Digital Transformation: a buzzword or for real?
A whopping 65% of businesses indicate that improving customer experience (CX) is their top driver for digital transformation. The evolution of the digital age set the stage for trends like D2C (Direct to Consumer): manufacturers selling directly to consumers via marketplaces, resellers or their own e-commerce platforms. These days, prices and products are no longer enough. To attract, win, retain and support customers, you need to digitally transform your businesses to deliver a differentiated experience.
What is digital transformation?
At the heart of digital transformation lies the improvement, connection and change of business processes to enhance customer experiences and stimulate innovation. In order to achieve that, IT should be aligned with and driven by a well-planned business strategy. Digital transformation has several goals with regards to how you:
● Serve your customers, employees and partners;
● Support continuous improvement in business operations;
● Disrupt existing businesses and markets;
● Invent new businesses and business models.
At its purpose, digital transformation is for companies to better serve their customers.
Differentiation by transformation
Customer experience is all about achieving competitive differentiation by viewing the world through the eyes of your customers and modifying interactions accordingly. Shoppers who feel they are just another number will look to competitors to meet their needs. Therefore, customer interactions have to be consistent and transparent across your brand, products, services, channels and operations. A focus on both how and how well you deliver customer value serves as a foundation for digital transformation. A frictionless and personalized experience will be rewarded with loyalty and referrals.
3 digital transformation challenges
People, processes and technology continue to provide challenges for your digital transformation:
- Silos and technology. Businesses tend to be siloed and they often try to leverage legacy systems. These were once considered transformational but now form a layer of complexity due to APIs, monolithic architectures and point-to-point integrations. The complexity of existing applications coupled with organizational silos can harm meeting your digital transformation goals.
- Transformative leadership. Leadership’s approach to introducing, explaining, and incentivising the work of digital transformation makes all the difference in achieving your goals. Lead strategically for full buy-in across your organisation: identify and communicate your goals, focus on your people and encourage collaboration.
- Technology vs. your customer. KPIs for success often focus on technology implementations, rather than the impact on the customer. Once you deeply understand each customer’s unique preferences to connect with your company, then you can see where technology provides a value-add to that buying process and relationship with your customers.
Technology supports digital transformation
Digital transformation is not just an IT-led strategy. However, as you continue to make digital the center of your organisation, you need to invest in new technologies and use data to help your business. Data paired with technology, that can interpret and communicate it in a way that meets a specific goal, is transformative.
A 360-degree view of customers is at the core of a business use case for many related technologies, e.g., applying machine learning to detect buying intent, creating personalised emails and deciding what contact channels to support. Do not focus on individual technologies or approaches that are tactical and operational, but embrace digital with an eye toward transforming your businesses.
Digital is here to stay
Nobody digitalises just to be digital. It is just a means to an end: happy customers and competitive differentiation. Many of the success stories in digital transformation will feature the most important of all audiences: the end customer and how digital transformation, by automation, accessibility and portability, make doing business easier and more rewarding. Do you want to learn more about new business strategies?
Read our D2C whitepaper here. → https://bit.ly/ImpactD2C
Source reference: A Glass Half-Full? Preparing Businesses for the Hard Work of Digital Transformation, Adobe, Feb 2019
