Will AI help companies deliver better CX in a multi-experience future?

Image: Freshworks

Customer experience (CX) may mean different things to different companies but it means only one thing to customers: whether they liked what a company offered or not in a given context or setting. And whether they are going to have that offering again—and, yes, whether they would grab anything else the company wants to sell them. Perhaps they would also spread the good word on the product or service used.

Alas, in most cases, it is the bad word that gets thrown around—often wildly and out of the company’s control into the ruthless arenas of social media.

For the past several years, most organizations have responded by throwing back more and more technology to fix their CX efforts. According to research firm Gartner, global spending on customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software reached $48.2 billion in 2018, a growth of 15.6% over the previous year.

But, despite the rising expenditure on tech and the best intentions of companies, the struggle to get a handle on customers and delight them with exceptional support and service continues. So, what is going on here? What challenges are companies facing in putting together a complete picture of their customers and serving them better? Whatever happened to the promise that up and coming technologies such as chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) were supposed to hold in equipping organizations with the wherewithals to delight their customers (and do so at lower costs)?

We spoke to a few industry analysts and experts to dig deeper and see what gives.

One of the fundamental problems, they say, has to do with the ability to use the right data to get a comprehensive view of the customer. “After all these years, having a 360-degree view of the customer is still on the agenda for companies. One of the issues here is, what do you understand by a 360-degree view? Is it an electronic Rolodex? Is it an extended set of data about the customer, something that different vendor tools are now increasingly exchanging? Or is it something else?” says Brian Manusama, a senior director analyst at Gartner.

On his part, he offers a simple, functional definition. “If you ask me, it is the right data in order to serve your customers well. It can have just two or three components or even hundreds of components, including different metrics such as customer sentiment or behavior,” he avers.

There are other aspects to this challenge. According to Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder, and chairman of Constellation Research, “On the one hand, most companies don’t have access to all their internal data. This lives in siloed departmental systems that rarely talk to each other. On the other hand, most companies now rely on more external data which is often seen as not secure, not as safe, and in different data formats. The last part is that data often does not tie back to business processes or journeys—which means it’s hard to determine a recommendation or next best action.”

The ‘recommendation or next best action’ typically refers to suggestive responses provided by the AI engine that is increasingly getting embedded in chatbots, CRM, and other business software. Such recommendations are based on a knowledge repository comprising standard answers mapped to frequently asked questions, previous customer interactions, etc. It is now common industry wisdom that for better recommendations, it is necessary to have a rich data repository and a finely tuned machine learning model.

Wang points to a basic flaw in how most organizations have traditionally dealt with customer experience. “Most [customer] journeys have been designed for internal efficiency, not external efficiency. Customers don’t care what department you are in and this means the design point must revolve around the customer,” he says. To correct this anomaly, a lot of organizations are now “retooling” to support this from an internal process and technology point of view.

Another big headache for companies is to make their disparate CX systems talk to each other and work as an integrated solution. Today, there is a dearth of holistic solutions that can manage the entire customer lifecycle—from acquisition to retention to life-time value (LTV) management. “There are different piecemeal offerings from different solution providers. For example, there are a lot of sales analytics companies out there who help sales teams optimize their processes; likewise, there are a lot of marketing attribution and automation software that have AI capabilities to help marketers spend their budgets more optimally and so on. Similarly, on the customer success side, there are tools for churn prediction and other areas, but the overall customer journey stack is broken,” says Swaminathan Padmanabhan, director of data science at Freshworks.

According to him, it will be of fundamental value to customers “if we can tie all these capabilities together.”

A multi-experience world
Customers are now interacting with brands through a complex mesh of interfaces and touchpoints—physical as well as digital. “Do you know how many different ways one can order pizza from Domino’s? Twenty four!” says Manusama by way of an example. Such ordering ease includes the use of phone, text, social media, and voice assistants, besides showing up at physical stores and giving the order over the counter.

“We are moving toward a multi-experience world with three different modalities of customer experience across multiple digital touchpoints—gesture, text, and voice,” he says. At Gartner, analysts now call upon tech leaders to get ready to serve ‘the everything customer’—one who requires conflicting things at the same time: to be treated like everybody else but served on their own unique terms, to be connected yet sometimes left alone.

