Perficient’s Cloud Modern Data Platform Approach – Customer Journey & Capabilities

Various Enterprise clients across different verticals like Healthcare, High tech, Financial Services, Retail, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain etc. can leverage the Modern Data Platform approach. Marry in people, process and technology and you have Producers and Consumers with a great value add. This Digital Transformation approach will help enterprises looking to re-platform, helping various Line of Businesses embark on the journey for Self Service Analytics, Modern fully managed Data Platform services etc. The explosion of data and advances in digital technologies has completely disrupted our industry as service / solution providers.

Many of our existing clientele, new and prospective clients still face challenges around exponential growth of data, Siloed data, the way they budgeted for projects (cloud changed the spend model CAPEX vs OPEX), driving KPIs and insights in a fluid business landscape to drive actionable insights – factor in Organizational politics and various data regulations mandated around privacy – there is a lot of work and consideration that goes into creating an agnostic data and analytics platform as a service. The problem is significant because enterprises are still struggling to drive actionable insights in an automated, scalable manner. It affects decision making on everyday basis which does not let these enterprises provide value to their customers in an efficient manner.

So how do you embark on this journey? We at Perficient leverage Customer Experience Mapping the most.

Being a Services Provider as a part of our engagement offering we do 2 things

Prospect Qualification and Idea Mapping – Hand in hand Sales and Delivery teams exercise

This is where we have pre-sales calls and understand the initial pain points ( you can call them insights into their world ) These can be Integration challenges, dirty data challenges, redundant data, over engineering, maintenance issues, scalability issues, people problems etc. We ask a few questions and formalize the conversation where we address the Customer Experience Mapping Then we make sure there is executive sponsorship involved in this and introduce the idea to them in a follow up meeting We have a few standard templates – which can be customized to the end client addressing their challenges

What is Phase 0 in terms of Customer Experience Mapping for our customers?

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Enablement with Workshops

• Functional workshops – Interviews and white board sessions
• Technical workshops – Interviews, white board sessions & reference architecture discussions
• Information Gathering – Triage Priorities, Budget considerations, Gaps and Capabilities, Needs and Wants, Delivery Timeline
• Use Cases facing challenges – Discussions, Improvement considerations

We take the above and produce a Customer Experience Map and then call out essential considerations.

That Customer Experience Map is then leveraged to propose a Future state – that will either augment or improve the client’s experience keeping in mind people and processes.

Deliverable coming out of those workshops is a Customer Experience Map that addresses

• Improved Reference Architecture
• MVP Prototype – ideation and flow
• Gaps called out and future proofing
• Future road-map with delivery timeline with Assumptions & Difficulties called out
• Immediate mitigation plan to address hot button issues

Response Based Segmentation for our clients

• We generally do a Phase 0 with our clients
• The phase 0 has various markers that are addressed in the workshops
• The Audience
  • Technical vs Functional
• We garner responses from Technical Folks and group it into the following and score them in a matrix
  • Platform needs
  • Sustainability
  • Code protocols
  • Capabilities
• We garner responses from the Functional Folks and group it into the following and score them in a matrix
  • Ease of Use
  • Adoption
  • Training and Enablement
  • Platform / Product Communication
• The workshops take into consideration a blend of internal and external aspects of that particular customer
  • Internal factors are everything that was mentioned above across the tech and functional segments
  • External factors are things we specialize in
    • Best Practices
    • Delivery Velocity & capacity
    • Architectural patterns in the industry
    • Future the industry is heading towards – like the cloud
    • Digital Transformation
  • We then present a Functional, Capability and technical Matrix
    • Align them to Scores

Then Customer Journey Mapping – formulates the core of the Modern Data Platform and its capabilities

