Multichannel maturity model
To help marketers understand their multichannel marketing prowess in relation to best-in-class companies and their peers, Harte-Hanks has launched a strategic assessment tool and process which measures a company’s current practices for customer engagement across communications channels and “scores” them — comparing these practices to those companies seen to be “best-in-class” as well as an average score for medium and large-sized companies.
Multichannel Assessment
To gain a comprehensive understanding of an organization’s various multichannel processes, and its current multichannel aptitude and maturity level, five areas must be measured and scored:
- strategy
- insights
- communication and execution
- performance
- enablement
In addressing these five areas, a brand should determine whether or not it has the following in place: strategies for planning and migrating to multichannel competencies; a holistic view and understanding of customers in order to apply insights into action-oriented, ROI-driven initiatives; coordinated approaches to ensure a consistent and targeted customer experience across all interaction points; approaches to manage and optimize integrated campaign execution, fulfillment and sale channel activities; standardized metrics, processes and enterprise-wide tools to capture and apply measurement insights; and, enablers (integrated technologies and data, and vendor coordination) for supporting the multichannel vision.
Getting to Multichannel Maturity
Multichannel marketing is not the marketing department’s problem to solve. While marketing may in fact lead the discussions, our experience shows that all areas within an organization must be aligned if the company is to connect the dots between consumers who are spending money and which channels they are using. By completing an assessment, a marketing team, and an entire organization, can truly achieve the creation of marketing roadmaps to connect the dots between problems and solutions; establishment of priorities, in what order should challenges and opportunities be bridged; and seeds planted for the immediate and next appropriate marketing efforts.
Author: Harte-Hanks
More information: website
