The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age

1. Objective setting
Customer Network Strategy Generator
Direct objectives
Higher-order objectives
2. Customer selection & focusing
Segments
Unique objectives, value prop, barriers
4. Concept generation
5. Define impact
3. Strategy selection
Access
Engage
Customize
Connect
Collaborate

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Step 1: Objective Setting
The first step of this process is to define the objectives you are hoping to 
achieve for your business with any new customer strategy you develop. It 
is valuable to define objectives at two levels: direct objectives and higher-
order objectives.
r
 Direct objectives: These are the objectives that you are directly respon-
sible for addressing in your project. For example, if you were leading 
customer service, you might be seeking to develop new strategies that 
leverage customers’ digital behaviors to increase the speed of response 
to customer queries, reduce attrition of dissatisfied customers, or 
turn customer service into a source of customer insights. If you were 
responsible for developing direct-to-consumer sales for the first time 
via e-commerce, you might be seeking to drive awareness and product 
discoverability, reduce friction in the purchase decision, and engage 
lead customers as evangelists for your new sales channel.
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 Higher-order objectives: It is also important to identify what overarch-
ing, or higher-order, objectives you are seeking to support through 
your initiative. These are objectives that you are not solely responsible 
for but that your project should support. In the e-commerce example 
above, you might identify developing richer data sets about customers 
across all channels as a firm-wide objective that your initiative should 
support. This would impact how you plan for your initiative to support 
that data collection and integration.
Step 2: Customer Selection and Focusing
The next step is to get a clear picture of the customers that you are seek-
ing to address. This starts with selecting which customer segments are 
most relevant to your stated objectives. For example, if your key project 
objective were to reduce customer attrition, you might select customer 
segments with the highest rates of attrition and high-value segments 
whose losses pose the greatest risk. If your project were aimed at increas-
ing the acquisition of a group of customers who are often influenced 
by opinion leaders, you would want to include both these segments in 
your plan.

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Then you need to focus on these segments to understand them in the 
context of your project’s specific objectives. That involves answering three 
key questions:
What is my unique objective for each customer segment? If you are 
focusing on different segments to launch your new e-commerce service, 
how does your objective differ—even slightly—for each of them? Per-
haps, for one segment, the objective is simply to drive early adoption; 
for another highly active segment, you want not just adoption but also 
customer feedback and assistance in iterating the platform; for a third 
segment, you want to convince customers to set up recurring contracts 
with the new service.
What is my unique value proposition for each customer segment? It 
is important to see how the value proposition (the reason for customers 
to give you their time, attention, and money) varies among segments. For 
one customer segment, the value proposition of your e-commerce service 
may be simplicity in placing orders; for another, it may be a better selec-
tion of products; for another, it may be better record keeping for past and 
future orders.
What are the unique barriers to success for each customer segment? 
Barriers could vary from lack of awareness of a new offer to indifference, 
price sensitivity, technical hurdles, or risk aversion, among others. For each 
customer segment, try to articulate what the biggest barrier is and see how 
it differs from the others.