Intelliswift's DigiPod™ - Distributed Agile Pods for Digital Customer Experience
- By Sanjay Kalra, Associate Vice President, Digital Engineering
- 16 April, 2021
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Post Covid-19, Digital Commerce and Digital Marketing functions in enterprises need to leverage a Distributed Agile Model to fast-track their Digital and Omnichannel outreach efforts, while enhancing their commerce and customer service portals and applications to address the significant shift in their channel mix since the beginning of the pandemic.
Why Agile, and what does Agile look like for Customer Experience leaders and Digital Marketers? Let’s turn to McKinsey for the definition, “Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real-time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.”
As you would notice from the above, the key themes here are - time to market, being able to deploy at scale, and most importantly - driven by data analytics and insights.
At Intelliswift, we’ve been at the forefront of Agile methodology since it took off in the Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. Over the years, we’ve successfully adapted Agile model to address:
- Globally Distributed Teams - Leveraging Shared Vision, Extreme Collaboration, Replication of Product Owners and Overlapping work hours
- Agile Managed Services – For Application Development, Maintenance, Support and Sustenance
- Agile Data Analytics Operations – Condensing the Data Pipeline (Acquisition, Transformation, Analytics, Visualization, Modeling and Predictions) into Agile style sprints
- Agile Business Support – For activities like Marketing, Recruitment, HR, Legal
Digital Marketing and Digital Commerce functions require an intersection of the above. It is in equal part custom development and configuration of web, mobile and digital applications; and business support for running campaigns, promotions, on-tap analytics to provide insights to marketers and business users. As a result of Intelliswift’s intersection of capabilities in these areas, we have been successful in delivering a Distributed Agile Pod model for Digital Commerce and Marketing to Enterprises. We call it the DigiPod™.
The key value our customers experience after implementing our Agile model in their Digital Marketing function is:
“From being distracted and pulled
into ten different directions, and losing sight of business priorities,
our teams were able to prioritize and focus their efforts on high-value
activities and projects – with buy-in from business, complete tasks in
bite-sized sprints – thus providing transparency and measurability of
the outcomes, and iteratively improve outcomes.”
Digital Commerce Lead of a major travel company
COMPOSITION OF DIGIPOD™ - INTELLISWIFT DISTRIBUTED AGILE POD FOR DIGITAL COMMERCE AND MARKETING
Scrum Master
- The Scrum master is experienced in Agile and often working with an assistant, leads the team
- They set priorities, define the hypotheses, manage the backlog, identifies necessary resources, and manage sprints (one to two week cycles of work)
- The strategist also checks whether the final campaign has the required relevance in the marketplace for optimum PPC management
Campaign Strategist / Product Owner
- The strategist’s role is to understand consumer behavior
- The job includes using data and research to map the buying process, explore new opportunities, and come up with relevant insights
- Customer journey skills to analyze website, contact center, IVR, Chatbot interaction data and design optimal journey experience
Content / SEO / Pay per click
- There could be one or multiple content writers in a team-based on need
- The writer understands the copy requirements of blogs, websites, e-mails, and social media. They have SEO knowledge and are experienced in writing for multiple outlets
- EO specialists use analytic tools and techniques to figure out what your consumer is searching for online
- They tailor content to feature favorably in search results. They also conduct SEO and keyword audits to optimize results
- Pay-per-click managers use tools to monitor, test, and update content and results from SEM services
Full Stack Developers
- Front-end developers are responsible for transforming data and content into what the consumers actually see on the interface
- They build landing pages and design other elements such as pop-ups
- Proficient in using the latest software tools to create an immersive and flexible user experience
- Back-end developers write the efficient server-side code that encapsulates business logic and provides scale and performance
- Back end developers also ensure seamless and secure integration with all the complementary business applications – both internal and external
UX Designers
- UX designer design the user’s experience through the entire customer journey
- It includes graphic design skills - use typefaces, patterns, photographs, and colors to make your message distinctive
Analytics
- Develop insights based on targeted analytics
- Identify anomalies, pain points, issues, or opportunities in the customer journeys
- Leverage tools for social listening, customer journey and interaction data analytics
- Maintain a robust end to end data management platform – ingestion, transformations, analytics, machine learning
KEY ACTIVITIES AND OUTCOMES OF DIGIPOD™ TEAM:
The DigiPod™ team ensures:
- Alignment with line of business leadership and setting up roadmap
- Analyzing the data in real-time to continuously improve performance and identify unique opportunities
- Prioritizing, designing and running test marketing
- Iterative improvements based on test results
Some of the key results we have seen include:
- 3x - 4x increase in throughput of marketing campaigns – across channels
- Data-driven decisions leading to improved segmentation / targeting and hence 20-30% improved conversion
- Reduced cost to deliver defined digital capacity – up to 30% to 40% reduced costs
- Improved customer satisfaction by at least 25%
- Ability to leverage social moments – with quick response and execution