When it comes to customer experience, companies are compelled to move from a reactive way of working to a more proactive way. And while this complexity is generally good for customers, as it gives them more choice and hands them greater control over how they want to be served, it leaves companies in a constant state of flux.

The growing role of AI
Analytics and AI are playing a more important role than ever in improving customer experience, according to Wang. “We are moving from gut-driven to data-driven decisions and this requires a ton of analytics to quantify and anticipate customer needs and requirements,” he says. The rising capabilities of AI offer hope to organizations. “Over time, machine learning will support precision decisions, which means better personalization, fraud detection, and customer  experience,” says Wang. He doesn’t hesitate to call AI “the biggest shift” in CX.

Padmanabhan refers to a six-layer maturity model of AI to lay out the path ahead for customer engagement. In increasing order of sophistication and capabilities, these layers are Data Representation Layer, Knowledge Layer, Ranking and Relevance Layer, Forecasting Layer, Recommendation Layer, and Autopilot Layer. In his opinion, most companies and systems today are operating at the Ranking and Relevance Layer.

“For example, when a customer query comes up, the bot ranks the different solution artefacts and suggests the best solution artefact. Similarly, when you have a bunch of sales leads, the lead scoring system ranks them according to their probability of conversion,” he explains.

As the AI system matures, one can expect AI-based recommendations such as “increase the ad budget by 15% to 20% for a 10% increase in customer acquisitions” or “use this workflow to optimize customer experience” and other actionable insights like these.

The pinnacle of AI capability, according to Padmanabhan, would be realized in the Autopilot Layer. As the name suggests, at this level, AI can replace some common functions performed by service agents or other team members. Rather than recommend something to be done, an AI can execute it as well.

 Not that AI will possibly replace humans fully—nor is that the direction taken by companies or recommended by experts. “Today, we don’t say that we are going to completely replace human labour but say there are a lot of repetitive tasks that are involved in the support workflow or the sales workflow or the customer success workflow which can be automated. So the agents’ time can be better spent by using AI,” says Padmanabhan.

Keeping the human element in customer engagement while still using AI is “actually a question of service design,” says Manusama. What customers want are four things in how they are served: effortless, quick, convenient, and seamless across different channels. “Many companies are discovering that they can do this through self-service. However, for more complex situations, having the human touch will often be more relevant or appropriate. Basically, companies need to answer this question: Where is the business value getting generated for my customers?” he adds.

Another trend he sees is customer service vendors consolidating their solutions into engagement clouds. “Silos that existed previously are getting broken down,” he observes.

Wang’s bet is on a future built around “ambient experiences”. What we have to ask ourselves, he says, is this: When do we automate, when do we augment with humans, and when is something a pure human interaction.

The role of engagement clouds or customer engagement platforms assumes greater significance in this context.  “We need common data models, great integration, and very good journey orchestration. You can do it in platforms or you can do it with really good tooling. I’m betting that the platforms will do 80% of the work and the tooling will carry the other 20%,” says Wang.

Whichever way organizations tilt, AI is likely to play a greater role in a multi-touch, multi-experience world. Now, depending on how they are able to lend a helping hand—through automation with a smile or by being pesky or ‘unintelligent’—customers will choose to give them a thumbs up or thumbs down.

(This blog post, which I wrote as a lead editor in the corporate marketing team at Freshworks, first appeared on www.freshworks.com.)

How Paytm Uses Tech to Manage 200 Million Users

Key points:

- Paytm processed 1 billion transactions in the quarter ended March 2018
- The firm employs 200 product managers and over 700 engineers
- Its data science lab in Toronto, Canada, develops key tech tools
- App analytics and machine learning are used to retain users and for up-selling

Mobile wallets--mobile apps used to pay for recharges, groceries and other daily items--may have come of age in an increasingly digital India, but much goes behind-the-scenes to keep them working well and users hooked.

