXM strategy.

2.2.3; 2.2.4 Inventory your CXM applications, and assess usage and satisfaction

Working with your core team, the facilitator will assist with building a comprehensive inventory of CXM applications that are currently in use and with identifying adjacent systems that need to be identified for integration purposes. The facilitator will work to identify high and low performing applications and analyze this data with the team during the workshop exercise.

2.2.5 Conduct a VRIO analysis

The facilitator will take you through a VRIO analysis to identify which of your internal technological competencies ensure, or can be leveraged to ensure, your competitiveness in the CXM market.

Step 2.3: Create an Application Portfolio

Phase 1

1.1 Create the Project Vision

1.2 Structure the Project

Phase 2

2.1 Scan the External Environment

2.2 Assess the Current State of CXM

2.3 Create an Application Portfolio

2.4 Develop Deployment Best Practices

Phase 3

3.1 Create an Initiative Rollout Plan

3.2 Confirm and Finalize the CXM Blueprint

Activities

• Shortlist and prioritize business processes for improvement and reengineering
• Map current CXM processes
• Identify business process owners and assign job responsibilities
• Identify user interaction channels to extract strategic requirements
• Aggregate and develop strategic requirements
• Determine gaps in current and future state processes
• Build the CXM application portfolio

Outcomes

CXM application portfolio map

• Shortlist of relevant business processes
• Current state map
• Business process ownership assignment
• Channel map
• Complete list of strategic requirements

Understand business process mapping to draft strategy requirements for marketing, sales, and customer service

The interaction between sales, marketing, and customer service is very process-centric. Rethink sales and customer-centric workflows and map the desired workflow, imbedding the improved/reengineered process into the requirements.

Using BPM to Capture Strategic Requirements

Business process modeling facilitates the collaboration between the business and IT, recording the sequence of events, tasks performed, who performed them, and the levels of interaction with the various supporting applications.

By identifying the events and decision points in the process and overlaying the people that perform the functions, the data being interacted with, and the technologies that support them, organizations are better positioned to identify gaps that need to be bridged.

Encourage the analysis by compiling an inventory of business processes that support customer-facing operations that are relevant to achieving the overall organizational strategies.

Outcomes

• Operational effectiveness
• Identification, implementation, and maintenance of reusable enterprise applications
• Identification of gaps that can be addressed by acquisition of additional applications or process improvement/ reengineering

INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITY

Refer to Info-Tech’s Create a Comprehensive BPM Strategy for Successful Process Automation blueprint for further assistance in taking a BPM approach to your sales-IT alignment.

Leverage the APQC framework to help define your inventory of sales, marketing, and service processes

APQC’s Process Classification Framework is a taxonomy of cross-functional business processes intended to allow the objective comparison of organizational performance within and among organizations.

(APQC, 2011)

MORE ABOUT APQC

• APQC serves as a high-level, industry-neutral enterprise model that allows organizations to see activities from a cross-industry process perspective.
• Sales processes have been provided up to Level 3 of the APQC framework.
• The APQC Framework can be accessed through APQC’s Process Classification Framework.
• Note: The framework does not list all processes within a specific organization, nor are the processes that are listed in the framework present in every organization.

Understand APQC’s “Market and Sell Products and Services” framework

3.0 Market and Sell Products

3.1 Understand markets, customers, and capabilities

• 3.1.1 Perform customer and market intelligence analysis
• 3.1.2 Evaluate and prioritize market opportunities

3.2 Develop marketing strategy

• 3.2.1 Define offering and customer value proposition
• 3.2.2 Define pricing strategy to align to value proposition
• 3.2.3 Define and manage channel strategy

3.3 Develop sales strategy

• 3.3.1 Develop sales forecast
• 3.3.2 Develop sales partner/alliance relationships
• 3.3.3 Establish overall sales budgets
• 3.3.4 Establish sales goals and measures
• 3.3.5 Establish customer management measures

