Peter Turner
This article is a guide that can help you flesh out use cases, allowing you to:
- Gather sufficient detail to enable internal and external stakeholders to provide the necessary technology, staffing, creative, and process solutions to deliver the use cases.
- Drive consensus, excitement, and investment across your organisation.
Follow the six steps below for each use case in the order provided, collecting as much detail as possible. While this can be done individually, I highly recommend involving your stakeholders to build this collaboratively in workshops.
1. Identify objectives and key metrics
Your first priority should be to define the customer outcomes and metrics you hope to potentially drive with each use case. Are you trying to increase CLTV? Adding to your MAUs? Driving online reviews? Uncovering this up front will help you to design the customer touch points that deliver.
Questions to answer:
- What specific metrics will the use case drive?
- What, if any financial benefits could this use case potentially deliver for the organisation?
- What OKRs will the use case level up to?
- Can you measure before you attempt it? What’s the current value? What are the realistic targets?
- What method will you use to determine the incremental value driven by the use case?
- Do you have systems in place to measure this outcome currently?
2. Capture hypotheses and testing criteria
Have a bunch of customer segments? Lots of assumptions on how you think your customers will respond to your tactics? Capture all your hypotheses and think about how you will test them before moving to the next step.
Questions to answer:
- What are the questions you are hoping to answer about your customers?
- What are the A/B/MV tests that need to perform to answer these questions?
- What do you consider a success for each test?
3. Define actions and channels
The open nature of modern customer engagement platforms and the interconnectivity of data platforms has increased number of ways to create touch points with your customers. In this activity, think though the metrics you've identified, the testing that you've outlined and capture all those moments you think will move the needle.
Questions to answer:
- What actions are you trying to get a customer to take?
- How will you drive those actions? What channels and touch points will you try to use?
- What creative will you need to build to activate the channels?
- What existing creative can you leverage?
- What optimisations might you need to perform along the way?
4. Evaluate your technology and data
Now that you've cataloged the "what," it's time to shift your focus to the "how"! The purpose of this activity is not necessarily to find all the answers but to capture what you need from a technical requirements perspective and ensure that you have documented your current resources to achieve it. You might not have all the answers, and that's okay! A little bit of detail now ensures you can enlist the right people to address the challenge later on.
Questions to answer:
- What platforms will you be using to execute on your touch points? Do you have them at the ready today?
- What data do you need to target your customers? Can you use batch targeting? Do you need real-time triggers?
- What data is required to personalise all the touch points?
- Of that data, what data do you currently have access to? Is it integrated into your customer engagement platform? Are there any governance concerns? What data is missing?
- Do you have the right resources in place to perform analysis of your efforts? Do you have data visualisation tools to present your reporting? Do you want to automate the reporting?
5. Identify your MVPs
With everything you've just gathered, you should be able to define your MVPs for each use case. MVPs act as great entry points to get your organisation excited by making things real and to start generating results before you are able to address your technical gaps.
How to know if something is a good MVP candidate:
- You can execute it with what you have on hand today or with minimal additional effort/cost.
- It provides learnings you can use towards your final builds.
- It can start tracking towards the metrics you have set out to achieve for the use case.
- You can iterate on it once you've aligned the right resources to tackle your technical blockers.
6. Prioritise your backlog
Now that you've established your detailed backlog and your MVPs it's time to make sure that your organisation is aligned towards your approach and order of delivery. You can achieve this in workshops with your stakeholders by locating each use case on a simple 2x2 matrix:
- X-axis (Horizontal): Impact (Low to High)
- Y-axis (Vertical): Feasibility (Low to High)
Once you've located each use case on the matrix, rank your backlog in this order:
- High Feasibility, Low Impact: Quick Wins & MVPs
- High Feasibility, High Impact: High Priority
- Low Feasibility, Low Impact: Low Priority
- Low Feasibility, High Impact: Strategic Initiatives
Successfully leveraging your martech stack and first-party data for customer engagement requires careful planning. It may seem daunting at times, but if you build out your backlog of use cases as described above, you'll have a strong blueprint to deliver with a way to align the right resources and technology solutions to your goals.