By Janus Boye
Kristina Podnar is a renowned expert on digital governance and also the author of “The Power of Digital Policy""
Most marketers and digital ops teams are still busy asking “may I” when they ought to be pushing the envelope on innovation and innovating on what will make the company more resonant in the marketplace next month, quarter and year.
In a recent member call, digital policy consultant Kristina Podnar asked the question: What if we could change that dynamic, deliver “just in time guidance” and push for faster and more frictionless market engagement? What if we applied the same type of approach to our digital ops enablement that we apply to our consumers?
Kristina talked through several use cases and shared examples of how marketing and digital ops teams are reinventing digital policies for enablement. She also shared her tips and tricks on how to help your colleagues around the globe get to the next level of enablement.
We started with the problem: What’s holding us back?
Marketing can’t find the answers
Kristina opened her presentation with a few screenshots illustrating how hard it unfortunately often is for a marketer to find the current marketing policy.
When working in the marketing department, how do you find the right version of the marketing policy? Kristina shared this screenshot, which unfortunately is an accurate depiction of the unsolved problem facing many marketers for the past many years
As Kristina said:
Marketers often have to act like superheroes
To drive home her point, she listed some of the superhero powers that are often expected. She did this by a few notable underlinings from real-world policy documents and base level marketer requirements. I’ve listed them here and you probably won’t find them surprising:
All users, regardless of department, shall comply with all University policies and federal, state and local laws, rules and regulations
The Country General Manager or their delegate must approve all email copy
The capturing and handling of customer data is compliant with all local privacy legislation
Policies for handling customers’ data are created and embedded
Compliance with local legal requirements
Regularly review legal advice to ensure the website remains compliant at all times
To meet these expectations, you need quite some governance and ideally updated versions of policy documents. To quote Kristina
“Many senior managers are not ready to take the hands of the steering wheel”
On this topic, Kristina shared the minimum standard policy for all external commercial communications at Dutch multinational brewing company Heineken. This included wording like:
Compliance with the code is mandatory
Both Legal and Corporate Affairs should be involved as early as possible in any creative discussion about marketing or commercial communication to provide timely guidance, and should continue to be involved if new questions arise along the way
Not being able to find the right versions and the right answers is clearly one very big problem.
As Kristina said, it doesn’t help that marketeers too often have to ask headquarters “May I”, almost like when a child asks permission with “mother, may I?”
How do we fix this and move to the next level?
It’s time to free your digital policies
Kristina has worked with governance for over a decade and since 2019 she’s started working with customers in pharma on freeing digital policies. Back in 2019, she was a part of a project, where policy requirements were delivered through a chatbot for faster content approval.
Fast forward to 2023, and this helpful tool has now been further improved with personalised policy guidance with continual learning and back-end office integration. This makes sense in a setting where new rules and regulation is introduced at an unprecedented rate, including for privacy and accessibility.
The idea is to empower marketers to find the answers to their questions much faster. Kristina shared an example prompt, where a marketers asked this question:
How do we handle personal data from consumers?
As an answer the bot then delivered both relevant and helpful guidance and also offered a checklist of do’s, don’ts and what to consider with regard to consumer privacy.
Use the same technology and approaches internally and externally
Ensuring the same user experience for employees as for customers is essential for fostering a harmonious and productive work environment. By providing employees with a seamless and intuitive experience, access to digital policies that are accessible, centralised, and intuitive, ensures that your colleagues can deliver the same high-quality experiences that external users warrant and expect.
By leveraging the same type of technologies internally to your enterprise as you do for external product and service delivery you ensure consistency in user experience which cultivates a sense of fairness and equality within the organization and inspires digital workers to high performance delivery.
Also, when employees have access to user-friendly digital policy tools, streamlined processes, and intuitive interfaces, they can perform their tasks efficiently, leading to increased job satisfaction and reduced frustration.
In the trenches with clients, Kristina consistently sees a superior digital policy user experience inside of the corporation empowering employees to deliver better customer service. When employees are familiar with similar tools and the same type of consumer experiences, they can empathise with customer pain points, anticipate their needs, and provide appropriate solutions. This alignment allows employees to deliver a more personalised and efficient service, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Furthermore, creating and ensuring that employees have the same user experience criteria when looking for digital policy guidance as you would want for your consumers, reinforces your organisation's brand image. A cohesive experience across all touchpoints demonstrates a commitment to excellence, professionalism, and attention to detail, fostering trust and credibility among both employees and customers.
In closing and to quote Kristina:
“Overall, investing in user experience (tools, technologies, education) for employee-guiding digital policies helps inform them of the boundaries within which they can exercise creativity and freedom, and without the friction, positively impacts the business bottom line.”
Learn more about digital policies
We’ve previously hosted Kristina for a popular member’s call on What digital policies do you have? On Kristina’s website kpodnar.com, you can also find a ton of helpful inspiration on the topic
The conversation also continues in person at our group meetings and upcoming conferences. You can meet Kristina in person in Florida in January 2024, where she is speaking at CMS Kickoff 24.
You can also view the slides (PDF) from the call or even lean back and enjoy the entire recording below.