Stronger Together: Building a Shared Engagement Architecture
In my last article, I outlined the challenges of capturing simple, clean, and consistent metadata to power AI and other automation tools. I then proposed three solutions that, when combined, can enable companies to systematize context collection with minimal cost and disruption:
A simple, shared, and easily understood data framework.
Tools and services to capture and share context.
Rollout plans that deliver both immediate value and long-term transformation.
In this article, I'll describe these solutions in more detail and illustrate how they apply to business disciplines that focus on customers and customer experiences: Sales, Marketing, Product Development, and Service.
These disciplines share a common purpose. They all leverage relationships with external audiences to enable engagements that impact business performance. Since a relationship is essentially the sum experience of all engagements between two parties, being able to combine data collected across different engagements, regardless of discipline, can be extremely valuable.
Data Framework:
These disciplines require a data framework that can fully describe any audience engagement for any purpose using simple, shared, and easily understood terms. This can be accomplished by answering six key questions:
Who is engaging?
What are they engaging about?
Where are they engaging?
When are they engaging?
Why is the organization facilitating the engagement?
How is the organization facilitating engagement?
Each of these questions represents a unique data facet describing one aspect of the engagement. Each facet contains specific categories and sub-categories unique to that facet. For example:
"Who" includes audience attribute descriptions and any engagement permissions/restrictions related to those attributes.
"What" describes the topic of the engagement and any content elements used to enable the engagement.
"Where" outlines which engagement channels were used, the exact location (either real or virtual) of the engagement, and the functionality facilitating the engagement.
"When" captures any external time-based factors that might impact the engagement, such as operating hours, holidays, and seasonality.
"Why" relates which organization offerings (products and/or services) are being supported and the specific business objective (e.g., build awareness, transact, service customers, retain customers).
"How" collects common “playbooks” used to meet business objectives and captures the details of the organization’s various engagement plans, programs, and initiatives.
By collecting and describing data in this deliberate manner, the organization can describe any engagement, in any channel, with any audience, about any topic, for any purpose, using the same finite set of categories and descriptions.
Tools and Services:
Sharing a data framework across an organization offers numerous benefits. It enables the deployment of common services that streamline and enhance engagement processes, making them easier and more efficient. Additionally, it systematizes the capture of data context, facilitating automation and maximizing the impact of AI.
These tools typically relate to one of six data framework facets. For example:
Who: Customer Data Platforms (CDP) facilitate the assignment and creation of reusable segments based on audience attributions.
What: Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions and Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) help teams share and create engagement assets.
Where: Various channel platforms, like Email Service Providers (ESP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, are used to engage with audiences.
When: Business Rules Engines (BRE) apply common calendar-based rules across all engagements.
Why: Business planning tools and common product databases align objectives with offerings.
How: Customer Journey Management Tools (CJMT) outline repeatable playbooks to automate work and create benchmarks to measure program performance.
Properly configured shared tools and services can significantly reduce the technology investment and overhead necessary to support audience engagement.
Rollout Plan:
Adopting a shared data framework and common tools and services won't happen overnight. It may take years for an organization to fully realize the benefits of an integrated engagement ecosystem. Fortunately, change doesn't need to occur all at once or originate from a single team. Small, independent groups can adopt these principles, achieve immediate tangible benefits, and gradually contribute to the larger whole, if key tenets and practice standards are followed.
While some level of socialization, training, and governance is required, small, repeatable, ground-level changes are the best way to ensure value is captured at every step of the deployment. This approach also helps gain user buy-in, mitigates the cost of change management, and allows for the customization every organization requires.
I will dive further into the data framework, shared tools and services and roll out plans in future articles.
Next time I will focus on the data framework and the power of granularity.