3.4 Develop and manage marketing plans

• 3.4.1 Establish goals, objectives, and metrics by products by channels/segments
• 3.4.2 Establish marketing budgets
• 3.4.3 Develop and manage media
• 3.4.4 Develop and manage pricing
• 3.4.5 Develop and manage promotional activities
• 3.4.6 Track customer management measures
• 3.4.7 Develop and manage packaging strategy

3.5 Develop and manage sales plans

• 3.5.1 Generate leads
• 3.5.2 Manage customers and accounts
• 3.5.3 Manage customer sales
• 3.5.4 Manage sales orders
• 3.5.5 Manage sales force
• 3.5.6 Manage sales partners and alliances

Understand APQC’s “Manage Customer Service” framework

5.0 Manage Customer Service

5.1 Develop customer care/customer service strategy

• 5.1.1 Develop customer service segmentation
  • 5.1.1.1 Analyze existing customers
  • 5.1.1.2 Analyze feedback of customer needs
• 5.1.2 Define customer service policies and procedures
• 5.1.3 Establish service levels for customers

5.2 Plan and manage customer service operations

• 5.2.1 Plan and manage customer service work force
  • 5.2.1.1 Forecast volume of customer service contacts
  • 5.2.1.2 Schedule customer service work force
  • 5.2.1.3 Track work force utilization
  • 5.2.1.4 Monitor and evaluate quality of customer interactions with customer service representatives

5.2 Plan and 5.2.3.1 Receive customer complaints 5.2.3.2 Route customer complaints 5.2.3.3 Resolve customer complaints 5.2.3.4 Respond to customer complaints manage customer service operations

• 5.2.2 Manage customer service requests/inquiries
  • 5.2.2.1 Receive customer requests/inquiries
  • 5.2.2.2 Route customer requests/inquiries
  • 5.2.2.3 Respond to customer requests/inquiries
• 5.2.3 Manage customer complaints
  • 5.2.3.1 Receive customer complaints
  • 5.2.3.2 Route customer complaints
  • 5.2.3.3 Resolve customer complaints
  • 5.2.3.4 Respond to customer complaints

Leverage the APQC framework to inventory processes

The APQC framework provides levels 1 through 3 for the “Market and Sell Products and Services” framework. Level 4 processes and beyond will need to be defined by your organization as they are more granular (represent the task level) and are often industry-specific.

Level 1 – Category - 1.0 Develop vision and strategy (10002)

Represents the highest level of process in the enterprise, such as manage customer service, supply chain, financial organization, and human resources.

Level 2 – Process Group - 1.1 Define the business concept and long-term vision (10014)

Indicates the next level of processes and represents a group of processes. Examples include perform after sales repairs, procurement, accounts payable, recruit/source, and develop sales strategy.

Level 3 – Process - 1.1.1 Assess the external environment (10017)

A series of interrelated activities that convert input into results (outputs); processes consume resources and require standards for repeatable performance; and processes respond to control systems that direct quality, rate, and cost of performance.

Level 4 – Activity - 1.1.1.1 Analyze and evaluate competition (10021)

Indicates key events performed when executing a process. Examples of activities include receive customer requests, resolve customer complaints, and negotiate purchasing contracts.

Level 5 – Task - 12.2.3.1.1 Identify project requirements and objectives (11117)

Tasks represent the next level of hierarchical decomposition after activities. Tasks are generally much more fine grained and may vary widely across industries. Examples include create business case and obtain funding, and design recognition and reward approaches.

Info-Tech Insight

Define the Level 3 processes in the context of your organization. When creating a CXM strategy, concern yourself with the interrelatedness of processes across existing departmental silos (e.g. marketing, sales, customer service). Reserve the analysis of activities (Level 4) and tasks (Level 3) for granular work initiatives involved in the implementation of applications.

Use Info-Tech’s CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool to prioritize processes for improvement

2.3.1 CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool

The CXM Business Process Shortlisting Tool can help you define which marketing, sales, and service processes you should focus on.

