Take Practical Steps To Apply CX Disciplines To Digital Initiatives

Odds are your firm is regularly seeking ways to improve customer experience (CX). You’re also likely embracing digital technologies to enable a more customer-driven, agile operating model. The question is: Are these initiatives aligned? In other words, are you confident in your firm’s ability to consistently deliver on brand promise?

Financial services firms, like firms in many other industries, are struggling to thrive in a disrupted market. They’re challenged to reinvent often mature brands, deliver a world-class digital experience, and ensure ongoing trust in an industry facing increased scrutiny and ever more empowered customers. As a global provider of risk, retirement, and health solutions, Aon is no exception.

In a recently published report, “Case Study: How Digital And CX Teams Collaborate To Deliver On Brand Promise,” I explain how Aon aligned its CX and digital teams to deliver consistent brand experience across all digital platforms. Among our key learnings were:

  • Embrace an outside-in perspective to create and maintain a common vision. Undertaking a digital transformation typically involves a large number of interdependent projects and stakeholders, including digital, marketing, customer service, and CX, underpinned by solid executive leadership. By linking all decisions back to its members (e.g., customers), Aon was able to proactively engage key stakeholders to cultivate and maintain buy-in and ensure that its priorities, goals, and objectives never wavered.
  • Establish a central role for customer advocacy. For Aon, this role was key to effectively managing outbound communication and consistently linking all decisions back to members. It required agreement on which participating group — marketing, CX, digital, sales, product, customer service — owned, prioritized, and signed off on project elements such as member personas and journeys, visual design, brand voice, content, and flow.
  • Be open to new ideas but ruthless in setting priorities. Distinguish between who needs their opinions heard, who gets to have a say, and, ultimately, who makes final decisions. Harness the enthusiasm that often accompanies projects like this, but manage expectations. As Aon discovered, you’ll never be able to implement everyone’s feedback or ideas, but do ensure that the good ideas feed into the development pipeline.

To explore this topic in greater detail, check out the full report.