How swimlanes deliver multi-channel transformation

Before we can advise our clients on the evolution of their digital infrastructure, products or services, it’s critical we understand their digital maturity. It’s very rare that organisations truly understand the full customer lifecycle or have a holistic digital transformation programme in place. Often there are uneven levels of understanding between departments who may be zeroing in on specific online or offline aspects of the overall customer experience. This is often exacerbated by organisational silos (e.g. the traditional IT-business divide).   
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At UNRVLD we help our clients to overcome this challenge by working with senior stakeholders to define what their overall key digital objectives are and how to connect up silos to deliver on their most ambitious aims. A useful way to think about this work is as a series of swimlanes. We try to keep these in mind when working with our clients to drive transformational change.  

Usually, we concentrate on six key swimlanes:

‍Customer Experience – across every channel. We focus on all the points in the customer journey, online (web, app, chat, voice, etc.) and offline so we fully understand where the customer is interacting with an organisation. Some organisations have this bit down but it’s the other swimlanes that tend to be missing.

Channels – overlaying the experience, we indicate where an organisation is interacting with that user and start to consider its effectiveness (is this a candidate for a new approach, are we missing an interaction, etc.). We can take it a step further to bring value streams into this. What’s the conversion rate or value at each stage and could it be improved?  

Processes – what is happening in the background at each of these touchpoints. Thinking to the concept of “Total Experience”, how effective are we at this stage. Could we be doing things better? Could we save an organisation money by doing things more efficiently?  

Technology – what technology is being employed at each point, what’s it doing and who’s using it. In addition, what interactions do we have between technology at these touchpoints? Is the technology effective at the function we’re specifying? Do we need to replace it? Could we rethink how we integrate? The list goes on…

Data – what data does an organisation receive and how are they leveraging it? What is being missed?  

Content –  you can go even further to layer in swimlanes for content. What do we want to say? Do we have the content and do we need to create, amend, replace or remove content? What is the intent? And finally what is the emotion it conjures in the customer? How do we want them to feel?  

For effective transformation all of these swimlanes need to be interoperating. The aim is to bring everyone together so that we understand the big picture and, more importantly, how each “kingdom” in an organisation interacts with another. All with the aim of driving effective digital transformation.