Working in concert with stakeholders from the appropriate departments, complete the short questionnaire.

Based on validated responses, the tool will highlight processes of strategic importance to your organization.

These processes can then be mapped, with requirements extracted and used to build the CXM application portfolio.

INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

Activity: Define your organization’s top-level processes for reengineering and improvement

2.3.2 1 hour

Input

• Shortlist business processes relating to customer experience (output of Tool 2.3.1)

Output

• Prioritized list of top-level business processes by department

Materials

• APQC Framework
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Inventory all business processes relating to customer experience.
2. Customize the impacted business units and factor weightings on the scorecard below to reflect the structure and priorities of your organization.
3. Using the scorecard, identify all processes essential to your customer experience. The scorecard is designed to determine which processes to focus on and to help you understand the impact of the scrutinized process on the different customer-centric groups across the organization.

Current legend for Weights and Scores

F – Finance

H – Human Resources

I – IT

L – Legal

M – Marketing

BU1 – Business Unit 1

BU2 – Business Unit 2

Activity: Map top-level business processes to extract strategic requirements for the CXM application portfolio

2.3.3 45 minutes

Input

• Prioritized list of top-level business processes (output of Activity 2.3.2)

Output

• Current state process maps
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• APQC Framework
• Whiteboard
• Markers
• Sticky notes

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. List all prioritized business processes, as identified in Activity 2.3.2. Map your processes in enough detail to capture all relevant activities and system touchpoints, using the legend included in the example. Focus on Level 3 processes, as explained in the APQC framework.
2. Record all of the major process steps on sticky notes. Arrange the sticky notes in sequential order.
3. On a set of different colored sticky notes, record all of the systems that enable the process. Map these system touchpoints to the process steps.
4. Draw arrows in between the steps to represent manual entry or automation.
5. Identify effectiveness and gaps in existing processes to determine process technology requirements.
6. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITY

Refer to Info-Tech’s Create a Comprehensive BPM Strategy for Successful Process Automation blueprint for further assistance in taking a BPM approach to your sales-IT alignment.

Info-Tech Insight

Analysis of the current state is important in the context of gap analysis. It aids in understanding the discrepancies between your baseline and the future state vision, and ensures that these gaps are documented as part of the overall requirements.

Example: map your current CXM processes to parse strategic requirements (customer acquisition)

Activity: Extract requirements from your top-level business processes

2.3.4 30 minutes

Input

• Current state process maps (output of Activity 2.3.3)

Output

• Requirements for future state mapping

Materials

• Info-Tech examples
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Discuss the current state of priority business processes, as mapped in Activity 2.3.3.
2. Extract process requirements for business process improvement by asking the following questions:

• What is the input?
• What is the output?
• What are the underlying risks and how can they be mitigated?
• What conditions should be met to mitigate or eliminate each risk?
• What are the improvement opportunities?
• What conditions should be met to enable these opportunities?

3. Break business requirements into functional and non-functional requirements, as outlined on this slide.

Info-Tech Insight

The business and IT should work together to evaluate the current state of business processes and the business requirements necessary to support these processes. Develop a full view of organizational needs while still obtaining the level of detail required to make informed decisions about technology.

Establish process owners for each top-level process

Identify the owners of the business processes being evaluated to extract requirements. Process owners will be able to inform business process improvement and assume accountability for reengineered or net-new processes going forward.

Process Owner Responsibilities

Process ownership ensures support, accountability, and governance for CXM and its supporting processes. Process owners must be able to negotiate with business users and other key stakeholders to drive efficiencies within their own process. The process owner must execute tactical process changes and continually optimize the process.