Paytm, which has 200 million monthly active users and processed close to 1 billion transactions in the quarter ended March 2018, is a case in point. It competes with MobiKwik, FreeCharge, PhonePe and several others in this space.

Discussing the tech strategy at the company in a recent interview, Deepak Abbot (pictured), senior vice president of One97 Communications Ltd, which owns and operates Paytm, said, “Though a payments firm, we are a technology company at the core and everyone here, including Vijay, is a hardcore techie--he even calls mid-level engineers sometimes to discuss architecture design.” (Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the chief executive of Paytm.)

Abbot said that most in top positions at the company either have technology background or are “quite comfortable” with tech. “Culturally, we have a tech mindset. That is another reason we have been able to build a very complex product in a flexible way.”

Sharing insights into what goes on ‘under the hood’ as they say in tech, Abbot said that quick decision-making and a product-centric approach drive software development. “In our meetings, once an idea is crystallized, Vijay is very clear about what product to build. As a result, the product managers are also clear how to get it done. And when the engineers are given very specific details, they are able to quickly build it,” he revealed.

The simplicity of the Paytm app belies its complex architecture and the number of people that work on it. For instance, Abbot said that there are as many as 200 product managers and 700-800 engineers working on different aspects of the app.

But how does Paytm define a product? “At Paytm, a product is defined as anything a consumer—be it is an end consumer, a merchant or a marketplace seller--interacts with,” said Abbot. For example, recharge is a product in itself. Paytm’s implementation of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), again, is a product (UPI is an easy, instantaneous payment system built by the National Payments Corporation of India or the NPCI). “And then you build use-cases on top of UPI such as P2P, P2M and B2B payments. Wallet--the most used product of Paytm--is another,” said Abbot. (P2P, P2M and B2B stand for person-to-person, person-to-merchant and business-to-business respectively.)

The idea of keeping all these products within the same Paytm app, according to him, is that users should move from one product to another seamlessly—something that requires “a highly scalable product” to be built.

Integration of multiple products within the same app also helps Paytm cross-sell more easily to customers, who may first use one product before being “nudged towards” others, said Abbot.

Talking about stickiness of the app and up-selling to users, he said, “We have observed that if a customer has only used Paytm for recharge, then the retention rate for such a user is 40% after three months. But if we can upgrade him to send money to others, they become power users of Paytm and the retention improves dramatically to 70%.”

Industry experts forecast bright days ahead for mobile wallets. The number of mobile wallet users is expected to grow from the current 200-250 million to around 500 million in the next couple of years, according to Probir Roy, co-founder of Paymate and an independent director at Nazara Technologies. While he believes that “the next big thing” will be “interoperability” among different wallets, he noted that it is a tough space to operate in and some consolidation is “bound to happen” in the coming years. “My guess is that the top two or three companies will have 80% of the market,” he concluded.

------Paytm Labs: Managing customer lifecycles-----

To make the most of app analytics that capture user behaviour, Paytm’s data science lab, Paytm Labs, in Toronto, Canada, works on developing multiple software tools. One such key tool is CLM or Customer Lifecycle Management.

According to Deepak Abbot, senior vice president of the company who is based at Paytm’s headquarters at Noida near Delhi, what CLM does is “catch every ‘signal’ from the app”. Explaining how it works, he said, “If you use the app for UPI, it segments you as a UPI user; if you do a recharge, it marks you as a recharge user. It also upgrades you automatically based on your behaviour or purchase history. So, for instance, if you make an electricity bill payment or a post-paid bill payment, it upgrades you to a post-paid user.” There is a lot of granularity built into the CLM tool to classify and reward different levels of users at different times.

The tool puts users in different segments and generates actionable triggers accordingly. “For example, if a premium user who earlier made a money transfer of Rs 5,000 has not used the app for a month, he will be shown a cashback offer or an ad on Facebook,” said Abbot. Similarly, alerts are shown for soon-to-expire mobile recharges and other bills. “The CLM tool uses such alerts and offers to get those customers back into the app. And if they are already in the app, it will customise the view for them by showing up frequently used icons upfront and hiding others,” he explained.

