What advice would you give customers who want to accelerate transformation?
Firstly, transformation should be an end-to-end process, not just something that happens at the front-end, driven by expedience. It needs to be driven from the top of the organisation, which means you need leadership and communication. If you aren’t taking a joined up approach, and looking at these projects over a period of years, you’re going to end up wasting a lot of money.
What are the most effective strategies that you use to help clients enhance customer engagement, generate new revenues and better serve their customers?
Once a customer is happy with you using their data, then use it in ways that are only beneficial to them. For example, I worked with a bank that built an app to give their customers these hyper-relevant offers, based on their spending or location. We ended up with a very strong user preference service based on strong use of their data. Within digital transformation, always look at customer data with good intentions, and with their consent in mind.
People often get chatbots very wrong but there are some very good declarative chatbots out there, with a decision tree and natural language processing behind them. Cathay Pacific and Amazon are both great examples of using conversational chatbots that are task-oriented and enhance the customer experience. Remember the end goal is to make the customer’s life easier, not to deliver machine learning.
Within digital transformation, always look at customer data with good intentions, and with their consent in mind.
How effective are the virtual meetings for managing services, like workshops for your clients?
I may be in the minority but actually, I find them more effective. We run big planning events and use an agile methodology, which means we have 70 plus people planning events every quarter. With virtual events we are very focused, so we have to plan more before meetings. If you know what the end goal is, and you’ve done the planning, it’s very focused and I would advocate it. To some extent it’s true that you lose personal connections, but you can have breakout sessions and Zoom calls, to help with smaller conversations.
I would advocate a virtual meeting more than having people flying in from all over the world where you have lots of people with jetlag sitting in a room; you get some output over a few days, but it’s always less focused. We should obviously respect that there are people who want to get back in the office but generally, I think moving towards a place where we’re more relaxed about working from home and we recognise that travelling for business means you’re generally operating on 80% of your mental energy. If we were to see a 50% reduction in business travel, I think you'd see a productivity increase.
During the pandemic, we were very proactive in contacting clients because our business is built on relationships and regular contact. We used virtual meetings and forums extensively to get over the lack of travel, and we saw a great expansion in the number of free networking events, which opened up new networking opportunities. Remote working has promoted a more informal culture in many offices. I hope we don’t return to working in bubbles when we return to offices.
We used virtual meetings and forums extensively to get over the lack of travel, and we saw a great expansion in the number of free networking events, which opened up new networking opportunities.
JAMES O’SULLIVAN
Owner & Director of Consulting Services
Project One
What role do you see content playing in your organisation's marketing activities?
Great content is vital in attracting and retaining customers and candidates, but it must be relevant and offer value, knowledge and expertise that helps people as individuals in their roles as well as organisations as a whole.
Trying to get the tone of customer engagement is a real challenge. We live in a world where brands are very close to their customers and I think that needs to be reflected in content. It sounds obvious to say companies need to have their marketing right, but you should make sure to adjust your marketing content to reflect the relationship you have with customers.
Second, we don’t live in a big bang world anymore. The cadence and frequency of content has changed so if you look at the successful companies, ideas are often seeded into small niche groups of customers before being widely released.
At the same time, tone is much more conversational – we’re looking to customers as a source of information rather than just as a source of revenue. It’s not about saying, “Use my company because it’s the best,” it’s asking you to tell me how I can make it better for you.
Lastly, content must be really engaging by understanding the audiences’ challenges and offering the right advice, at the right time.
Trying to get the tone of customer engagement is a real challenge. We live in a world where brands are very close to their customers and I think that needs to be reflected in content.
HENRY BURROWS
Consultant, Programme Management,
Digital Product Management
Project One
Project One specialises in leading complex change and transformation. Named a leading management consultancy by the Financial Times, we have global experience across a range of industries and sectors.
At Project One, we are passionate about working shoulder-to-shoulder with our customers, helping them to grow and build and execute change in the right way. We help bring clarity and pace to the delivery of key business programmes. Our goal is to be visible and to add value, consistently.
The company has a strong history in defence, energy and utilities, financial services, retail, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and Government and public sector. Our team of senior consultants benefit from a strong melting pot of ideas and experiences. Every customer is different but there are some universal, underlying principles and we have the experience to understand and address those whilst providing a bespoke approach to achieve our customers’ outcomes.