Responsibilities include the following:

• Inform business process improvement
• Introduce KPIs and metrics
• Monitor the success of the process
• Present process findings to key stakeholders within the organization
• Develop policies and procedures for the process
• Implement new methods to manage the process

Info-Tech Insight

Identify the owners of existing processes early so you understand who needs to be involved in process improvement and reengineering. Once implemented, CXM applications are likely to undergo a series of changes. Unstructured data will multiply, the number of users may increase, administrators may change, and functionality could become obsolete. Should business processes be merged or drastically changed, process ownership can be reallocated during CXM implementation. Make sure you have the right roles in place to avoid inefficient processes and poor data quality.

Use Info-Tech’s Process Owner Assignment Guide to aid you in choosing the right candidates

2.3.5 Process Owner Assignment Guide

The Process Owner Assignment Guide will ensure you are taking the appropriate steps to identify process owners for existing and net-new processes created within the scope of the CXM strategy.

The steps in the document will help with important considerations such as key requirements and responsibilities.

Sections of the document:

1. Define responsibilities and level of commitment
2. Define job requirements
3. Receive referrals
4. Hold formal interviews
5. Determine performance metrics

INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

Activity: Assign business process owners and identify job responsibilities

2.3.6 30 minutes

Input

• Current state map (output of Activity 2.3.3)

Output

• Process owners assigned
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Info-Tech’s Process Owner Assignment Guide
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Using Info-Tech’s Process Owner Assignment Guide, assign process owners for each process mapped out in Activity 2.3.3. To assist in doing so, answer the following questions

• What is the level of commitment expected from each process owner?
• How will the process owner role be tied to a formal performance appraisal?
• What metrics can be assigned?
• How much work will be required to train process owners?
• Is there support staff available to assist process owners?

Choose the channels that will make your target customers happy – and ensure they’re supported by CXM applications

Traditional Channels

Face-to-Face is efficient and has a positive personalized aspect that many customers desire, be it for sales or customer service.

Telephony (or IVR) has been a mainstay of customer interaction for decades. While not fading, it must be used alongside newer channels.

Postal used to be employed extensively for all domains, but is now used predominantly for e-commerce order fulfillment.

Web 1.0 Channels

Email is an asynchronous interaction channel still preferred by many customers. Email gives organizations flexibility with queuing.

Live Chat is a way for clients to avoid long call center wait times and receive a solution from a quick chat with a service rep.

Web Portals permit transactions for sales and customer service from a central interface. They are a must-have for any large company.

Web 2.0 Channels

Social Media consists of many individual services (like Facebook or Twitter). Social channels are exploding in consumer popularity.

HTML5 Mobile Access allows customers to access resources from their personal device through its integrated web browser.

Dedicated Mobile Apps allow customers to access resources through a dedicated mobile application (e.g. iOS, Android).

Info-Tech Insight

Your channel selections should be driven by customer personas and scenarios. For example, social media may be extensively employed by some persona types (i.e. Millennials) but see limited adoption in other demographics or use cases (i.e. B2B).

Activity: Extract requirements from your channel map

2.3.7 30 minutes

Input

• Current state process maps (output of Activity 2.3.3)

Output

• Channel map
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Info-Tech examples
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Inventory which customer channels are currently used by each department.
2. Speak with the department heads for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service and discuss future channel usage. Identify any channels that will be eliminated or added.
3. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Example: Business Unit Channel Use Survey

Bring it together: amalgamate your strategic requirements for CXM technology enablement

Discovering your organizational requirements is vital for choosing the right business-enabling initiative, technology, and success metrics. Sorting the requirements by marketing, sales, and service is a prudent mechanism for clarification.

Strategic Requirements: Marketing

Definition: High-level requirements that will support marketing functions within CXM.

Examples

• Develop a native mobile application while also ensuring that resources for your web presence are built with responsive design interface.
• Consolidate workflows related to content creation to publish all brand marketing from one source of truth.
• Augment traditional web content delivery by providing additional functionality such as omnichannel engagement, e-commerce, dynamic personalization, and social media functionality.

Strategic Requirements: Sales

Definition: High-level requirements that will support sales functions within CXM.