The entire user data in the Paytm app goes into a “data lake”, and the team in Canada uses it to formulate the rules of the risk engine and other software. The data lake, Abbot explained further, is a repository of multiple sources of data, including phone usage data, hardware data and address book; then there is transactional data plus the behavioural data (where the users navigate inside the app, how much time they spend shopping, etc). All this data is used through machine learning (ML) algorithms so that the alerts and promotions can be automated and personalized.

The Toronto team comprises 70 data scientists and engineers and, besides the CLM tool, has developed the company’s risk and customer score engines. “We just plug those products here (in India) and start using them,” said Abbot.

---##----

(Note: An edited version of the above post first appeared on www.livemint.com - where I used to work until recently. The interaction with Deepak Abbot took place during my Mint tenure.)

How CXOs are Learning to Tackle the Challenges of Multiple Clouds

Five years ago, when messaging and voice communication services provider Solutions Infini Inc. moved its entire information technology (IT) infrastructure to the cloud, the company’s executives believed they would save on operational costs. Chief technology officer (CTO) Ashish Agarwal soon realized that such was not the case. Just two years after the company moved to the cloud, he discovered that “the amount of money we were paying to the cloud providers was quite high for us, as we operate on very slim margins”.

This called for remedial action, following which the company decided to invest in a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system and host these machines at independent data centres.

While a converged infrastructure integrates the computing, storage, networking and server virtualization aspects of a data centre, HCI integrates some additional technologies with the help of software. Agarwal chose Nutanix as the HCI vendor. Other companies that offer HCI systems include Dell Technologies Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Oracle Corp.

Agarwal reasoned that, “using the front-end of Nutanix’s HCI solution, which is quite simple, we could replicate or mirror our cloud environment with simple clicks”. Solutions Infini now uses a blend of cloud services and the HCI systems hosted at third-party data centres for its application delivery needs.

Solutions Infini’s example is simply a case in point. The fact is that chief information officers (CIOs), CTOs, and other technology decision makers in India are facing challenges related to dealing with multiple cloud computing facilities of companies such as Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Google Inc.

Industry experts and analysts are of the view that as more investments pour into cloud data centres, which provide computing, storage and other information technology (IT) infrastructure and services on a pay-per-use basis, CIOs will have to learn how to manage what they say is an “increasingly hybrid” set-up.

There are three models under cloud computing: in public cloud, business applications run completely in a third-party data centre; in private cloud, individual companies operate their own data centres; and in hybrid cloud, they use a mix of the two. Research firm Gartner, Inc. estimates that the public cloud services market in India, which stood at $1.35 billion in 2016, will grow to $1.93 billion by 2017 and further to $4.28 billion by the end of 2020.

According to the firm, hybrid cloud solutions are driving overall cloud adoption in India.

“Cloud adoption is growing strongly in the region, albeit from a low base. Enterprises are adopting both cloud-enabled managed hosting and public cloud services, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, typically for different use cases,” said D.D. Mishra, research director, Gartner India. “It is getting increasingly common for enterprises to have multiple cloud environments, often operated and supported separately.”

The main issues faced by companies and CIOs, according to Mishra, include “lack of expertise around key areas of hybrid cloud enablement—virtualization, standardization, automation and instrumentation.”

According to Mishra, there is a “lack of guidance” on the technology prerequisites needed to “fully leverage hybrid cloud capabilities”.

He added that the capabilities required typically involve use of “automation and monitoring tools... to not only detect user-impacting problems, but also proactively identify when the service is degrading”.

The growth of virtualization—one of the building blocks of cloud computing—has also given rise to the phrase “software-defined” (software-defined storage, software-defined networking, even software-defined data centre). Virtualization allows a computer to be split into multiple virtual machines (VMs) for running different applications through the use of a sophisticated software called ‘hypervisor’. Companies that provide hypervisor solutions include VMware Inc., Microsoft, Red Hat, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc. and Nutanix.

“Gradually, it has to be software-defined everything and one operating system (OS) will subsume everything else,” said Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO, Nutanix, in an interview recently.

“You can get rid of a lot of people in the data centre and optimize your costs when software starts to do a lot of things automatically,” he explained.