Our target personas are various resources at our Clients

• Functional – their journey entails shoring up data to the C Suite who can make better decisions towards product adoption, improved sales, forecasting, outreach, better marketing campaign. Their outcomes depends on the Industry vertical for example a Healthcare client wants to reduce cost while improving the quality of care.
  • Business Analysts
  • Decision makers
  • Business SMEs
  • Business Sponsor
  • Office of the CIO, CMO etc.
  • Functional Personas go through the journey of understanding business -> Measuring Business -> Improving efficiency -> Improving Product -> Increasing Profits
• Technical – their journey entails supporting shoring up data to the business in a sustainable manner, improving product code, improving product experience, technical blogs/documentation along with platform support.
  • Solutions Architects
  • Platform Architects
  • Security Architects
  • Developers
  • Testers
  • Support tier
  • Office of the CTO, CDO etc.
  • Technical Personas go through the journey of understanding business -> Ideation -> POCs-> Supporting Business -> Improving processes-> Improving Code -> SDLC -> Improving product and platform

• The Desired outcomes at each stage of the customer journey
  • All of the following are intent based depending upon the personas and the outcomes they want to drive in their journeys. End goal is to find harmony across both the personas to drive revenue, innovation and product development improving brand recognition.
    • Functional Personas go through the journey of understanding business -> Measuring Business -> Improving efficiency -> Improving Product -> Increasing Profits
      • Desired outcome of each stage is better understanding of the business and improved collaboration with product development and delivery teams to drive revenue and profits
    • Pain points Functional personas experience are
      • no access to real time data impeding business value decision making
      • no 1 version of the truth to help better business outcomes
      • integration challenges with mergers and acquisitions
      • growing costs
    • Technical Personas go through the journey of understanding business -> Ideation -> POCs-> Supporting Business -> Improving processes-> Improving Code -> SDLC -> Improving product and platform
      • Desired outcome of each stage is support the business in the most efficient and cost effective manner with an eye towards innovation and evolution
    • Pain points Technical personas experience are
      • Legacy infrastructure
      • Rapid growth of business
      • Innovation pains – build vs buy decisions
      • Technology debt
      • Scale and Automation

Delivery and Implementation

There will be Call to Actions (CTAs) at the end of these Journey Maps and then we put the delivery in motion in an agile manned in Sprints with relevant Delivery Squads.

Let us now walk the above with a Marketing use case

• The Modern Data platform is supposed to digitally transform our potential client’s capabilities and enable them support their businesses via automation, outreach and better access to data. Marketing teams engage with customers predominantly via Online Media (Digital Channels and Socials). Our Marketing Customers are mostly looking to improve their platforms, their scale and sustainability. This is how it layers into the overarching strategy of being active on various Socials and Digital channels.
  • Webinars will have Online Surveys uniquely identifying prospects
  • Socials will have Industry specific nuggets about the platform and its various capabilities – with download brochure or online forms
  • The only Offline media outreach will be via Tech Cons and booth representation where we can scan participant’s badges stopping by the booth or QR code scans on certain speaking engagements showcasing our Platform and its capabilities.
• Metrics for success of our initiative are below
  • This eventually will lead with more prospects for our Sales/Portfolio Specialist
  • This will drive Pipeline Utilization for our Services
  • Increase traffic to our company’s website and blogosphere
• Data Triaging and Ingestion into the platform – We will gather the data from various channels and feed it to a data lake in their Organization tagging those to specific Customer IDs
  • We will track the following in an agile manner and then tweak our content placement on the website, Vertical Expertise plays, Vendor specific Customer testimonials, Vendor Awards testimonials etc.
    • Clicks on Customer testimonials
    • Best practices Brochure Downloads
    • Blog reads
    • Tech con QR Code scan inquiries etc.
  • The ROI of the above iterative agile captures will be tracked and we will provide insights, feedback to our Marketing and Sales teams via Dashboards and models telling a story of our Prospective Customers’ journey
    • Relay that into the sales funnel
    • Relay that into front line Lead Development Reps activities
    • Relay that into our Services and Delivery teams for repeat business and up sell

In my last blog, i mentioned how we leverage Snowflake to tell this story for our clients. The other technologies we are working with are Azure Synapse, RedShift etc. With some good tech thought in place the modern platform idea and implementation will thrive in an organization supporting capabilities for various personas. Add analytics via Power BI, Domo, Tableau, Cognos Analytics, Micro Strategy, AWS Quicksight, ThoughtSpot etc. now we have a bring your tool approach to the Modern Data Platform as a service. If this blog addresses some of the things you are considering please feel free to contact us we would love to have conversations across the board. We do on platform Proof of Concepts, Technology Proof of Values to put the picture together.