Chief Digital Officer, CDO. There’s a new C-level in town. Question is, why? With the rise of social media, mobile applications, e-commerce, and consumers living and breathing online, CDOs help companies navigate the digital age. This article will look how this came about, three reasons on how small business owners can benefit from their advice, and what some of the big companies are doing.
Chief Digital Officer Cometh. WHY? The internet is changing the conversations we have with our customers. As cliché as it sounds it is in fact the new Business As Usual. With this interconnectedness, companies had to get their message straight and interact with their customers. CDOs began as a subset of marketing according to this article by Russel Reynolds Associate (an executive recruitment agency). They soon played critical roles as products had to be “digitized” to be sold online and monitor how digital assets performed ie traffic, conversion, and sales. Recognising that their input was required at the strategic vision level, the CDO was born (and according to the same agency, is commanding a respectable price in the market).
Chief Digital Officer. Three Reasons Why you Need Them.
Strategic Vision of Customer Digital Experience – Cash is king, but great customer experience builds loyalty, trust, and reputation which translates into positive feedback, customer advocates, and a lifetime customer (they who choose your brand only and don’t even think of the competition). The internet is an integral part of building that customer experience. CDOs are in a position to find out what the key message is and work out how that translates into digital experience. But more importantly, how everything is streamlined when it comes to social media. There is a plethora of platforms out there (eg Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Delicious, StumbleUpon). CDOs help you streamline the process of getting the message out to the right customer and ensures the is not drowned out.
Digital Strategy – Now that you’ve built a great platform from which you converse with your customers, how does it translate internally? Are your IT systems setup to support these conversations? What about the business processes involved with updating content, or allowing your sales agent to access a Facebook comment which led to the sales callout? Is there an enterprise iPad app which you can use to integrate all this information from a sales visit and ensure a record is kept so that the next time the customer is visited, their concerns are addressed and information that they asked for is at your consumer’s finger tips? CDOs ask these questions and more importantly, work on answering them. A digital strategy should not only be integrated (all systems working towards a common goal) but is also scalable ie the system is sustainably managed with growing users. These strategies also identify digital opportunities for companies to gain a competitive advantage.
Do you Speak English? We at OMate believe that the most important reason is that CDOs speak from the business side of things more than the IT side of things. As such, we not only speak business language but also ensure that all IT decisions are tied to business strategy. This is where conversations consist of simple analogies and business impacts are clearly stated. For example, we shouldn’t be developing our app in language X because our customers are expecting a responsive experience, language y would be more suited for this. No discussion on “vertex shading” or ”optimized swarming simulation”. A simple x vs y and the reason being better customer experience.
In summary, CDOs are here to stay because they help companies create meaningful digital experiences with their customers, ensure there is a digital strategy in place so that business and IT work in harmony, and to help CEOs make decisions because they understand the decision being made in the first place. So, what can a CDO do to help your business today? Feel free to comment and provide feedback.