He added that the concept that everything is an app is “being replicated into the bowels of the data centre”.

The service delivery model in cloud computing has evolved from companies having their own data centres to hosting their servers in outside facilities, to plain-vanilla or bare-metal infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to software-as-a-service (SaaS), according to Sunil Gupta, executive director and president of Netmagic—an NTT Communications Corp. company that operates a number of cloud data centres across India.

Netmagic, according to Gupta, has integrated multiple cloud offerings from different companies into “a unified managed cloud service”. Towards this purpose, it has developed an “orchestration layer or a cloud management platform” internally over the past couple of years. Moving to the cloud, Gupta said, is not a “zero-to-one story”. It is a “gradual, lengthy journey” and CIOs must keep that in mind.

“The challenge for them is how to migrate their applications smoothly to the cloud with zero or negligible downtime. Then, they also have to tackle what is called ‘shadow IT’ wherein departments other than IT purchased certain cloud applications without even informing the CIO,” Gupta cautioned.

CIOs, according to Gupta, are increasingly moving applications to the cloud—not just email and productivity apps that they began with but also critical ones such as payroll and human resource management apps. Hence, they should plan their cloud migration well in advance. And while planning must be done in a comprehensive way—taking into account storage and other infrastructure requirements—execution should be “gradual”.

According to Gupta, IT heads should also invest in skills for cloud computing such as how to configure and manage hypervisors and hire people who have experience in procuring cloud. “One challenge CIOs face is that different cloud computing companies have different parameters and models for pricing cloud resources, so it makes sense to have technically savvy people in the infrastructure procurement or purchase department who can understand the complexities involved,” he explained.

Mishra of Gartner believes that taking a “consultative approach” is often “a good way to go about implementing one’s cloud strategy.”

CIOs should also look at developing or hiring talent in the areas of automation tools, agile development and cognitive domains, he said.

(This article first appeared on www.livemint.com. Image Credit: Pixabay.com)

The Four Stages of Digital Disruption CXOs Should Know

It is easy for people within an industry to see something repeated quite often as clichéd, boring, hyped or done-to-death. But when it comes to the double dose of “Digital Disruption” (with two heavyweight words wrestling alongside), there is usually a lot of discomfort as well.

And while one often gets to hear the names of the usual “culprits”—the Ubers and Olas, the Airbnbs, the Facebooks of the world—who are causing or have caused a lot of disruption in the market, it is good to come across something that helps the existing enterprises or the incumbents chart digital territory with greater confidence.

McKinsey’s aptly titled “An incumbent’s guide to digital disruption” offers a few silver linings and plenty of hope. The introduction lures you in with these powerful words: “Incumbents needn’t be victims of disruption if they recognize the crucial thresholds in their life cycle, and act in time.”

It goes on to describe in interesting detail the four stages of disruption from an incumbent’s perspective, the barriers to overcome, and the choices and responses needed at each stage.

The four stages are identified in self-explanatory terms—Stage one: Signals amidst the noise; Stage two: Change takes hold; Stage three: The inevitable transformation; and Stage four: Adapting to the new normal.

The authors of the McKinsey article, Chris Bradley and Clayton O’Toole, also help the incumbent organizations in visualization of their current stage on an S-curve and mapping their moves and barriers along various inflection points on the graph.

The authors pepper these stages with real-life examples and insights, which makes for useful reading for companies that are in the midst of their own digital journeys and can take cues from those who have been there or done that (or not done that, for that matter).

Sample a few: as long as 10 years back, Norwegian media group Schibsted made the bold move to offer classifieds online—for free; Netflix “disrupted itself” in 2011 by shifting its focus from DVD rentals to online streaming; and Grocery retailer Aldi is said to have disrupted numerous incumbents globally with its low-price model.

You can read the full McKinsey article here or download an assessment guide that helps an organization in ascertaining its position in the digital journey by clicking this link.

It is always better to disrupt yourself than let someone else do it!

6 Best Practices for E-commerce CXOs and Developers

Over the past few weeks, I have spoken to a few senior IT decision makers from e-tail, retail and other industry segments where e-commerce is becoming the new business magnet. Alongside, I have also flipped through tons of content on what makes or mars the prospects of an e-commerce firm.

