Delivering contextually relevant digital commerce experiences requires changing the mindset of your organization. Translation: re-thinking the way you structure your organization is imperative to providing a truly blended content and commerce experience for your customers.
Easier said than done, right?
However, with the shift of empowered customers, they are no longer purchasing products – they are buying experiences. Forrester says:
“Companies will thrive in the age of the customer by becoming customer-obsessed – but they will only achieve that obsession when CMOs understand and can anticipate the most important customer shifts driving demand for new services and experiences.”1
The following provides some insight on how to establish digital governance to support your content and commerce initiatives.
Breaking Down Silos to Establish Digital Governance
Creating personalized experiences that provide the right content in the right context has created the need for companies to establish individual roles and processes to make this possible. However, delivering this experience to customers seamlessly and consistently across all touchpoints is a tall order. You have to address data and operational challenges, such as breaking down departmental silos and addressing disconnected processes, while also establishing governance to maintain the systems, shared data resources, and processes implemented.
From a high-level perspective, digital governance establishes standards, processes, metrics, and is overseen by an internal steering committee. The evolution of content and commerce platforms has empowered business users to create and update content and/or campaigns without going through the IT department. This “power” creates the necessity to establish a governance system that minimizes risk and protects the organization from creating or publishing content that could hurt customer experience or be detrimental to the brand.
Within the context of content and commerce, you need to think about who specifically will support these initiatives because they extend beyond the technology side of the business. The governance team needs representation from IT, marketing, content management, and data strategy teams. By defining the key roles for the tactical team and putting standards in place, you will be able to increase velocity while maintaining oversight and accountability. With a consistent set of roles, everyone knows what to do, and your teams move forward accordingly.
Establishing digital governance will empower a cross-functional team of business users to execute content and commerce within your organization. To learn more about this topic, check out our recent guide, Why Organizational Change Management is Critical to Digital Transformation.
Source:
1 The Rise of the Empowered Customer, Forrester, 2016