What is Digital Customer Investment?

Principles Behind The Digital Customer Investment Approach to Customer Centricity
The term Digital Customer Investment (DCI) separates its concepts and objectives from more commonly used concepts like Digital Operations, or Digital Marketing, or Digital Solutions. Any of those phrases carries with it a strong direct transactional intention that bleeds into the activities defined for Digital Customers. This pre-defined intention can act as a prison preventing innovative thinking in digital customer investment. To open a perspective to different approaches that are customer-centric in nature, I have defined digital customer investment along the following principles:

1. That digital customer-centricity can be achieved via fixed information-rich transformation messaging processes.
   
   
2. That the process of creating, maintaining, and evolving this information-rich digital messaging processes can serve as a tool for customer acquisition and retention.
   
   
3. That the process of creating, maintaining, and evolving this information-rich digital messaging processes creates a powerful symbol representing the company at every turn, allows a company to hold a mirror to its own values, objectives, and its purpose.
   
   
4. That by committing to adding the DCI approach to its existing, transactional digital approach, DCI becomes a vital method for the company to express itself to potential and existing customers, as well as any other audience that might happen to view its messaging.
   
   
5. That the success of the DCI process is measured solely by unsolicited customer feedback, properly captured and understood, via company-neutral methods.

A properly applied Digital Customer Investment Marketing plan will support most of these principles from the start and use them as the basis for the creation of the messaging, measurement and implementation of the plan.