What is Digital transformation?
It isn’t just about the website.
Brands often credit Digital Transformation to be everything about their website(s) and how it looks. And even if their websites are super functional, they still need to work on the part of transforming themselves to adapt the technology and it’s functioning.
But, practically the scenario is much different.
Digital Transformation is an implementation of synchronous IT Front-End and Back-End services that provide an experience to the customer.
Example:
- Omni Channel touch points
- Hyper Personalisation
- AI & Automation
- Agile Workflow
- And many more
Well, we know the fact that the Digital is the future. It’s the place where brands can build their value and connect to their customers.
The upside ,though, is the minimized investment amount over the traditional media with a rather easy medium to connect.
With time, this concept became popular and Brands started using the Digital Media to ease up their operations. And Digitally Transformed themselves.
Let’s understand the digital transformation with three golden rules of current successful businesses:
- Customer Experience
- Digital Business Agility
- Work-Force Automation
1. Customer Experience
The entire CX shows that the company cares, it’s the willingness to prioritize the quality of the interaction through maximum possible omni channel touch points.
Touch points may be physical + digital or hybrid one.
When we talk about the increasing CX through Digital Transformation, we mainly talk about enabling 24x7 customer service via Omni Channel Interaction, Automation & Hyper personalization.
Let’s understand the digital transformation’s role in increasing the CX with Automation & Hyper personalization with a real business example of the retail industry.
Consider yourself as an apparel brand with 5 stores across the city.
A customer walks in to your store A looking for a particular design of cloth.
Case 1 — Live search within the store:
Customers invest at least 10–15 minutes into searching the product when they first enter the store, they end-up covering 50% of the store’s products. But, with the help of Digital Transformation, the search becomes much easier as the customer can directly search for the product’s availability and position in the store.
Case 2. Multi-store inventory sync & search
Now that you have digitally transformed your inventory by allowing a live multi-store sync to access it through a kiosk or a mobile app.
Meaning, the customer can now access the inventory to find the particular product through your inventory across multiple stores on his/her device of choice and can order through a mobile app or any convenient digital medium.
Thus, Digital Transformation ends up saving time-consumption, efforts and also, provides better sales.
Case 3. Digital Transformation saves fulfillment cost.
According to our example, out of the 5 stores, your order of need is available at store B, Store C & Store D such that, if you place an order and the following stores take following times to deliver:
Store B takes 1 Day to deliver
Store C takes 7 hours to deliver
Store D takes 4 hours to delivery
Now, to make sure that the product reaches to you at the earliest, we developed an algorithm that uses automation in a specific three-step method where:
Automation 1: Maps the product from the inventory to the nearest store of the shipping address entered by the customer and sends a personalized notification to the store manager about the new order.
Automation 2 : This automation algorithm checks the incoming orders and prepares the e-invoices and connects to the full-fillment center with the delivery details and the timeline.
Oh! you just converted a sale, Right? And you got an interesting customer. But, What about sending reminders and offers on a timely scale?
And this is where another automation comes in play to reconnect the customer to your brand.
Automation 3:
If customer-lead doesn’t track back with another consignment or a purchase order for upto 30 days, the System sends a personalised coupon of 10%-20% to the customer.
This is just a simple example of how CX can automate the process, seamlessly reduce the operational costs and even connect to potential leads within minimal time.
Learn — How Digital transformation can increase the CX in ecommerce industry
Here are few more tips how you can increase your CX through digital transformation:
1. 1. Through Omni Channel Interaction:
It’s an omni-channel interaction process. Meaning, a customer can avail the service or buy the product in multiple ways based on his/her comfortability.
To understand it better, let us again, talk about the previous example where in the Omni Channel Interaction methods were:
1.1.1.Website:
A web-page with their most important details about the apparel brand. Meaning, customers could learn about the brand, purchase their products and pay seamlessly without cash.
1.1.2.Kiosk:
Set up custom machines at the stores, where the customer can search the inventory and place orders seamlessly.
1.1.3.Mobile App:
Connect to the customers via the smartphone app wherein they can purchase the product, place returns/ replacements and an integrated automation system that automatically detects the location and asks the permission to set it as the delivery address.
1.2. Digital Technology Integration to increase support services:
E-Commerce businesses have segmented a single support system into multiple branches specific to a particular purpose.
Meaning, it has a unified support system that has integrated sub-branches to cater to various situations and processes like
a.Customer Support
b.Returns and Replacement
c.Payments and Deliveries
d.Operations and support
e.Legalities and prospects
And to any and every specific operation required by the brand(s). Here’s a simple representation of the complex algorithms, they use:
It uses various methods and technologies to communicate to the customer and back to the brand and vice-versa.
1.2.1. Chat:
The brands can chat with their customers on different social media platforms or their very own chat platform to stay connected to their customers, get feedback and provide services.
1.2.2.E-Mail:
The brands can allow the users to connect via the process of E-Mail in terms of long conversations. They can reduce the use of paper by sending e-invoices.
