Forrester Blogs › Category: digital business strategy

Sourcing Capabilities: What Big Business Can Learn From Startups

Posted by Nigel Fenwick on the CIOs Blog on January 29, 2013

Nigel Fenwick

It's been clear for years now that small business startups don't build massive IT departments and big operations teams. Instead they focus on the capabilities which truly differentiate them in the marketplace - their strategic capabilities. They hire experts in these capabilities as employees and continue to improve their differentiation. At the same time, they look to source their more generic business capabilities from business partners and technology service providers.

We are going to see a seismic shift in big business in the coming years: there will be an increasing appetite to source generic capabilities from vendors and business partners; at the same time CEOs will focus increasingly scarce human capital resources on improving their strategic capabilities - the capabilities which give them a competitive edge.

While digital technology will remain at the heart of these strategic capabilities - leveraging cloud, big data analytics, mobile and social - the majority of technology services will be sourced from partners and vendors. The company's own technology resources will become more and more intensely focused on developing unique systems of engagement around strategic capabilities.

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2013: The Year Of Digital Business

Posted by Nigel Fenwick on the CIOs Blog on December 31, 2012

Nigel Fenwick
While Social Business continued to evolve in 2012, 2013 will see the emergence of digital business as a new strategic theme for many firms. What's driving this shift and what does it mean for CIOs, CEOs, and chief digital officers?
 
The Communications Evolution
 
Communications continue to evolve. Consider how humans have transformed communications over the centuries: signal fires; semaphore; Morse code; the telegraph; the telephone; telex; fax; email; SMS; Facebook; and Twitter. I have no doubt that this evolution will continue in 2013 and beyond. Perhaps beyond 2013 we will eventually achieve the ability to communicate our thoughts directly — whether we’ll want to is a different question. As people the world over learn to use new social networking tools, they drop older tools that are no longer useful to them. Regardless of where you are in your personal communications evolution, the undeniable truth is that over the past decade we have significantly changed how people communicate; we are no longer dependent upon email. But social tools and 24/7 mobile access have not removed the complexity or decreased the volume of information we must process. Time remains our most precious resource and we’ll always seek ways to use it more effectively — but social tools are not necessarily the silver bullet we might think. In 2013 we need to rethink business processes to take this new communications paradigm into account.
 
The Social Business Evolution
 
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The Digital Banking Strategist’s Wish List

Posted by Peter Wannemacher on the eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals Blog on December 20, 2012

Peter Wannemacher

Whether you’ve been naughty or nice this year, you probably have a wishlist for your business. We thought it would be fun and interesting to find out what some of your wishes are, so the Digital Banking Strategy team at Forrester reached out to some of our eBusiness clients at banks and asked them “What one ‘wish’ do you have for your team’s digital banking efforts or strategy in 2013?”

Here are some of the answers we got back:

  1. “We wish we could transform every branch and call center employee into an advocate for marketing and educating customers on our digital capabilities.”
  2. “I wish that our execs would understand how understaffed we are.”
  3. “I wish we had better live help for our digital banking customers.”
  4. “I wish I knew which area of mobile payments to focus on and what is going to ‘shake out’ and actually ‘stick,’ so to speak.”
  5. “We wish for a digitalized branch pilot that focuses on advice and guidance.”
  6. “We wish all of our customers – including the most skittish and skeptical – would try out our digital banking capabilities (online, mobile, and tablet)… and those who already use them would do so even more regularly.”
  7. “I wish I could spend 3 hours with our CMO – and have his full attention – to show him how much impact our online and mobile banking efforts have.”
  8. “I wish we could sort through the clutter of mobile wallet vendors and offerings to know which will actually pan out.”
  9. “I wish I could snap my fingers and have great secure site search and intelligent cross-selling on our secure site.”
  10. “a pink pony.”
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What Are Companies And Brands Investing In To Deliver Great Digital Experiences?

Posted by David Aponovich on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on September 28, 2012

David Aponovich

The intense work by companies and brands to deliver stellar digital experiences (DXes) has been exciting to witness. This isn’t just incremental change for most organizations; it’s transformational. (Think: Outside In, a new book by two Forrester colleagues.)

