Remaining relevant is one of the most important ways a business can scale and be differentiated from its competitors. It is equally as important in the workplace if you’re looking to get ahead. The truth is, irrelevant people are not the ones you see climbing the corporate ladder. Relevance is the ticket to your next promotion and we’re here to show you how it’s done.
What does it mean to be relevant? Whether as a business or as an individual, relevance in its simplest form is the quality or state of being closely connected or appropriate.
The more closely you are connected to your organization’s people, processes and technology, the more valuable you become and consequently, the more appropriate you are for the bigger role. Having a pulse on the knowledge that exists on your team, the strategies (or lack thereof) in place that enable you to make use of it and an understanding of your current and desired tech stack puts you in a good position to provide information that aids decision-making, offer some form of predictive insights, and provide valuable feedback. Helping your organization improve its relevance in the market will in turn help increase your relevance and get the recognition you deserve.
1. Improve your team’s performance with effective knowledge management
Joshua Lee from Standout Authority suggests that raising other team members’ performance is a sign of good leadership. This is an indicator to your boss that you’re not only concerned about yourself getting to the top, but that you want to bring your team with you.
One of the best ways to raise your team’s performance is to make sure they have the right information at the right time. That means giving them access to relevant company knowledge so they (and you) can do your job better and more efficiently. A knowledge management strategy, such as Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®), is extremely helpful in making sure your company’s collective knowledge is captured and shared.
By empowering your team to make independent and informed decisions in a timely fashion, they too will be more adept to do their jobs more proficiently. They will be able to close sales quicker, resolve support tickets with ease and delight your customers. All of which position you as a hero.
2. Know your customers… really know them
Whether it’s on your website, intranet, portal or community, knowing what your customers are looking at, what they’re looking for, and what they’re not finding is crucial in staying ahead of the competition in the age of information.
Usage analytics are incredibly powerful and yet often overlooked by many companies. Most companies today have accepted the use of digital channels but they’re not optimizing them and they’re missing out out on business-critical insights and opportunities to become more relevant in the market. This offers another chance for you to shine.
A great example of a company capturing and leveraging those insights is CMSWire.com. They use AI-powered site search and a unified index to surface relevant information such as customers’ location, behavior trends, use of discount codes and more to deliver a superior end-to-end digital experience. This has enabled CMSWire to increase their mobile conversion rate by 125%.
So, how can this help you? With the help of AI-powered search and machine learning capabilities, your organization can offer personalized experiences and become more relevant to your customers. If you can recommend a service that both empirically captures customer problems and help your team deal with them appropriately, your relevance increases. I’m willing to bet that kind of forward-thinking will put you next-in-line for your promotion.
3. Establish yourself as a leader within your organization
As you grow in your understanding of your customers and take a leading role within your team, you also need to think about the projects and strategies that can grab the attention of the leaders in your organization. For many companies, those projects are going to center around emerging technology that promises to make your company smarter, more efficient and more effective.
While virtual reality experiences and other emerging tech may be a few years off, we recommend looking at a technology that is already paying dividends for forward-thinking companies: artificial intelligence. It’s probably already on your CEO’s mind; according to research from PwC, 72 percent of business execs believe AI will be the business advantage of the future.
You can play a leading role in ushering your company into the era of AI by focusing on a specific and solvable use case to pilot with machine learning or artificial intelligence. Try to identify a business problem that is hindering the accomplishment of strategic goals at your company, has an immense amount of data associated with it and has current solutions that cannot scale due to the amount of resources involved.
Sound familiar? For a lot of companies, the relevance of their customer and employee digital experiences will fit the bill. Creating personalized digital experiences requires a tremendous amount of data analysis, along with a full team implementing and testing your changes.This is a great use case for artificial intelligence; by identifying existing patterns in your data and automatically applying those insights, artificial intelligence can be a scalable solution to that strategic problem. Plus, many companies provide out-of-the-box AI-powered relevance solutions.
Imagine how leading a successful artificial intelligence pilot project and potentially solving a strategic issue for your organization will look when it comes time to negotiate your next step. That project alone will make your promotion a “when,” not “if.”
As AI initiatives begin to be a top priority for companies in various industries, you needn’t worry if your job will become obsolete. If you make it your job to ensure your company is maintaining its relevance to your customers, employees and partners, you’ll never be out of work. Furthermore, if you make it your mission to bridge the gap between your company’s people, processes and technology, not only will you help your company achieve its strategic objectives, you’ll be top of mind when it’s decision making time.
If you have any other thoughts or ideas about how relevance can help you get that promotion, get in touch with us on Twitter!