1.2.3.TelePhone:
The brand can speak to address the queries of a customer via the phone which inturn, increases the honey value of the brand in terms of connection and customer understanding.
1.2.4 Video Call Support:
To understand their customer’s specifications and pictorial queries, the brands can set up a video support system to better understand the queries of the user/customer.
1.3 .Automation and Artificial Intelligence:
To further streamline the process and reduce the time consumed, brands can implement the use of automation techniques and Artificial Intelligence providing quick support and solutions.
1.3.1.Chatbots on websites and apps:
These Chatbots are designed to understand the keywords of the sentences or queries sent by the user and a defined solution accurate to the query by scanning a pre-defined database designed for the purpose.
1.3.2.Quick EMail diverts and replies:
Brands can use quick email divert and reply automation services which send a specific reply based on the keywords in the email and/or transfer it to the concerned department.
Think of it this way, a customer sends the restaurant a query about catering on an email designed to be used for legal queries, the automation and the intelligence service diverts the email to the designated email yet, also, sends a reply from the designated email thanking the user about writing to them and/or reverting to them with an answer for their query without the customer even having to worry about anything.
1.3.3. Customized messages:
The brands can create a connection with their audience by investing into the honey economy. By sending personalized messages with an emotion to convey, brands can attract a huge amount of brand recall value at the end of the day.
It can be anything from a birthday wish to a festival greetings or just a message that asks about the well-being of the customer. It’s indirectly boosting the brand’s economic value.
2. Digital Business Agility:
Consider the fact that you have adopted Digital Transformation and have initiated the first step towards your brand progressing in the manner.But, does it stop there?
Well, no. And here’s where Digital Business Agility comes into play.
Agility is the process to rapidly adapt to new methods and ideologies to solve a problem.
Digitally, businesses adapt new technologies when we need them the most to solve a problem. Digital Business Agility is a three step process which brands are implementing the most in the modern times.
2.1.Hyper-Awareness:
It is when brands are aware and realize the constant changes around them and are learning more about the changes just so to stay on the safer side and to implement a better customer experience around it.
Two mainstream factors that contribute towards a brand’s awareness are:
2.1.1.Content and Research Papers:
The brands can use the Internet to read up on the latest content in terms of the Business, Markets and every market connected to them.
2.1.2.Consistent feedback and analysis:
The brands can use the Internet to constantly stay connected to their audience, consistently host and evaluate feedback from their customers and analyze the behaviour input of the customers based on situations to understand their customers better.
The perfect example would be how GoDaddy constantly hosts feedback and surveys to their customers to improve their experiences(both inhouse and CX) and design in business aspects and provide a better end user experience.
2.2.Informed Decision Making:
This is when the brands take on the decisions based on the data they’ve collected by being hyper aware about the world and the shift in terms of business, markets and methods.
Decisions should be based on the Analysis.
Since ,we are talking about an ECommerce Brand as an example, let’s consider a scenario where the brand only operates in Tier 1 cities but, the traffic or the brand awareness is spread across all the tier 1 and tier 2 cities.
Here, if the brand is aware about it, the brand can expand their business to service more customers who are from tier 2 cities as well, thus, generating better revenue and sales.
2.3 Fast Implementation:
The process of implementing the above taken decisions based on a phase manner where the change comes first and the necessary legalities next. The brands create a streamlined work process where the people can experience their products or services or changes but, at the same time, all the necessary actions or legalities are also in play.
Example: Considering the latest pandemic as an example, a lot of brands shifted to using web-communication technologies in a short period of time to continue their operations, provide their services and to communicate with each other.
The use of the Zoom app was not mainstream pre-lockdown. And post-lockdown changed rapidly with every brand shifting to Zoom and other video communication platforms.
Brands started to work on ways to increase their efficiency with Work from Home programs and their agility is one of the reasons behind the world economy being saved from crashing on a huge scale.
3.WorkForce Automation + Hyper Personalisation:
Digital Transformation is not just about the customer experience but also about the employee and work-force experience which in-turn builds the brand value, saves operational costs, provides better output and provides a better customer experience.
It’s about streamlining your inhouse work experience which saves time in future while improving customer experience and maintaining it.
It completely revolves around the work-force experience enhancements where technologies are used in play to help the employees ideate, communicate and perform better.
We, at NexGen Innovations, use an integrated workforce management suite that not just calculates our operational costs based on a custom algorithm but also,
i.Calculates Time value of money based on the hours spent on the Project.
ii.Connects employees to each other seamlessly.
iii.Maintains a record of employees’ work and makes sure each and every minute spent for the brand is accounted for.
iv.Builds a daily work report specific to each and every individual employee.
v.Generates reports based on analysis and suggests performance improvement methods to the employees on a monthly basis via EMail.
Vi. Helps understand performances and work reports to inturn build a better brand experience, indirectly investing into the brand’s future.
What do you think about digitally transforming your business to adapt to the Internet and the consumers? Do let us know by commenting down your thoughts.