But these things don’t just happen. It’s not magic. It takes significant planning and commitment across silos: Execs establish a mandate. Digital strategists and marketing pros set direction. User experience and design pros translate the vision. The same goes for marketers and content strategists.

Application developers, meanwhile, must choose and implement the right tools and technology to support DX initiatives. It isn’t easy figuring out what to prioritize (hello, internal politics), where to source solutions (suite vs. best-of-breed?), and how to roll out new capabilities to eager users.

In my research focus area, web content management (WCM), solution vendors have tried to fill the gaps and deliver DX features by building on their own platform or partnering with third-party providers.

Where are organizations investing to support digital customer experiences? Forrester asked 170 WCM leaders earlier this year and their answers, charted below, provide a snapshot of their current status and foreshadow near-term DX investments.

Mobile delivery, video streaming, email tools, and content targeting are high on the list of capabilities or near-term focus to serve digital experience requirements, according to respondents.

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Focus On Customer Experience To Navigate Digital Disruption

Posted by William Band on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on September 25, 2012

William Band

Executives don't decide how customer-centric their companies are—their customers are the ultimate arbiters. Digital disruptors—a term coined by Forrester describing companies that leverage digital platforms to take advantage of customers' heightened expectations and deliver a more compelling product and service experience at a lower cost—are threatening traditional business models. I will be exploring this challenge and discussing how to establish the right digital agenda on October 18-19 at the upcoming Forrester conference Developing Digital Disruption: A Forum For Application Development & Delivery Professionals.

Our research shows that a good experience impacts customers' behavior in three ways: 1) they are more willing to consider another purchase; 2) they are less likely to switch their business to a competitor; and 3) they are more likely to make a favorable recommendation. But how does that affect a company's bottom line? We estimate that the revenue impact from a 10-percentage-point improvement in a larger service company's performance, as measured by Forrester's Customer Experience Index score, could exceed $1 billion.

During our research, we discovered three customer experience (CX) trends that you can capitalize on:

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Royal Bank Of Canada, Citi, & Wells Fargo Top Forrester’s Digital Sales Rankings In 2012

Posted by Peter Wannemacher on the eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals Blog on September 6, 2012

Peter Wannemacher

Every year, Forrester employs its Website Benchmark (WSB) methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of North American banks’ digital sales efforts. This year, our evaluation has yielded two reports: 2012 Canadian Bank Digital Sales Rankings and 2012 US Bank Digital Sales Rankings. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) leads all of North America.RBC again took the top spot in the 2012 Canadian Bank Digital Sales Rankings, scoring 77 out of a possible 100. It continues to tweak and improve an already good design; the bank started a major redesign in 2009. RBC continues to excel in areas big and small: For example, the firm presents fulfillment options in an easy-to-read format (see screenshot below). In 2012, Royal Bank of Canada improved its navigation, content, and online application functionality, and its score for 2012 reflects that improvement.
  • Citi and Wells Fargo top the US banks.Citi and Wells Fargo topped Forrester’s 2012 US Bank Digital Sales Rankings by delivering on multiple levels. Both banks combine good usability with exceptional account-opening processes. For example, Wells Fargo uses presentation best practices to make its checking account fees clear to customers and prospects (see screenshot below).
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Will Amazon's Deep Pockets Strangle Netflix?

Posted by Nigel Fenwick on the CIOs Blog on September 4, 2012

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Nigel Fenwick

IronMan2Amazon’s recent distribution agreement with Epix is a big threat to the dominance of Netflix in the movie streaming market.

Last year Netflix attempted to shift its business strategy to focus mainly on streaming video. Although I wasn’t present in the boardroom discussions, it’s a reasonable bet that Reed Hastings and his team had decided the future was online streaming and that physical discs were a dinosaur. Since the war for content would be fought over streaming, Netflix would focus on adding value to its streaming customers and spin off the disc customers. On the surface this seemed to many a reasonable strategy, especially since Netflix reported that its digital streaming customers and the disc-in-the-mail customers were mostly not one and the same. So Netflix execs crunched the numbers and decided this was the right move for them. Perhaps they had hoped to spin off the disc side of the business to raise some capital. Whatever their thinking, their strategy choices left some gaping unanswered questions for observers like me:

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