Part 1 : Business Need : Drivers of Digital Transformation
I have always been impressed by these two statements. More so relevant in the current pandemic context
- It is survival of the fastest now
- Competition is one click away
There are many cases in Software industry where many businesses have lost out by not adhering to the above. I do not want to take names but anybody who has spent significant time in Software field will know how amazon tanked a most popular offline book shop, how google took away the search engine market which was once captured by a competitor. Similarly, i see a new trend today in neo banking space which can give the traditional banks a run to their money.
So, the key thing is to stay competitive and change quickly to follow the competition if they go ahead. How do we achieve it? Answer is to use technology to transform the business digitally.
Digital transformation is all about applying and leveraging evolving technology to solve an existing business problem or to help business achieve its goals.
Let us look at it bit more detail in terms of relevance to business.
Business is all about selling relevant products/services to customers at right price.
Customer is the always the king and his experience is most important:
Customer expectation continues to rise. Customer wants highly personalised and speed for convenience. As the technology evolves, it is very natural for any person to expect productivity and convenience. As an example: When i am driving, i expect my mobile to take instructions using my voice, be it for opening a destination in google map, or to open my favourite youtube talks. Similarly, would like an easy way of making payments for an online purchase, preferable with one single click, I also want a quick way to compare my vehicle insurance quotes, make a purchase and sign the contract digitally. Many customers do not like to be contacted and spend time for a mundane process. More digital, better it would be.
Business needs to know more about the customer :
To treat the customer as king, the business would like to know more the about the customer so that they can clearly sell relevant product/services. Relevance is the key and the way to find it is to know more about the customer. For example: As a business user, i would like to have control of promotions that i setup for my products online. i would like to see the effectiveness of of my marketing campaign. Similarly, If some customer is searching for a product with a search term and if he is not getting any search results, i would like to know what that failed search term has been.
Enhancing Customer reach — Make your product and service more and more visible:
The popular products sell themselves. The long tail is the key. While it is known what customer wants and needs, one need to spend extra energy to make the customer aware of his new products/services, changes to existing ones be it a price or a feature etc. It might also be the case where the businesses are not able to reach out to my customers directly. For e.g. : A manufacturer always relies on a retailer to get his product reach his customer. Imagine if the manufacturer could reach the customer directly and by pass as many intermediaries as possible.
Externalize your Business function and be ready to be aggregated
With aggregator model (e.g.: Price Comparison sites, eCommerce Marketplaces) becoming popular, especially where the service is commoditised, it is becoming increasing difficult to stay niche of a smaller part of a larger business process and still be competitive. One has to either be ready to be part of an aggregator or offer the complete process themselves. For e.g.: Used Car selling market was very fragmented and unstructured in Indian market until aggregators like Cars24 came in. Similarly there has been lots of examples of how aggregators and marketplace players such as Udaan, RedBus, PolicyBazaar etc. have created a space for themselves and have also created a competition amongst respective service providers. Imagine a service provider who is not well equipped to be part of the aggregator platform. He will struggle to stay competitive.
Automate Business Processes that are repetitive
By automating business processes one can clearly achieve increased productivity, better customer service, transparency and traceability, efficiency, accuracy, convenience etc. For e.g.: Complete End to end automation of Expense management with user requiring to only upload images of receipts and bills will have many takers and benefits. Similarly Banks, automating process of onboarding a customer including KYC checks, Anti money laundering checks etc will bring in more transparency and speed. Workforce automation and Supply chain automation will bring in efficiency.
Configure rules to drive change and scale
Many businesses prefer to go global after being successful in one of the country of presence. It is also common to repeat a success of a particular line of business to other lines or categories. More often than not, many processes and rules will be common across countries, line of business etc with few changes specific to each country or line of business. It is imperative to have systems that are configurable and rules driven so that it is easy to make change to a specific country or to even launch to a new country.
Use Information to differentiate over competition
One of our client, who is a background verification service provider, wanted to build a criminal database so that it could help their decision making during verification. What was interesting was the data they used to build this database. They analysed all judgement documents given by all the courts to identify name and address data of criminals. The work was complex but what was important was that they were able to use a publicly available information to help their business.
So, it is clear that there is a need to capture more information, think inside-out, reach out more, analyse more about the customer, use available information effectively to be able to arrive at accurate and timely decisions. Key thing is to find out what are you doing to help achieve the above need.
We at ThoughtClan do a competitive benchmarking and Business–Technology fit gap analysis to help our clients arrive at a Digital Transformation roadmap. Reach out to info@thoughtclan.com for more information.
