A strategy can define a destination but it won’t get you where you need to go. It takes strong leadership with focused vision to effectively guide an organization along its journey toward profitable and sustainable growth. Unfortunately, most insurers are not prepared to overcome the roadblocks that stand between strategy and value.

Digital IQ

Diamond’s Digital IQ Study found that only 20 percent of companies have strong strategic planning, mobilization and execution skills. These companies are more likely to outperform their peers. The remaining 80% are not effectively putting their business strategies into action, something we call “operationalizing the strategy.”

After much analysis, we have identified six main reasons insurers and other organizations fail to successfully operationalize their strategies.

1. The strategy developed contains an inadequate level of clarity or detail. Strategic objectives are too often high-level visionary statements that contain little detail and no over-arching guide path. In order for an organization to embrace and succeed in implementing a new strategy, the high-level mission must be translated into lower-level goals that can be measured and linked to financial targets.
2. The strategy fails to identify and quantify customer experience and/or market need. Strategies are typically expressed in terms of growth and profitability targets. They do not often consider what customers want or analyze what is feasible from a market perspective. Strategies are only successful after review of the marketplace through a market validation process. This process helps organizations to identify market dynamics and appropriately link financial and operational targets.
3. Corporate leaders have difficulty translating strategic objectives into operational processes and technology requirements. Concrete business objectives and required business and technology capabilities must be clearly defined at the outset. This can be further informed through market validation. Thereafter, organizations can prioritize for business value and operational and technical feasibility.
4. Corporate leaders are too overwhelmed with ongoing initiatives across divisions to be able to implement an integrated plan. Incorporating new initiatives within ongoing operations will challenge even the most capable organization. Organizations that create manageable transformation plans do it in phases that are aligned with pre-existing roadmaps and other plans.
5. Corporate leaders find it difficult to sequence projects, assign responsibilities and quantify benefits and costs. Organizations often do not follow through on the rigor of quantifying, assigning responsibility and measuring benefits and costs. Even if costs of a program are measured, benefits are rarely quantified. Creating a detailed business case can ensure that capabilities are translated, prioritized and sequenced to create an action-oriented roadmap.
6. There is an inconsistent understanding of or lack of commitment to the strategy among different levels and/or divisions within the organization. Agreement at the 35,000-foot level does not necessarily translate into ground level action. Ongoing one-on-one sessions with leaders and managers of every division will surface issues. Providing decision options and facilitating workshops thereafter will resolve contentions and help to build consensus.

Putting a new strategy into action, or operationalizing it, is a process that is unique to every organization. It cannot be completed with a cookie-cutter approach. Even the best of strategies will end up on the boardroom floor if an organization – from leaders to staff – is not prepared for, doesn’t clearly understand or fails to see the vision of the strategy.

Organizations must frame their strategies, align them with business needs, identify and quantify the capabilities needed to implement and develop a clear roadmap for success. Employing a thoughtful and thorough approach will ensure operational alignment while maximizing value realization across strategy formulation and implementation.

Which of these six roadblocks have you experienced in your organization? Do you have ways of overcoming these roadblocks?

We’d love to hear from you on these issues. Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts that talk about the insights, frameworks, tools, and techniques that can be used to address these challenges and ‘operationalize’ your strategy.

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Hindering Success: Six Roadblocks to Putting Business Strategy into Action is a post from: Connections

A good customer experience has to embody three key components

• A for Aesthetics – Aesthetics in its broad sense is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and expression of beauty. According to the great philosopher Immanuel Kant it is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the laws of perception. An aesthetically pleasing experience needs to appeal to one or more of the five senses. For example, walking into a Starbucks Coffee shop you smell the aroma of the coffee, listen to soothing music in the background, and meet with the friendly staff – all together constitute a pleasurable or aesthetic experience.
• C for Contextual – Any customer experience has to fit within the overall context of what the customer is seeking to accomplish. For example, while I am happy to chat with a Resort receptionist about the attractions around the resort when I go on a vacation, I expect a professional and fast service when I am checking into a downtown hotel in Manhattan when I am on business.
• E for Emotion- Depending on the context, the experience should touch the customer ‘emotionally’. While mass media advertising has focused a lot on the emotional aspects, online media have generally not paid enough attention to the ‘emotional’ aspects. However, that is changing rapidly as we will see in some of my subsequent blogs.

While Aesthetics and Emotion deal with experience as an ‘art’ form, the Contextual component of the experience appeals more to the engineering discipline. I’ll explore the Aesthetics of an experience in this post and leave the other two components for subsequent posts.

I want to consider two types of aesthetics – Visual Aesthetics and auditory aesthetics.

Visual Aesthetics: When is the last time that you found your banking or credit card website visually pleasing? Although, most of them are designed for easy navigation they tend to ignore the visual aesthetics behind the online experience. Take a look at Mint – the financial services aggregator site and compare it with your banking site. The ease-of-use, the interactive Web 2.0 interface, and just the pleasing and uncluttered layout brings into harmony the 3C’s of Visual Design – Concept, Components, and Composition.

Visual aesthetics need not always mean, pleasing to the eyes. In some cases, you want to invoke a feeling of ‘disgust’ and make the visual imagery ‘repulsive’ to enable people to act. One of my favorite sites that does this well is the site on ‘Longevity Game’ developed by Northwestern Mutual – an insurance company. It uses visual imagery in an interesting way to capture the attention of the users and urge them to act. The site is a very simple Life expectancy Calculator. Based on the answers provided by the user the system develops a caricature that could be pleasing or repulsive. The purpose of the game is to show the impact of lifestyle and behavioral habits (e.g., eating and exercising habits) on one’s health and life expectancy. The site first engages the user, educates them, and then leads them to action – the 3 E’s of customer experience.

Auditory Aesthetics: While visual aesthetics is easy to comprehend, auditory aesthetics is more of a challenge. What would you like to hear that is pleasing? How can a customer experience change based on auditory aesthetics? The best example of auditory aesthetics I came across was in the airline industry. How many of you really listen to the safety instructions of the flight attendant? After a tiring day or week working away from home and looking forward to the interminable delays en-route home, everyone is ‘switched off’ to the pleas of the Flight Attendant. Listen to the following video – one of the most popular YouTube videos on what an auditorily pleasing experience could be?

Agreed, not many of you might be into ‘Rap’, but this Southwest Airlines flight attendant definitely got everyone listening and I am sure most would not have objected to a little diversion from the dull and boring announcement.

The negative side of auditory aesthetics is extremely important in a Call Center environment. Abusive customer service representatives can significantly damage the reputation of a company. A couple of years back AOL had a very famous case of a customer who was attempting to cancel his subscription and was faced with a really hostile AOL customer service representative.

As it happened the recording of this call went ‘viral’ and within 12 hrs there were more than 700,000 hits to a blog that carried the recording. Within a couple of days the incident was being reported in all major newspapers and TV media, forcing AOL to do damage control (See my article on Slideshare for more details). While this might be an extreme example of auditory aesthetics on the negative side, we often experience terrible customer service interactions with contact centers. Auditory aesthetics is particularly important for contact center agents or service representatives.

Do you have any other visual or auditory aesthetics that has really changed your customer experience? If so, leave a comment behind. I’ll tackle the other two aspects of ACE in my future postings.

ACE of Customer Experience – Part I is a post from: Connections