Examples

• Implement a system that reduces data errors and increases sales force efficiency by automating lead management workflows.
• Achieve end-to-end visibility of the sales process by integrating the CRM, inventory, and order processing and shipping system.
• Track sales force success by incorporating sales KPIs with real-time business intelligence feeds.

Strategic Requirements: Customer Service

Definition: High-level requirements that will support customer service functions within CXM.

Examples

• Provide a live chat portal that connects the customer, in real time, with the next available and qualified agent.
• Bridge the gap between the source of truth for sales with customer service suites to ensure a consistent, end-to-end customer experience from acquisition to customer engagement and retention.
• Use customer intelligence to track customer journeys in order to best understand and resolve customer complaints.

Activity: Consolidate your strategic requirements for the CXM application portfolio

2.3.8 30 minutes

Input

• Strategic CXM requirements (outputs of Activities 2.1.5, 2.1.6, and 2.2.2)

Output

• Aggregated strategic CXM requirements
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Aggregate strategic CXM requirements that have been gathered thus far in Activities 2.1.5, 2.1.6, and 2.2.2, 2.3.5, and 2.3.7.
2. Identify and rectify any obvious gaps in the existing set of strategic CXM requirements. To do so, consider the overall corporate and CXM strategy: are there any objectives that have not been addressed in the requirements gathering process?
3. De-duplicate the list. Prioritize the aggregated/augmented list of CXM requirements as “high/critical,” “medium/important,” or “low/desirable.” This will help manage the relative importance and urgency of different requirements to itemize respective initiatives, resources, and the time in which they need to be addressed. In completing the prioritization of requirements, consider the following:

• Requirements prioritization must be completed in collaboration with all key stakeholders (across the business and IT). Stakeholders must ask themselves:
  • What are the consequences to the business objectives if this requirement is omitted?
  • Is there an existing system or manual process/workaround that could compensate for it?
  • What business risk is being introduced if a particular requirement cannot be implemented right away?

Info-Tech Insight

Strategic CXM requirements will be used to prioritize specific initiatives for CXM technology enablement and application rollout. Ensure that IT, the business, and executive management are all aligned on a consistent and agreed upon set of initiatives.

Burberry digitizes the retail CX with real-time computing to bring consumers back to the physical storefront

CASE STUDY

Industry Consumer Goods, Clothing

Source Retail Congress, 2017

Burberry London

Situation

Internally, Burberry invested in organizational alignment and sales force brand engagement. The more the sales associate knew about the brand engagement and technology-enabled strategy, the better the store’s performance. Before the efforts went to building relationships with customers, Burberry built engagement with employees.

Burberry embraced “omnichannel,” the hottest buzzword in retailing to provide consumers the most immersive and intuitive brand experience within the store.

Technology Strategy

RFID tags were attached to products to trigger interactive videos on the store’s screens in the common areas or in a fitting room. Consumers are to have instant access to relevant product combinations, ranging from craftsmanship information to catwalk looks. This is equivalent to the rich, immediate information consumers have grown to expect from the online shopping experience.

Another layer of Burberry’s added capabilities includes in-memory-based analytics to gather and analyze data in real-time to better understand customers’ desires. Burberry builds customer profiles based on what items the shoppers try on from the RFID-tagged garments. Although this requires customer privacy consent, customers are willing to provide personal information to trusted brands.

This program, called “Customer 360,” assisted sales associates in providing data-driven shopping experiences that invite customers to digitally share their buying history and preferences via their tablet devices. As the data is stored in Burberry’s customer data warehouse and accessed through an application such as CRM, it is able to arm sales associates with personal fashion advice on the spot.

Lastly, the customer data warehouse/CRM application is linked to Burberry’s ERP system and other custom applications in a cloud environment to achieve real-time inventory visibility and fulfillment.

