Digital 2.0 = Design + Re-engineering
A few years have gone by since digital became the only buzzword. Over the last decade, organisations have been investing and building their digital profiles, exploring e-commerce, hiring digital teams, building innovation labs with exposed pipes, launching apps, starting incubators and accelerators; doing hackathons and replacing gray office furniture with bean bags in primary colors. These efforts were aimed at adding ‘digital’ to a business. So what really differentiates us from our digital competition?
They are the companies who are battling for the same customer. Since these competitors are often selling something mighty similar to what you are selling, most of them are working right now to figure out how to better serve your customers with a superior experience, lock them in and eat your lunch.
Taking an experience from good to great
This is often where the difference between Digital and Digital 2.0 lies- version 1 is all about looking at an existing process and making it work digitally. In other words, if you have a dumb process — you just make the dumb process faster.
Digital 2.0 goes much further. Let’s look at one simple example from the core banking platform my team and I were recently working on. The way the banking process currently runs is that information is sent from the front office to the back office for document assessments and checks. 80% of the time, there are questions or minor discrepancies on the documentation which could have been easily resolved if the front office who is onboarding the customer reviewed them. With this stage being ‘rejected’ by the back office it comes back to the front-office manager who then again runs through the process of reviewing the information and contacting the customer for relevant documentation. If there was a good checklist at the beginning, maybe a lot of these could be avoided? A good digital process is just a good process that’s made efficient through digital.
Good Design ‘just works’
It’s said that Good Design is not about how it looks, but about how it works. That is the essence of digital 2.0 — it takes a digital lens to a process that allows us to reengineer it to make it work better for every stakeholder in the chain. Digital 2.0 optimizes the process, not merely digitizing it.
The fact that the process is now digital allows you to make corrections on the fly. It allows better, more effective controls (not lose control). A digitally reengineered process is not (at all) easy; but organizations who are embracing this will start outpacing those who merely do feature dumps and digitize legacy processes. Here is an example:
A large banking client was selling a bunch of very profitable Installment Payment Plans to their card customers. They wanted to digitize this process to reap the benefits from all the advantages of digital (cost, reach, productivity, always-on, non intrusive, targeted). We discovered that the process would be unworkable if implemented as a series of customer campaigns, where leads could be 45 days old and credit checks needed to be re-done.
We re-imagined the process by making the credit check first, followed by a much shorter “live” period but faster response mechanisms — SMS and Online banking pop-up. This made the customer process immediate and got the bank a super response! That’s what we need to look at doing with every digital program we do — is the process easier for the customer or the staff or for a stakeholder? Otherwise, why do it?
This is the power of true “digital.” So ask yourself, are you digital 1.0 or 2.0? Is someone eyeing your lunch?
About the author
Bhavna is a User Experience Specialist. She has diverse work experience, having worked for digital agencies, consulting and technology companies over the last 15 years. Her passion is to create result-driven, frictionless and memorable digital experiences.
