Customer experience is huge. There’s no other way to put it. That’s why we have several major initiatives that my team and I, and the whole enterprise, are engaged in.
First and foremost, I’m helping to lead our digital transformation. On the back end, that’s everything from creating a new content management platform or data warehouse to building a new integration layer for other providers to link their applications and capabilities into our data. On the user experience part of it, we are launching new CRM capabilities to personalize our engagement with our customers so that we know who they are, what makes them tick, and what content is of interest and value to them.
We currently have 750,000 members and players in our programs, but there are about 30 million tennis players in the United States. So we’re trying to get our outreach beyond the people we know to anybody who’s ever come to one of our digital properties or expressed interest in tennis through social media. The goal is to engage those people, welcome them to the USTA and try to get to know more and more about them. If we can personalize their experience, perhaps they will want to be a member or a participant in our programming.
The good news is, you don’t need an enormous amount of personal data to personalize. For example, when someone from the greater Boston area logs on to one of our digital properties for the first time, all we know is the ZIP code or area code where their ISP is located. But even based upon that we could reach out to them and say, for example, “Hey, welcome to YouthTennis.com. We’re happy to have you on our site. By the way, here are some youth tennis tournaments and leagues that are happening in the Boston area that you might be interested in.” With our data management platform, if we see cookies come back from the same individual, even though we don’t know who that individual is, we start to get a profile of what matters to that person, and we can begin to personalize our content delivery strategy.
To budget for all this, we are looking at IT in a bimodal way. In the digital engagement arena, we’ve articulated to our board that it is a customer-facing, market revenue opportunity, as opposed to running the technology that runs the enterprise. One is an investment and a potential profit opportunity, the other is a utility to keep the business going. We’re looking at them separately and discretely.
We put a governance model in place where we’ve got not only our internal business stakeholders who are part and parcel of the digital life cycle, but also external people who are willing to participate in our ecosystem so that we’re getting real-world experiences. We’re not trying to figure out what players want, in other words. We’re talking to players. We’re talking to tournament directors. We’re talking to club owners directly and integrating them into the ecosystem so that we’re getting direct feedback on providing them the tools and the capabilities they need to build their business. That will hopefully help us grow our business.
An essential part of this effort was bringing in an integration partner, and they’ve been able to accomplish a few things. First of all, they have subject-matter expertise. They’re tapping into their experience of working with other organizations in the marketplace. Second, they’re bringing additional bandwidth – more hands and legs to help us get the work done, because we simply just don’t have the existing people to do it. Third, they are a credible third party that substantiates the things we’re saying. It’s a lot easier to make the case to the board for more investment when a credible third party says it.
Winning digital ownership: does it matter?
There’s a lot of jostling going on in companies right now as to who owns digital. There are situations where either the CMO or CIO are battling it out for ownership of digital, others where the organization has brought on a Chief Digital Officer. To me, it’s less about who owns digital; it’s more about how do we, as a business, collaborate to leverage digital.
Digital is not a thing that belongs to a person in a part of the organization. Digital is a way to conduct business that should be shared across the entire enterprise. The entire C-suite has to have skin in the game as to how we’re going to run our business differently because of digital engagement.
If you’re CIO, don’t fall into the trap of trying to wrestle with the CMO or anybody else to take ownership of digital. Be the collaborator; be the facilitator; be the person who brings people together to work on this, to see the opportunity in this, and you will have a key position in the organization help drive the bus. If you’re fighting to drive the bus, you could win or lose. If you’re working just to bring people together to try to make sure the bus gets to the right destination, you’ve got much more of an opportunity to have an impact.