Burberry digitizes the retail CX with real-time computing to bring consumers back to the physical storefront (cont'd)

CASE STUDY

Industry Consumer Goods, Clothing

Source Retail Congress, 2017

Burberry London

Situation

Internally, Burberry invested in organizational alignment and sales force brand engagement. The more the sales associate knew about the brand engagement and technology-enabled strategy, the better the store’s performance. Before the efforts went to building relationships with customers, Burberry built engagement with employees.

Burberry embraced “omnichannel,” the hottest buzzword in retailing to provide consumers the most immersive and intuitive brand experience within the store.

The Results

Burberry achieved one of the most personalized retail shopping experiences. Immediate personal fashion advice using customer data is only one component of the experience. Not only are historic purchases and preference data analyzed, a customer’s social media posts and fashion industry trend data is proactively incorporated into the interactions between the sales associate and the customer.

Burberry achieved CEO Angela Ahrendts’ vision of “Burberry World,” in which the brand experience is seamlessly integrated across channels, devices, retail locations, products, and services.

The organizational alignment between Sales, Marketing, and IT empowered employees to bring the Burberry brand to life in unique ways that customers appreciated and were willing to advocate.

Burberry is now one of the most beloved and valuable luxury brands in the world. The brand tripled sales in five years, became one of the leading voices on trends, fashion, music, and beauty while redefining what top-tier customer experience should be both digitally and physically.

Leverage both core CRM suites and point solutions to create a comprehensive CXM application portfolio

The debate between best-of-breed point solutions versus comprehensive CRM suites is ongoing. There is no single best answer. In most cases, an effective portfolio will include both types of solutions.

• When the CRM market first evolved, vendors took a heavy “module-centric” approach – offering basic suites with the option to add a number of individual modules. Over time, vendors began to offer suites with a high degree of out-of-the-box functionality. The market has now witnessed the rise of powerful point solutions for the individual business domains.
• Point solutions augment, rather than supplant, the functionality of a CRM suite in the mid-market to large enterprise context. Point solutions do not offer the necessary spectrum of functionality to take the place of a unified CRM suite.
• Point solutions enhance aspects of CRM. For example, most CRM vendors have yet to provide truly impressive social media capabilities. An organization seeking to dominate the social space should consider purchasing a social media management platform to address this deficit in their CRM ecosystem.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Social Media Management Platform (SMMP)

Field Sales/Service Automation (FSA)

Marketing Management Suites

Sales Force Automation

Email Marketing Tools

Lead Management Automation (LMA)

Customer Service Management Suites

Customer Intelligence Systems

Don’t adopt multiple point solutions without a genuine need: choose domains most in need of more functionality

Some may find that the capabilities of a CRM suite are not enough to meet their specific requirements: supplementing a CRM suite with a targeted point solution can get the job done. A variety of CXM point solutions are designed to enhance your business processes and improve productivity.

Sales

Sales Force Automation: Automatically generates, qualifies, tracks, and contacts leads for sales representatives, minimizing time wasted on administrative duties.

Field Sales: Allows field reps to go through the entire sales cycle (from quote to invoice) while offsite.

Sales Compensation Management: Models, analyzes, and dispenses payouts to sales representatives.

Marketing

Social Media Management Platforms (SMMP): Manage and track multiple social media services, with extensive social data analysis and insight capabilities.

Email Marketing Bureaus: Conduct email marketing campaigns and mine results to effectively target customers.

Marketing Intelligence Systems: Perform in-depth searches on various data sources to create predictive models.

Service

Customer Service Management (CSM): Manages the customer support lifecycle with a comprehensive array of tools, usually above and beyond what’s in a CRM suite.

Customer Service Knowledge Management (CSKM): Advanced knowledgebase and resolution tools.

Field Service Automation (FSA): Manages customer support tickets, schedules work orders, tracks inventory and fleets, all on the go.

Info-Tech Insight

CRM and point solution integration is critical. A best-of-breed product that poorly integrates with your CRM suite compromises the value generated by the combined solution, such as a 360-degree customer view. Challenge point solution vendors to demonstrate integration capabilities with CRM packages.