The result: this blog post you are going through right now. What I have done is distilled some industry best practices and do’s and don’ts that can be helpful for e-tail newbies as well as fast-growing e-commerce sites. Given that there’s little spare time for people working in this realm, here you go:

Aim for simplicity: Designing a user interface is a highly evolved discipline now. All the same, it is the online users who are the most evolved of species! Which is why keeping the UX simple yet elegant, rich yet devoid of unnecessary complexity, appealing and vibrant without being gaudy or over-the-top is more important than ever. What is the one thing that strikes us about a Google or Apple product? Its simple yet amazing user design, isn’t it?

Ensure easy site navigation: Many of the high-traffic e-commerce sites today boast of millions of products across hundreds or even thousands of product categories and sub-categories. One key thumb rule in designing navigation is that the user should not be made to click too many times (some call it the three-click rule) or find it too difficult to locate a product. Site search, in this context, is extremely important. GetElastic.com, a popular e-commerce blog, points out that even the biggest of e-com sites often fall flat in optimizing site search. It says: “Site visitors that use search boxes are more likely to know specifically what they want and are closer to conversion than those just browsing.”

It goes on to suggest that the merchandising team must anticipate variations in how consumers might be looking for certain things; for instance, they can type “two piece bathing suit”, “2-piece bathing suit”, or “2 piece bathing suit” (without the hyphen). Unless search dictionaries or tools accommodate such “correct misspellings” (in addition to commonly misspelt terms and synonyms), the potential buyers might be disappointed with search results.

Choose your e-commerce platform carefully: With hundreds of tools that let you set up an online shop, it’s a crowded market out there. For those who wish to play safe and do not have too much time researching or experimenting with options, going with an established platform such as Shopify, Magento or ZenCart makes ample sense. For the more adventurous, there are plenty of tools to fiddle with. The site www.ecommerce-platforms.com has even put up a comparison chart of some such tools available in the market. Among the things one should look out for in an e-com platform: availability of hosted/self-hosted environments, payment options supported, stock size (for which you want to build the e-store), credible case studies in a given industry segment, etc.

Look out for mobile-best customer experience: In this age of ubiquitous mobility, it would be foolhardy to ignore the significance of an optimum mobile user experience. Whether it is achieved through a mobile app or responsive web design (in which the same code can cater to multiple device types), a less-than-superlative experience that can be delivered on a majority of popular mobile handsets just wouldn’t do.

Test, test, test, and then test some more: We are living in a connected, socially hyperactive age. One in which customers go all out to tweet, post, share and shriek bad customer experiences from the rooftops. So it is always better to thoroughly test any new piece of code or feature before rolling it out to a million potential customers who will be exposed to it within minutes. The DevOps movement can indeed meet its full potential in the fast-paced world of e-commerce.

Ignore shipping and fulfillment at your own peril: In the nascent but burgeoning e-com market in India, it is not uncommon to find so many negative tales of shipments gone wrong. According to Richard Lazazzera, a leading e-commerce expert who runs an online e-commerce incubator deliciously named A Better Lemonade Stand, “Many new ecommerce entrepreneurs either don’t give much thought to shipping their products, or rightfully so, don’t understand the confusing and complex world of shipping and fulfillment.” (Read this blog post of his that talks about packaging, resources such as courier services, tracking & insurance, and apps to help make the whole process easier. The scenario in India may not be as mature as the advanced markets of USA or Canada, but some useful inferences can be drawn or lessons learned from e-com ecosystem players operating there.)

In the next couple of years, e-commerce will have come into its own as an established segment of industry in India. While the broadest market may turn out to be a case of the proverbial three-horse race (or four horses, perhaps), scores of mid-size and niche players in e-tailing will prove their mettle. Soon, the fight would stop being about funds and customer acquisitions; instead, the attention would shift to technology-led differentiation, profitability and customer retention.

And that’s where the players that implement the best practices and treat customers as the center of their universe will stand out from the crowd.

(This blog post first appeared on www.DynamicCIO.com.) 

