In Part One of our series, we introduced the first part of Delvinia’s three-part process: insight. In this second installment, we extend the examples to illustrate how and why we tackle digital strategy on behalf of our clients.

I’m Rosalina Lin-Allen and I head our strategy practice. I work closely with the practice heads and team leads to deliver a final plan and roadmap. In this post, I’ll explain my role and the importance of strategy to Delvinia and the work we do with our clients.

What is Strategy?

As a digital strategy and customer experience design consultancy, we often get asked, “What is Digital Strategy?” Here’s our take.

A digital strategy can broadly be defined as a plan that defines how to meet a set of business, brand or marketing objectives using digital technologies. It enables an organization to establish a common goal and to focus its activities and resource allocation.

There are three key types of digital strategies Delvinia commonly assists our clients with.

Digital Product Strategy

This type of strategy is applied when the mandate is to define the requirements and approach for a predetermined digital property such as an e-commerce site, a social media tool, a branded mobile app or a standalone digital product.

As described in Part One, we begin to build the product strategy by gathering insights about the customer, their needs and the role of the digital product in their lives. By distinguishing the needs of different customer groups, we can then develop a strategy that equips our clients to realize the greatest return on their investment by focusing on customers with most acute needs who are also the best fit for using the digital product.

Digital Customer Experience Strategy

Digital Customer Experience Strategy defines how the digital channel as a whole, or a specific component of the digital channel (e.g. mobile), can help close the gap between today’s consumer behaviours/needs and organizations’ current delivery.

We begin by looking at the current customer journey with the product/service and identifying points along that journey where the experience could be enhanced or pain points could be alleviated using digital technologies.

We then propose innovative ways to close the gap between client’s current experience and the future ideal experience.

The large national retailer referred to in Part One of this series is an example of a digital experience strategy.  In this case, Delvinia identified mobile as the priority means through which to advance customer’s interaction with the loyalty program and proposed a framework and a set of initiatives to evolve the program for the next five years.

Digital Service Delivery Strategy

This type of strategy is applied when a client seeks to change their service delivery model or to offer a new one, so it typically has the most significant impact on organizational processes and structure.

To follow on the insurance example from Part One, Delvinia understood from its insights work that our client, a leading insurance company, needed a strategy that prioritized the needs of advisors and made the insurance company easier to do business with. For this reason, we proposed to furnish advisors with online marketing tools so that they could more effectively attract and engage with new clients in the digital space. In turn, interested clients could connect with an advisor through a central online hub. The digital channel would also allow for advisors to exercise choice in how to engage with those clients, including in-person or virtual meetings.

While each of the above types of digital strategies has a different focus, Delvinia’s process in developing them remains consistent: insights, strategy, action.  In this way we ensure that the strategy is always focused where it should be: on the customer.

In tomorrow’s post, Charles Sue-Wah-Sing, our Head of Design, will talk about the importance of taking action; the third and final phase of our process.