Refer to your use cases to decide whether to add a dedicated point solution alongside your CRM suite

Know your end state and what kind of tool will get you there. Refer to your strategic requirements to evaluate CRM and point solution feature sets.

Standalone CRM Suite

Sales Conditions: Need selling and lead management capabilities for agents to perform the sales process, along with sales dashboards and statistics.

Marketing or Communication Conditions: Need basic campaign management and ability to refresh contact records with information from social networks.

Member Service Conditions: Need to keep basic customer records with multiple fields per record and basic channels such as email and telephony.

Add a Best-of-Breed or Point Solution

Environmental Conditions: An extensive customer base with many different interactions per customer along with industry specific or “niche” needs. Point solutions will benefit firms with deep needs in specific feature areas (e.g. social media or field service).

Sales Conditions: Lengthy sales process and account management requirements for assessing and managing opportunities – in a technically complex sales process.

Marketing Conditions: Need social media functionality for monitoring and social property management.

Customer Service Conditions: Need complex multi-channel service processes and/or need for best-of-breed knowledgebase and service content management.

Info-Tech Insight

The volume and complexity of both customers and interactions have a direct effect on when to employ just a CRM suite and when to supplement with a point solution. Check to see if your CRM suite can perform a specific business requirement before deciding to evaluate potential point solutions.

Use Info-Tech’s CXM Portfolio Designer to create an inventory of high-value customer interaction applications

2.3.9 CXM Portfolio Designer

The CXM Portfolio Designer features a set of questions geared toward understanding your needs for marketing, sales, and customer service enablement.

These results are scored and used to suggest a comprehensive solution-level set of enterprise applications for CXM that can drive your application portfolio and help you make investment decisions in different areas such as CRM, marketing management, and customer intelligence.

Sections of the tool:

1. Introduction
2. Customer Experience Management Questionnaire
3. Business Unit Recommendations
4. Enterprise-Level Recommendations

INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

Understand the art of the possible and how emerging trends will affect your application portfolio (1)

Cloud

• The emergence and maturation of cloud technologies has broken down the barriers of software adoption.
• Cloud has enabled easy-to-implement distributed sales centers for enterprises with global or highly fragmented workforces.
• Cloud offers the agility, scalability, and flexibility needed to accommodate dynamic, evolving customer requirements while minimizing resourcing strain on IT and sales organizations.
• It is now easier for small to medium enterprises to acquire and implement advanced sales capabilities to compete against larger competitors in a business environment where the need for business agility is key.
• Although cost and resource reduction is a prominent view of the impact of cloud computing, it is also seen as an agile way to innovate and deliver a product/service experience that customers are looking for – the key to competitive differentiation.

Mobile

• Smartphones and other mobile devices were adopted faster than the worldwide web in the late 1990s, and the business and sales implications of widespread adoption cannot be ignored – mobile is changing how businesses operate.
  • Accenture’s Mobility Research Report states that 87% of companies in the study have been guided by a formal mobility strategy – either one that spans the enterprise or for specific business functions.
• Mobile is now the first point of interaction with businesses. With this trend, gaining visibility into customer insights with mobile analytics is a top priority for organizations.
• Enterprises need to develop and optimize mobile experiences for internal salespeople and customers alike as part of their sales strategy – use mobile to enable a competitive, differentiated sales force.
• The use of mobile platforms by sales managers is becoming a norm. Sales enablement suites should support real-time performance metrics on mobile dashboards.

Understand the art of the possible and how emerging trends will affect your application portfolio (2)

Social

• The rise of social networking brought customers together. Customers are now conversing with each other over a wide range of community channels that businesses neither own nor control.
  • The Power Shift: The use of social channels empowered customers to engage in real-time, unstructured conversations for the purpose of product/service evaluations. Those who are active in social environments come to wield considerable influence over the buying decisions of other prospects and customers.
• Organizations need to identify the influencers and strategically engage them as well as developing an active presence in social communities that lead to sales.
• Social media does have an impact on sales, both B2C and B2B. A study conducted in 2012 by Social Centered Selling states that 72.6% of sales people using social media as part of their sales process outperformed their peers and exceeded their quota 23% more often (see charts at right).