6 Best Practices for Digital Pros and CXOs that Click

Digital marketing is fast coming into its own as a specialized discipline. From the early days of setting up websites left, right and center and cutting checks for search engine optimization, it now encompasses social media, mobiles and apps as powerful new possibilities.

So much so that some companies now have Chief Digital Officers (CDOs). In some cases, the CMO or the CIO may wear the hat of the CDO as well. The point is, the digital realm is getting bigger and more important as you read this.

In a world that is happily clicking away for content, groceries, travel, leisure and anything that fills up our life, how do you do digital? Sure, a bunch of boutique social media firms and others with 360-degree charters and integrated plays have come up recently, but as a digital marketing professional or CXO, it wouldn’t hurt to keep a few best practices handy, would it? So here you go:

1. Identify the digital goals for your organization: There are pioneering companies that have set their ambitions to nothing less than complete digital transformation. At the other end of the spectrum, there are (still) firms that are splitting hair about whether to go beyond a brochure or static website. Deliberate on where your company wants to be in the next one or two years and decide on specific digital goals.

2. Get the T&T (the team and its tools): Both these Ts will be crucial to the success of your digital efforts. However, in all likelihood, if you have the right team in place, they will go find the best digital tools to work with.

Again, in today’s increasingly fluid scenario, having a team doesn’t necessarily mean hiring bench-loads of Facebook junkies; it might work better to onboard a couple of digitally savvy professionals who are nimble-minded. They could even be hand-picked from within the company. Also, they should be able to manage the work outsourced (if any) to specialist agencies, programmers, etc.

3. Have a well-articulated social media policy: We keep reading of employees or customers cribbing on Facebook, Twitter or other social sites, followed by the klutzy approach taken by certain companies to respond to their comments. Given the generally open culture that social media fosters, even those who are not authorized by the company end up jumping in the fray—often causing reputational damage.

Building a brand online may be considered hard but it is nothing compared to the nightmare of salvaging a sullied reputation. It is best to have a detailed, idiot-proof policy (this must remind some of their boss :) concerning the use of social media and responding to comments or taking any other course of action. Goes without saying that a quick complaint-redress mechanism needs to be built alongside the policy. On social media, you must respond in minutes and hours rather than business days or weeks.

4. Mobile in the middle: In the feverish world of e-entrepreneurs, they have a new mantra for a successful business model: it’s called mobile-first. The idea is to think of the mobile phone (essentially the smartphone) as the first touch-point for customers (some storied mobile-first stars include Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Spotify and Evernote, among others).

Not every corporate entity on Earth needs to be mobile-first, of course. But with the usage of mobiles exploding and the number of those phones going smart increasing like crazy, it would be stupid not to give “mobile” the place it deserves. The caveat here is not to think of mobile in terms of any single device but to look at enabling employees, partners, customers—whoever—to interact with your organization anytime, anywhere, using anything that can connect to the Internet (you might have heard of the Internet of Things).

5. Balance speed and quality: If you ask around, most people would agree that the speed of life as well as business has gone up several gears in the past decade or so. In the context of digital, they would also aver that quality—the quality of content, software, etc—has gone down. While the race for digital supremacy is impelling most organizations to cut corners on quality, reduce time-to-market and respond to customers faster than ever, the winners will likely be those who manage a fine balance between speed and quality. It’s tough to achieve, but very much within reach, especially for companies that are not constrained by resources (or mindset).

6. Spread digital as a culture: This one is for the long term as well as the biggest impact. Arguably, it’s also the trickiest one. Remember the old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Having said that, people are not horses and digital is much different from water. With a top-down approach, can-do motto, the right tools and persistent monitoring, long-term organizational change can be brought in.

The key here is culture rather than strategy: you can strategize all you want, but unless the organization’s culture is soaked in digital, the results would be sub-optimal. No wonder management guru Peter Drucker is said to have once remarked, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Or lunch, if you are a lunch person, but you get the idea.

And here’s the short, two-word conclusion to this article concerning your digital journey: start now.

(The above article first appeared on IndiaDigitalReview.com.)