Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Yesterday I wrote about revenue growth strategies that we could use in conjunction with digital to spark ideas that will help our clients focus on what is most important. Recall, this series is about going back to basics and really zeroing in on value creation and helping us help our clients with the fundamentals. Today I am writing briefly about operating efficiency and how digital strategies can help our clients create and realize greater efficiencies.

Operating efficiency is about removing friction and barriers. Contrary to what many believe, it is just as much about innovation as it is about cost-containment or saving money. When you look at digital as a means to create operating efficiency you'll immediately see an abundance of opportunities to do things smarter, faster, more automated and with fewer defects or greater predictability. You also see immediately measurement capabilities that make ROI (which is king in a slump) move up front and center.

Many of our larger clients would characterize operations efficiency by including things like;

1. Improving customer interactions (service)
   
2. Improving access to customer and market information
   
3. Improve campaign tools
4. Improving internal support services
5. Business alignment
6. Simplify IT's complexity

We are going to explore a handful of ideas that we can take to our clients and help them get more done with less.

1. Improving customer interactions.  One of the things that many companies fail to see is the composite experience their customers have with the product or service brand. The diagnosis we can make is disjunctive brand experience. The cause is silo'd departments responsible for individual channels not doing the work to evaluate the "quilting" of those individual experiences from the customer's vantage point. The prescription is a comprehensive brand experience audit across all online and offline touchpoints. The result should be a more global awareness of how real people experience our client's offering. Optimally, our clients want their customers to have the most positive experience across any front. We can help by first doing the audit and research then by helping them determine the next best steps thereafter.  See Todd Coats, Dan Moore or Steven to get more details on this idea.   
2. Provide our client's staff with better info on their customers and market. I think this has everything to do with knowledge management and analytics. One of the best ideas I have heard is an extranet (secured Web site for internal eyes only) that our client's staff can access which points to better information on high-value customers, their market, and other specific intelligence that is driven to their inbox or mobile if ther shoudl be out in the field.
   
3. Improve campaign tool suite. Here is a great idea that we have used with tremendous success. Our clients really benefit when they can realize some economies of scale and reuse. If they launch multiple campaigns each year and need to move quickly, we can offer to help build greater  campaign agility into the mix. This tool suite would include a user research kit (recruiting, surveying, analysis and ouput) helping them to understand the foundational approach to their campaign. It would also include a Web site framework enabling them to get off starting line faster. An unspoken benefit of this approach is that companies with multiple campaigns create experience consistency by adhering to one structure. So, in addition to saving money, they offer consistently positive experiences for each campaign based on user research, not designer instinct.
   
4. Improving internal corporate services. Digital is a tremendous opportunity for our clients to drive lower-value transactions to an automated or Web channel. This strategy is realized by using the Web to help people accomplish more menial tasks themselves online. The benefit is lowering the total cost per transaction, helping our client's customers self-serve and ultimately it creates a foundation for better overall experiences across the board. An example is using the Web to help an insurance company's members answer the most asked questions by themselves. By making the answers more readily accessible, we are helping their human support team have more time to focus on those higher-value transactions.  We can offer an audit of our client's support systems to arrive at a strategy to get more out of using less.
   
5. Business alignment. Aligning core organizational structures or governance with enterprise strategies is critical for our clients to get the most out of the digital channel. For one of our largest clients, we took their foundational enterprise goals, developed their go to Web strategy, organized the initiatives and processes to get them done, deisgned their staffing model and helped them get the whole thing implemented. Now, they have alignment from the corner office goals all the way through the customer's positive experience.  
6. Simplify IT's Complexity. Leonardo Da Vinci said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."  In IT, we can help our clients avoid the complexity traps that IT oftentimes sets or falls into. We help our clients avoid these traps by researching how IT process strategies of the organization and approaches the work it gets done. With swift and decisive standards design and process re-engineering, we are able to reduce complexity in the organization and allow for greater alignment between IT decision makers and the rest of the company. The yield is our client's ability to get more done in digital with agreement or consensus across the board.

Visual thinking, best explained by Kermit the frog. Some things are timeless.

Kermit Scats

Imagining Shapes

One thing I continue to struggle with is how relevant sitemaps are--and to whom?¹

Below is an example sitemap, which indicates the basic hierarchy of pages or categories within a site.

What's wrong with this picture?

Sitemaps don't represent pages...

Implicitly, they communicate pages of content. This is not necessarily the case. They are a quasi-system model that blurs the lines between content and page. This leads to misinterpretation.

Extending this, they are rooted in a page-centric approach that assumes pages have one state. Ajax-y interactions that reload different content into the same page aren't communicated. 

...and they don't really represent content.

They suggest content, but a through the lens of a page. This, I believe, is an artifact left over from the days where sitemaps were closely tied to the physical implementation. As we've evolved the idea of a sitemap away from actual pages, we didn't rethink how it is actually interpreted or used by either developers or clients. 

...and they don't reflect true navigation or interaction paths.

In fact, they indicate a hierarchical flow between pages. Sitemaps suggest that users typically access the site through the home page. Users who arrive via a search or a link from a friend are likely to be entering at a deeper level than the home page. Luke Wroblewski has a great podcast and set of slides on this.

And sitemaps don't account for related items--hyperlinks that bring together similar content that exist in different categories of the site. Similar information may be "nearer" than sitemaps suggest. The perceived distance is content too and associate navigation can be as important as the categorical navigation. 

So, what do they do well?

For me, they are good as a sketch -- not a final product -- for how content may be organized and how navigation may occur. They work well for initial scoping. But having to caveat what sitemaps are feels like a cop out. There's gotta be a better way.

 Any thoughts? Do sitemaps help you or confuse you?

¹I'm talking about the information architecture kind, but many of the points also extend to those junk drawer sitemap pages that many sites have. That's entirely another issue to address.

If you didn’t take how to write a press release 101 in college or work in agency, the term boilerplate may be foreign in this context… "Do we have any boilerplate content on usability?"

The term originated from sheets of steel, originally used to build steam boilers, used as printing plates for widespread reproduced content, like advertisements of syndicated columns. Today boilerplate is text that can be reused in new ways and stays the same or changes slightly from the original. You see boilerplate information on the bottom of press releases or in legal documents.

Our interactive group uses boilerplate information in our strategy documents, Situation Analysis and Blueprint. Our standard definitions and terms have been evolving since our conception and with each new hire or project launch we learn something new and things change. A year ago we hardly mentioned the word SEO (search engine optimization) and with addition of a new developer that had a passion for the concept, we added an interior section to our strategy documents.

Some may think that having standard copy speeds up our process or leaves room for the dreaded cookie cutter experience. But with every new project we reexamine our meaning of usability, RSS, SEO, accessibility, global navigation, user experience best practices, etc, and bring a bit more knowledge to the table. Our team deals with these terms daily and sees them through different colored glasses, so why would we want to deprive our clients of this cumulative thinking.