(Social Centered Learning, n.d.)

Understand the art of the possible and how emerging trends will affect your application portfolio (3)

Internet of Things

• Definition: The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects accessed through the internet. These objects contain embedded technology to interact with internal states or the external environment.
• Why is this interesting?
  • IoT will make it possible for everybody and everything to be connected at all times, processing information in real time. The result will be new ways of making business and sales decisions supported by the availability of information.
  • With ubiquitous connectivity, the current product design-centric view of consumers is changing to one of experience design that aims to characterize the customer relationship with a series of integrated interaction touchpoints.
  • The above change contributes to the shift in focus from experience and will mean further acceleration of the convergence of customer-centric business functions. IoT will blur the lines between marketing, sales, and customer service.
  • Products or systems linked to products are capable of self-operating, learning, updating, and correcting by analyzing real-time data.
  • Take for example, an inventory scale in a large warehouse connected to the company’s supply chain management (SCM) system. When a certain inventory weight threshold is reached due to outgoing shipments, the scale automatically sends out a purchase requisition to restock inventory levels to meet upcoming demand.
• The IoT will eventually begin to transform existing business processes and force organizations to fundamentally rethink how they produce, operate, and service their customers.

For categories covered by existing applications, determine the disposition for each app: grow it or cut it loose

Use the two-by-two matrix below to structure your optimal CXM application portfolio. For more help, refer to Info-Tech’s blueprint, Use Agile Application Rationalization Instead of Going Big Bang.

Integrate: The application is functionally rich, so spend time and effort integrating it with other modules by building or enhancing interfaces.

Retain: The application satisfies both functionality and integration requirements, so it should be considered for retention.

Replace/Enhance: The module offers poor functionality but is well integrated with other modules. If enhancing for functionality is easy (e.g. through configuration or custom development), consider enhancement or replace it.

Replace: The application neither offers the functionality sought nor is it integrated with other modules, and thus should be considered for replacement.

Activity: Brainstorm the art of the possible, and build and finalize the CXM application portfolio

2.3.10 1-2 hours

Input

• Process gaps identified (output of Activity 2.3.9)

Output

• CXM application portfolio
• CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation

Materials

• Info-Tech’s CXM Portfolio Designer
• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Project Team

Instructions

1. Review the complete list of strategic requirements identified in the preceding exercises, as well as business process maps.
2. Identify which application would link to which process (e.g. customer acquisition, customer service resolution, etc.).
3. Use Info-Tech’s CXM Portfolio Designer to create an inventory of high-value customer interaction applications.
4. Define rationalization and investment areas.
5. Document your outputs in the CXM Strategy Stakeholder Presentation Template.

Example: Brainstorming the Art of the Possible

Use Info-Tech’s comprehensive reports to make granular vendor selection decisions

Now that you have developed the CXM application portfolio and identified areas of new investment, you’re well positioned to execute specific vendor selection projects. After you have built out your initiatives roadmap in phase 3, the following reports provide in-depth vendor reviews, feature guides, and tools and templates to assist with selection and implementation.

• Select and Implement a CRM Platform
• Select and Implement a Marketing Management Suite
• Select and Implement a Customer Service Management Solution
• Select and Implement a Web Experience Management Solution
• Vendor Landscape: Social Media Management Platforms

Info-Tech Insight

Not all applications are created equally well for each use case. The vendor reports help you make informed procurement decisions by segmenting vendor capabilities among major use cases. The strategic requirements identified as part of this project should be used to select the use case that best fits your needs.

If you want additional support, have our analyst guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop