How These Tools Can Track Your Strategy

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The Power of Enterprise Tools

Digital Transformation is the process of transforming your organization to meet customer needs more efficiently through technological innovation and data.  One way to do it, is by powering up your organization with the use of the right leaders who can evaluate and implement the best enterprise tool to manage your work.

In order to deliver business value in the digital age, you will need to require your leaders to broaden not only their skills, capabilities, and understanding, but also their enterprise portfolio management solutions.

Part of their efforts will require them to evaluate and implement an enterprise workflow platform that’s built for scaling your core capabilities practices.

We’ve evaluated and put together a quick recommendation of three Enterprise Management tools that have the capabilities to help your organization get started on your Digital Transformation journey.  With this purpose in mind we took a look at some tools we’ve used that can help your digital strategy get tracked quickly. 

These Enterprise Management tools are focused around helping your organization manage all types of work.  They are designed to cover most digital product initiatives and support most team sizes. The right tool can keep your culture aligned across the organization with the ability to track, measure and show management the impact of their work. 

It’s not only about being on time or on budget, but also about business outcomes so these software tools can get you setup to start doing just that.

BENEFITS

As a CEO you will have a window into the guts of your company with Top-to-bottom transparency.  Whether you decided to consolidate your entire value stream by linking strategy to execution across teams, you will get that rolled up visibility of multiple programs.  This allows your leaders to drive business outcomes with collaborative and digitized processes.

These 3 Tools include but not limited to: 

1. ATLASSIAN/JIRA

2. VersionONE

3. Rally

These tools can help you reap the benefits of your digital transformation by bringing predictability into focus, removing silos and making your business rich in data currency so you can make it easier to spot and resolve problems at speed: 

Let’s take a closer look at some key areas you will need to know before moving on.  Here are some areas they can help you manage your work projects across your portfolios.

Connect work to meaningful outcomes

In order to make faster and smarter decisions, your development work needs to align to your company's most important business objectives. These tools can help you align daily work to strategy and leverage data to steer your business towards an outcomes-driven culture.

Align teams and empower them to innovate

These tool can serve as a central hub for teams to collaboratively plan, prioritize and track work on a synchronized cadence. Teams can visualize their work in the form of lists, boards or timeline views, and more importantly—they can understand how their day-to-day work aligns to the greater goals of the business.

Plan the right work, measure the right results

Stop struggling to manage dependencies and risks across multiple teams or delivery groups. These tools provide a comprehensive rolling-up of the progress, dependencies, alignment and plan health—so teams and groups can make intentional decisions and stay relentlessly focused on value.

REMEMBER

Using tools across your organization involves tracking the effectiveness of your strategy and then iterating where needed. These tools are all about tracking, analytics and iteration!  CultureSparq is serious about creating an amazing tool adoption for all teams.

Want to know more? SCHEDULE some time with us to learn how we will evaluate and implement the right enterprise tools in your business to keep your strategy aligned and visible.

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Do You Have Social Currency?

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Let’s level set. What is Social Currency?

Social currency is the ability of brands to fit into how consumers manage their social lives in today's digital and mobile age. Social currency (or social capital) applies to the relationship between your business and consumers.

Brands get built through experiences, through people accepting them and making them part of the fabric of their lives. This process of building strong brands is very personal and also very social. Today, one of the most important strengths of a brand is its social currency, the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand with others as part of their everyday social lives.

Social currency strategies are arguably the most critical point of leverage for a marketer and is giving their brands a boost in revenues. From health care to fashion, growing number of companies have come to embrace the concept of “social currency,” allowing consumers to pay via tweet and other social media posts.

Companies that are cultivating an exceptional portfolio of brands like @Inditex and @LVMH will need to have a social currency strategy so they can discover new high-paying customers that feel connected to their company values and mission.

To achieve and maintain a leadership position, partnering with CultureSparq is beneficial because we help companies nurture and preserve their brand’s distinctive identity and purpose. At the same time, we leverage our global experiences, creative resources and operational expertise that is tailored to fit a brand uniqueness. 

If you haven’t dominated your digital presence already - your brand need to build and nurture social currency.

Here’s 3 quick areas to get you started with your Social Currency strategy.

1. SHARE

   Establish a way to which people share the brand as part of their everyday social lives. For example:  Create your brands' own channel and upload videos relevant to your business.  Utilize influencers to open your content to a much broader (but well-targeted) audience. Or create videos to showcase your business behind the scenes or in-the-moment content - for example: marketing can show how your items are made from concept-to-cash in a interactive way by going live on IG or where your customers are.

2. UNBOXING

   Creating the Perfect Unboxing Experience. Use branded boxes that are uniquely designed and manufactured. Plus, to create a successful unboxing experience, the box can't simply be an ordinary box. Use unique packing material. Think about product presentation. Consider giving a free sample or reward for being a loyal customer. Add a touch of personalization. Include important inserts that give insights and opportunities for the customer to consider right away .

3. CREATE CHANNELS WITH COMMUNITIES

   Test new marketing channels by creating community-building opportunities so your brand becomes an integral part of your customer daily lives by enabling them to connect, interact, and benefit from your brand at all points of the customer journey.  You can achieve this by creating pop-up Digital Stores or Boutiques within those channels and personalized them based on that community profile and mission.  You can even make communities a popular destination because people can experience a personalized and cool interaction with your products because it meets their community charter from being able to make fun videos with products giveaways to help them achieve a social impact.

REMEMBER

Social currency is your influence on social networks, online and offline communities, and the degree by which your business is shared by others.  It’s not just about conversation, buzz, or community. It is all this and much more. 

Are you doing anything that stands out from the competition? Do people look to you for a specific product or service? If so, you have social currency. 

If not, SCHEDULE some time with us to learn how we can help create and execute your e-commerce strategies.

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The Future of E-Commerce

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3 eCommerce Trends  To Consider in 2021

What will your eCommerce look like in 2021?

With retail closures at an all time high—consumers are forced to do their shopping online. This has created a massive consumer migration of newcomers seeking a world-class and personalized customer experience.

As we head into the new year, a variety of trends are gaining momentum that will shape retail and eCommerce forever.

To become a major competitor, your eCommerce platform must be developed quicker than Amazon can deliver, and this mean you will have to invest smart and go big at being all in. The shift has been made and consumers are now seeking virtually store fronts to be able to order from their computer at home, mobile phones or anywhere without stepping a foot inside a store.

At CultureSparq, we know cool way your brand can stand out in a crowded eCommerce space is through automated shipping and fulfillment. Orders must have fast, free, and sustainable shipping. This includes branding the packaging to give a personalized experience when customer are unboxing it.  This type of fulfillment can make an additional remarkable experience when combined.  

To help you better compete with marketplaces and retail giants, we recommend brands invest in richer, more personalized experiences. To drive that deeper connection.  Humanizing your brand aids in customer retention, now a top priority as acquisition costs rise, along with uncertainty in digital advertising.

To help you prepare your business for the next step in the eCommerce journey, here are 3 trends to consider in 2021:

1. Create Deeper Connections: Solidify your customer loyalty by knowing how to connect with them.  Try creating Memories of having more convenience and affordable cost options as the top reason for increasing your brand trust. But don’t miss the fact that consumers also want to connect with brands on a deeper level like how the product or company is linked to a social impact/cause.

2. Make Your Fulfillment Competitive:  Fulfillment will be your key differentiator especially now that consumers gravitate to brands offering fast, free, and sustainable shipping. Try to establish a fulfillment competitive advantage by placing inventory closer to customers, automating returns, and offering flexible options like curbside pickup.

3. Make Subscription The New Normal:  One-time buyers and single-time orders can be huge obstacles to scaling your business rapidly.  Try to capture a lion’s share of the market by adapting a subscription model that will benefit both your customers and business. Something easy as Monthly payment options for larger purchases will help customers and entice them to subscribe to you.

Remember

Online shopping is the reality and retail is becoming increasingly digital and internet-driven. Store fronts like bricks and mortar have adopted elements of the online experience to encourage us all to visit them by playing to the strengths that in-person experiences can offer, such as more personal levels of service.

The Consumers have made it clear about what they want from the shopping experience – are you listening?

If you need help strategizing and delivering your 2021 roadmap, please SCHEDULE some time with us and we will do an eCommerce deep dive with your team towards an unified connected commerce experience.

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Workflow Automation

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What is Workflow Automation?

Workflow Automation refers to the design, execution, and automation of processes based on workflow rules where human tasks, data or files are routed between people or systems based on pre-defined business rules. By leveraging self-operating processes that run manual tasks, workflow automation can help your business save time and money, diminish errors, and boost productivity.

Why Why Workflow Automation

At CultureSparq, we believe in automating workflows, especially those processes that are primarily handled manually by employees — significant improvements can be made in efficiency, productivity and even accountability.

The Benefits

Workflow automation provides several benefits over manual processes from Policy compliance adherence, Improved visibility, Improved employee satisfaction, Continual process improvement, Better workload management to Reduced errors.  These are just a few areas digital leaders will have to think about automating as part of their digital transformation strategy.

Almost every department in your business can benefit from workflow automation. Whether it’s marketing, human resources, or finance — automating your workflows will help you work smarter, not harder.

Here are FIVE examples to help you on your transformation journey towards automating a specific workflow or function:

MARKETING

Reach customers no matter where they are in their journey.  By automating some of your Marketing’s most repetitive tasks, such as sending emails, creating campaigns and posting to social media you can reach customers faster and convert customers into lifelong brand advocates.

Human Resources 

From performance reviews to employee onboarding, off-boarding and request for time off.  Decrease the time of having to manually enter all your new hires’ personal information, like addresses, social security numbers, and other employee information into payroll, expense, and insurance systems, by automation your HR systems.

FINANCE

You can streamline your CapEx Approval Process and improve Compliance by allowing users to easily define, build, and publish customized capital expenditure request processes. Automation your finance processes so you can streamline all your travel requests, reimbursements, and budget approvals to quickly learn how to maximize revenues.

IT 

You can replace repeatable processes and reduce manual intervention by automation your IT systems and software. Areas like Cloud automation and DevOps Automation can increase IT productivity and efficiency – and reduce human errors. Recently the focus on IT automation has shifted to enhanced business productivity, greater innovation and faster speed to market.

REPORTING & DATA ANALYTICS

Today’s digital marketing landscape often involves dealing with many different data sources on a daily basis. When it comes to measuring success, it’s important to have an accurate estimation by Tracking, Documenting and Measuring the key outcomes of your deliverables.  Automating your reporting process will help you gain faster operational insights and business insights that give you the necessary talking points needed to bridge the gap from the operational level to the business level so you can keep the company informed at speed.

Remember

With any technology-enabled initiative, you must have a strong change management strategy in place so that the workers impacted as a result of automation will adjust to the new workflow rather than rejecting the changes.

If you need some help with your Automation strategy and execution, SCHEDULE some time with us so we can streamline your workflow, so you can focus on delivering ore value and increase your income velocity. 

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How To Digitize Business Operations - Public and Private Sector

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Here are some insights on how to digitize your business?

All Enterprise Transformation will need to start with culture first.  

Although we are also transforming customer journeys and processes—we believe most of digitization efforts will be spent on advancing the culture mindset, automation, advanced analytics, and systems thinking. 

About 85 percent of the world’s senior business leaders are prioritizing business digitization around these areas to avoid a loss in their competitive edge and their company profits. That’s why many leaders in both private and public sectors are looking to expedite the Digitization of their Business Enterprises’ Operations.

We see organizations pursuing a change in this type of operational productivity and customer experience now more than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic. By scaling digital strategies across multiple enterprises, our clients realize new value will arise from these changes by adopting these several shifts:

SHIFT THE CULTURE MINDSET

Start with a focus on Leadership, talent, and culture.  Build the mindset with your Leadership team towards having a commitment and awareness of trends and opportunities both past and present.  Hire a workforce that is skilled at Technical implementation and Strategy.  This will require you to establish programs to attract, train and retain digital workers.

