
By Mike Metz on in Agency Life & Leadership
Digital adaptation, part 3: Scaling up
Welcome back! If you haven’t seen the previous articles in this series, be sure to check out part 1 where I introduce you to the idea of digital adaptation, and part 2 where we learned an important lesson from four major digital transformation failures.
What I’d like to do today is walk you through an imagined case study that uses multiple adaptations to transform a business. After that, we’ll reflect on that list you made of your own temporary digital implementations (you did do your homework after reading part 1, right?) and figure out what to do with it.
Step 1: Identify a need
For this mental exercise let’s imagine that you run a law firm with an incredible yet overworked administrator. Let’s call him Mike — great name. Among Mike’s many duties is to book first-time client consultations. During the pandemic, you haven’t been able to bring people into the office, and that means that Mike is spending way more time on the phone than he can keep up with. You can’t replace the human aspect of this role, but maybe you can supplement it?
Imagine you’ve been reading about cool new chatbot technology and decide to test it out. Your bot has a name, (you pick this time) and a personable-looking avatar with programmed dialog that expressed your brand. To start, it has one job — book first-time consultations. This frees up Mike’s time and means that existing clients spend a lot less time on hold. You’ve met the need of the moment with a quick digital adaptation.
Step 2: Iterate and innovate
The major question facing your imagined law firm now is whether to keep your receptionist bot once COVID-19 has passed. It wasn’t part of a planned digital transformation effort, and that means you likely don’t have any resources dedicated to scaling it.
Instead, there is now a unique opportunity to iterate your way into digital transformation, one small project at a time.
Instead, there is now a unique opportunity to iterate your way into digital transformation, one small project at a time. The bot makes a great first touchpoint, so you could drive to it with digital ads. Maybe the persona you created is so well named (good job) that we feature it in your social media. Turns out this bot can also do SMS, so let’s take a week and train it to text former clients to see if they need any routine legal services.
This new method lets us test tactics and determine what works with data instead of planning a whole strategy based on assumptions. It’s not something I’d recommend for every organization, as we’re creating a lot of loose threads, but might be the key to making the most of several digital adaptations.
Step 3: Integrate
The last thing we need to do is weave these threads together and retrofit what we’ve built into a full digital transformation. Let’s look at everything we implemented for this bot:
- Consultation scheduling
- SMS based CRM with existing clients
- Digital ads that drive prospects to it
- Presence in your social media
Can we integrate these? Absolutely. The best way to do that is to center each adaptation, one at a time, and consider how it links to the others.
As an example, let’s center first-time consultation scheduling. By linking scheduling to SMS for CRM, we could offer clients the ability to schedule via text. Scheduling and digital ads align perfectly if we use the Google Lead Form extension in your ads so prospects schedule appointments right from their browser. Etc.
By identifying, iterating, and then integrating we can take a series of digital adaptations and create something lasting and impactful for your business. In this instance, we’ve transformed a law firm’s CRM into a semi-automated, bot-driven solution.
Now is the time to take a look at the list you made of the temporary adaptations your organization put in place during the pandemic. Try centering one of them in your mind and then quickly brainstorm how it could be integrated with each other adaptation on your list. Do you see ways to tie them all together?
This past year has been challenging for everyone. As you evaluate your various digital adaptations, the team at FATFREE is a great resource to help you strategize ways to scale them. The race isn’t over yet, but remember that you don’t have to run it alone!