What Is a Digital Foundation?
Technology is arguably one of the most critical factors in a company’s ability to provide an optimal customer journey. The right technology can help you find new customers, keep them happy, and differentiate yourselves from the rest of the market.
The right combination of technology creates a seamless experience for all users, enabling you to attract, convert, and retain customers. Here at LaunchPad Lab, we’ve coined this combination of technology as a brand’s Digital Foundation.
As a digital product agency with a team of experts in web development and mobile app development, we help businesses create custom applications that provide the essential building blocks to ensure your digital foundation is strong. Book a discovery call with us to learn more about how we can help you create your digital foundation.
The 3 Pillars of a Digital Foundation
Attract
Entice New Potential Customers
The attract pillar covers how prospects find you and what they see first. On the customer-facing side, that’s your public website and landing pages. On the internal side, it’s the CMS your team publishes with, the analytics that show what’s working and the marketing automation that follows up. Signs it’s weak: slow pages, content your team can’t update without a developer, and no clear picture of which channels bring in buyers. Prosci needed a digital customer experience in 8 languages, an attract problem solved at the web application and CMS layers together.
Convert
Turn Leads Into Paying Customers
The convert pillar is the moment a prospect becomes a customer: a form submission, a booking, an application or an online purchase. It depends on your conversion flows connecting directly to your CRM and, for commerce, your POS. Signs it’s weak: leads re-keyed by hand, abandoned carts with no follow-up, and no way to test one version of a page against another. For CDK Global, we built a sales app that streamlined discovery.
Retain
Maximize the Value of the Customer
The retain pillar decides how much each customer is worth over time. It lives in the software customers log in to (portals, mobile apps, self-service tools) and in a CRM that gives your team a complete view of each customer. Signs it’s weak: support volume driven by questions customers could answer themselves, mostly one-time purchases, and no single record of a customer’s history. For Amplify Credit Union, a financial services client with $800M+ in assets, retention work took the form of providing new value through additional products and services.
Customer-Facing Tech
The Digital Foundation can also be split into two horizontal pillars—the customer-facing tech and the internal-facing tech. Your customer-facing technology will be the way that you make your first impression. Your website is often the first touchpoint for a customer, which means that it needs to be attractive, user-friendly, and informative. This will often be the determining factor in whether or not the user continues on to learn more about your brand, purchase a product, or engage with your company.
Another major piece of customer-facing tech is member applications. Once a user has converted into a customer, they’ll be looking for ways to stay up-to-date with your company. You can create nurturing applications in the form of communities, self-service portals, or mobile apps.
However, your digital foundation is not just your customer-facing software. It’s simply not enough to only have a really great website or member experience—they have to integrate seamlessly with the proper internal-facing tech to create the three structured pillars of your digital foundation.
Internal-Facing Tech
Your internal-facing tech is a bit more complex than the customer-facing tech, as it includes all the software behind the scenes that makes your business run and keeps your team members happy. This includes your content management system (CMS), analytics, point-of-sale (POS) system, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and more. All of these software platforms need to be integrated in order to work together seamlessly and provide you with the data and insights you need for your business to run smoothly.
How to Measure Your Digital Foundation
Let’s Build Your Digital Foundation
Building a digital foundation can seem like a daunting task, but it’s essential for any business that wants to grow and meet their goals. At LaunchPad Lab, we specialize in custom application development services. We can help you build the right digital foundation for your industry to ensure your business can attract, convert, as well as retain and grow your customer base. Book your free discovery call with us today to learn more about how we can help you build a strong digital foundation!
Questions we get asked
What's the difference between a digital foundation and digital transformation?
A digital foundation is the set of connected systems your business runs on. Digital transformation is the process of changing how the business works using those systems. The foundation comes first: transformation projects that skip it end up automating tools that don’t share data. In scorecard terms, transformation is the work of moving each of the 3 pillars from where it scores today toward a 5. For the wider process, see our guide to digital transformation.
What are digital foundation services?
Digital foundation services are the strategy, design, development and integration work that connects a company’s customer-facing and internal systems. In practice, that covers 4 kinds of work: websites and conversion flows, web and mobile apps customers log in to, integrations between your CRM, CMS, POS and ERP, and ongoing support once those systems are live. A good partner scores your foundation first, then builds the piece that moves your lowest pillar.
Do I need custom software for a strong digital foundation?
Not for every piece. Off-the-shelf tools are usually the right call for commodity systems like email, accounting and most CRMs. Custom software earns its cost where your process is the differentiator: a member portal, a dealer or partner app, or the integration layer that connects 3 or 4 systems no vendor connects for you. Our comparison of custom software vs off-the-shelf walks through the decision.
What are digital business foundations?
“Digital business foundations” usually means the same thing as a digital foundation: the core technology a business needs to operate and grow online. Some consulting firms use the plural to cover people and processes too, such as digital skills, cybersecurity and governance. Our definition focuses on technology across 2 layers (customer-facing and internal-facing) and 3 pillars (attract, convert and retain), because that’s the part a software partner can design, build and connect for you.
Where should a company start building its digital foundation?
Start with the pillar that scores lowest, because it caps the other two. A lead that never reaches your CRM can’t be converted, however good your website is. Pick one change that moves that score, such as a single integration or one customer-facing app, and size it to ship in a single release of 12 weeks or less. Leave the full platform rebuild until you know which pillars actually need one.
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