MAKE DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS

Build your data platform early on to take advantage of using advanced analytics to track, visualize, optimize, predict and make comparison to drive future decisions. Data is supreme when it can be converted into actionable insights, and that impact is sustained by developing skills and structures throughout the organization.  

USE TECHNOLOGY TO AUTOMATE@SCALE

Systems Thinking is key to knowing how to Automate workflow areas to increase the opportunities of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize and simplify the use of complex systems in order to make your business operations easily accessible.

TARGET AN END-TO-END CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 

Focus on crafting your customer journeys using new operating models that combine digital technologies and operational capabilities seamlessly. When creating a customer journey you’ve got to consider the big picture. The Customer experience is a cumulative impact; it considers all the touchpoint of your business and the relationships (or lack thereof) it fosters.

Remember

The digitization of your business operations should include staff from a variety of teams, as you want to deliver an end-to-end customer experience. As a result, you’ll need to compile and establish a group of transformational leaders to digitize your business processes. This will be a productive team of talented people from across departments with strong communication skills.

CultureSparq is a leader in helping companies transform through the digital age by helping CEOs make changes in operational productivity and the customer experience. Our Digital Strategist are working at scale throughout enterprises from around the world to deliver new value from these changes towards the Digitization of their Business Operations.

Schedule some time with me to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture towards a digital enterprise.

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Unified Commerce Transformation

How to build a Unified Commerce Culture

C-Suite leaders, how are you preparing to take your company to the next level towards providing a Unified Commerce experience?

We know culture is one of the biggest barriers to scaling any transformation. Culture is perceived to be a massive undertaking and often hard to change. Attributes that may be culture barriers for some are, in fact, enablers for others.  As part of the C-Suite, you should focus on mobilizing a purpose and beliefs to drive culture change. 

Determine the purpose of the company, what it yields for the world and what the beliefs are of the people coming to work each day can build the culture away from a barrier to an accelerator.

As we all are aware, Unified Commerce gives your customers a constant experience across multiple channels and by building an unified commerce culture you will have employees engaged in making use of a single, incorporated, real-time platform for all customer engagement points.

Gartner research suggest, the right culture is one of the most important requirements to achieve digital transformation. Along with Gartner, CultureSparq predicts in 2021, C-Suite leaders like CIOs, CDOs and CSOs will be as responsible for culture change as chief HR officers.

When there is change there is always some chaos. This requires bold leaders who think and see things differently to approach a culture transformation as an enabler to increase innovation and speed but to also save money.

If you’ve already decided that you need to change aspects of your organization’s culture, there are some key steps CultureSparq can help you to take that will ensure your culture transformation gets off on the right foot. 

You will need the right organizational leaders to drive the success of a culture transformation. They must provide the support employees require to begin making behavior changes, and they can help move the entire organization toward the new culture. 

Here are three strategies C-Suite leaders can ponder to prepare for a culture transformation towards a unified commerce experience:

1. Design a New Operating Model by transforming the business model or optimizing the existing one to deliver a commerce strategy at scale for todays market challenges. Unified Commerce requires a well designed Enterprise Operating Model Perspective to optimize operational costs, improve product traceability and availability, and increase customer satisfaction. 

2. Mobilize a Culture of Innovators by leveraging an innovative mindset and technology to optimize delivery and customer experience.  If you want to innovate, it’s important to build diverse talented teams and for you to be closer to what your company does to better understand the delivery experience.  

3. Transform your Communication Strategy by leading major changes across the organization to allow the entire company to participate, grow and succeed collectively in the decisions making process and get rewarding for the progress. You will have to quickly move towards a change management on steroids to make quantum improvements towards operational performance by reengineering key business functions with hyper-communication strategies.

Remember

These three strategies need to be at the heart of any C-Suite retailer’s Unified Commerce strategy. Without these strategies, you will be unable to put in place the organizational structure needed in order to better serve your customers and lead the way towards deploying an efficient Unified Commerce experience.

Schedule some time with me today, to learn how we are driving Unified Commerce transformational outcomes. 

For more insight, download our 4Cs of Connected Commerce white paper.

We Build The Culture