3 WAYS TO UNLOCK THE POTENTIAL OF ENGAGEMENT TECH

When new solutions fail to live up to expectations, frustration follows. Here are three ways to ensure engagement technologies deliver business value.

COMPANIES ARE UNDER SIGNIFICANT PRESSURE TO TRANSFORM WHERE AND HOW THEY INTERACT WITH CONSUMERS TO REMAIN COMPETITIVE.

BUT more and more organisations are failing to get the results they expect from their investments in engagement technologies.

As most of us comfortably adopted the ‘new normal’ of hybrid lifestyles, where we shift constantly between physical and digital worlds, seamless experiences have become the expectation, forcing marketing leaders to rethink their interaction strategies and question how effective their technologies are in supporting them.

Wide-scale digital transformation has changed the future

Demand is not the only force exacting pressure on marketing leadership, supply is too. The number of engagement solutions has increased by 24 per cent since 2020, with 9,932 now pitching for attention and business across the ecosystem. The acceleration of wide-scale digital transformation has increased the number of new entrants offering niche functionality and industry- specific products and services – at lower costs than their incumbents.

In particular, the significant growth of aggregators – systems that enable greater cohesion of technologies – is enabling more flexible and tailored technology stacks, providing opportunities to combine best-ofbreed solutions that meet organisations’ needs more efficiently.

With reports of strong performance and ROIs being touted across business networks and social platforms, it’s easy to understand why marketing leaders are putting their existing investments under the spotlight.

Here, Murray Allan, the Director of Customer Strategy & Engagement at Optima Partners, suggests three ways organisations can ensure their engagement technologies are efficiently delivering value for the business and yielding the returns stakeholders expect.

1) Start with a welldefined customer strategy

Poorly formulated customer strategy can often be a cause of an apparent failure of engagement technology. Ultimately, even the best technologies will not deliver business value if they’re driving the wrong outcomes. Effective customer strategies start with a deep understanding of the value opportunity and dynamics of the customer base, alongside how they change over time. Factors you must consider include:

• Scale

• Reach

• Current and potential value

• Shared personas and behaviours

• Needs and interests

• Motivations and frustrations

Next, you must clearly articulate how to unlock that value through key value drivers – the series of actions and behaviours that generate positive customer and business outcomes.

The fundamental inputs engagement technologies rely on are tactical, data-driven interactions – key value drivers become the objective for these. The more customer outcomes that drive positive business value, the greater the return on investment.

2) Evaluate technology thoroughly before investing

When it comes to technology, sometimes it can be difficult to separate a bold promise from what is commercially viable.

Many organisations find themselves swept up in the publicity and marketplace hype and invest in technologies before fully comprehending how they will be applied and supported in the business. Before investing, evaluate all new technology against a well-defined set of capability requirements, and link these back to business objectives.

By avoiding scope creep and overinvestment in capabilities that are unnecessary, underutilised or too advanced for the business to support, the company can prevent the wastage of resources.

Murray says, “Capability requirements should methodically capture not only technical business needs, but also establish how the technology will be used. Wellcrafted requirements will support a more comprehensive vendor evaluation and make it easier to delineate between solutions, which is often the biggest challenge.

“Before committing and investing, decision-makers should construct a sound cost-benefit analysis to fully understand the levels of risk and reward, and to validate the commercial mechanics involved in how the technology will deliver value. Examine any tolerances in assumptions, inputs and probabilities by modelling an array of outcomes and assess the envelope in which the business is willing to operate, making sure any thresholds are valid and realistic targets.”

3) Deploy efficient operating models to leverage technology effectively

Some organisations place immediate blame on their technologies when things are not going to plan – citing gaps or limitations in capability and compatibility as key driving forces for underperformance.

While this can be the case sometimes, in most situations businesses overlook how the technology is being applied, used and supported by the organisation.

As a result, investment in engagement technologies can be cyclical and the cost of behavioural change is often underestimated, with ‘rip-and-replace’ an all-toocommon solution that does not actually treat the problem. This behaviour consumes technical and business resources at great cost and is likely to create significant technical debt.

But technology is not always the issue or the answer. Any technology must be supported by an efficient operating model to be effective. To ensure it is being optimally applied, fully utilised and effectively governed within the business, you need to build the correct competencies, content and workflows around it.

The process takes time and must be carefully planned and managed by the right people, which is necessary with any operating model change. Many organisations fail to understand the changes required or those yet to occur around their technologies. As a result, they try to do or expect too much too quickly from them.

For the process to be successful, you must invest time to define and plot a realistic capability roadmap to ensure technologies are properly embedded within an organisation’s operating model. By unlocking those efficiencies, a successful implementation can ultimately drive an increased return on investment.

Source: Optima Partners