How to ask your boss for a million bucks

As more and more interactions become completely screen-based—including customer self-service and customer support—your customer’s digital experience is becoming inextricably linked with their overall perception of your business. And you know those digital experiences need to be better. A lot better. As Forrester Research writes, “Companies will increasingly win or lose on the battleground of customer experience.”

But understanding the need to improve those experiences is one thing; connecting improvements to your organization’s bottom line is a lot more challenging. We have found that the closer you work with your finance department (or even CFO), the more likely it is for your initiatives to get the green light.

Getting your digital experience project funded

Your executive team might intuitively know that digital experience improvement should be a priority, but unfortunately, that doesn’t translate into automatic approval for investing in your initiatives. Frankly, your CFO is likely—at this moment—to be juggling financial requests from all departments and lines of business across your organization.

So how do you get the attention of the CFO—and approval for your project—over all those other priorities?

The short answer? Learn to speak your CFO’s language.

Before doing anything else, you need to make sure you understand the financial levers of your business. For example: What are the strategic plans for the business? What are the top-level financial goals for the year? What drives growth? And how does your organization track and report on an initiative’s performance?

By using the same terms, data and formulas as your CFO—and forecasting the real, material impact your initiative will have on the business—you are far more likely to get funding approved for your digital experience project.

Getting the green light for funding

If you’ve identified a digital experience project and just aren’t sure how to gain traction, our DX Business Case Playbook will help you craft a solid business case for your initiative. This step-by-step guide will introduce you to the basics you need to cover in a business case and provide clear instructions on how to approach each part.

The playbook also offers pragmatic pointers on how to partner with your finance team to project an increase in revenue or a decrease in costs—and make your business case irrefutable. By following a proven process that ties projects to business outcomes, you’ll have a much better chance of seeing your ideas become reality.

Example DX improvement projects

You can use this business case framework for a variety of initiatives, including some of today’s most common DX and technology investments:

• Personalization and content strategy to provide a more relevant experience for prospects and customers.
• New marketing technology platforms to upgrade core areas of your customer experience management capabilities.
• Responsive website redesign to provide customers with a great experience on any screen.
• Customer portals and line-of-business applications to increase engagement and retention or allow for better customer self-service.
• Customer journey optimization to improve touchpoints and remove friction.

You know that in improving your customer’s digital experience, you’ll build stronger and longer customer relationships. The business case you create will paint the picture for your CFO and other stakeholders, demonstrating how investing in large-scale digital experience initiatives can fuel growth—and make a real, tangible impact on your business.

Download Let’s Get Phygital: Customer Experience in an Omnichannel Universe now to start building your case.