The world is getting increasingly digitalized which is driving Organizations to automate business processes and evolve models at a rapid pace. Consumers are increasingly resorting to social media for discerning customer service. This has huge implications in Consumer attraction as well as attrition. It provides a huge opportunity to connect with more customers, but, the risk of running into poor customer experience is high and can impact customer loyalty, brand advocacy and revenues. Enterprises need to focus on creating a brand experience through a unified channel approach with more consumers and cross channel marketing with multi-platform enablement.
This revolution has given birth to an interconnected world that binds customers, employees, managers, and systems together in a network of unprecedented complexity and opportunity. Making sense of those connections and building value requires a new interdisciplinary model of work. This is non-trivial, because digital transformation touches so many parts of an organization; any large digital program requires unprecedented coordination of people, processes, and technologies.
A strategy to increase revenue from high-value customer segments, for example, requires analytics-based insights into which purchasing journeys generate the most value, a clear vision and plan for how to capture that value, and technologies and tools to digitize interactions with customers. New capabilities and teams are also needed to manage and coordinate the delivery of those journeys across the organization.
Digital strategy is intrinsic to business strategy today. Majority of digital leaders have fully integrated digital into their strategic-planning process. A digital strategy also increasingly blurs the boundaries between strategy and execution. These digital leaders run strategy by experimentation through limited releases and prototyping.
Effective digital strategies prioritize a handful of interventions where the business can exploit significant opportunities, then craft a digitally enabled business model around them. That could mean creating a new way for customers to purchase a product, moving into new businesses, or exploiting competitive advantages such as proprietary data in new ways.
The organizations that can understand and skilfully act on complete customer journeys can reap enormous rewards. Understanding those decision journeys and the fundamentally different ways that customers behave—from evaluating products to bonding with brands—is becoming the cornerstone for successful businesses. With so much data available, companies can become much more precise in their outreach to customers. By combining deep data analysis and ethnographic research, digital leaders can identify high-value micro segments, such as new mothers with full-time jobs who primarily shop online.
Business-process automation can result in massive competitive advantage because initial investments, when well implemented, can scale quickly without substantial additional costs. Over time, cost performance can improve by as much as 90 percent as the automation effort scales across formerly siloed functions, reducing redundant processes.
Digital leaders in fact drive value quickly by focusing on a series of small but important solutions that target high-value customer journeys and expectations (for example, real-time availability and personalized treatment). This is more than just automating an existing process. Becoming digital often requires reinventing the entire business process to cut out steps altogether or reduce the number of documents required.
Automating processes at speed requires small teams employing agile development techniques to continuously build out elements of the product as prototypes, then testing and adapting them based on feedback, often within days or weeks.
Rigid, slow-moving Organizations will lose in the markets. The challenge is to move toward a structure that is agile, flexible, and increasingly collaborative while keeping the rest of the business running smoothly. Successful incumbents become agile by simplifying. They let structure follow strategy and align the organization around their customer objectives. Digital leaders generally have a culture that isn’t afraid of risks, and have a high tolerance for bold initiatives.
Many companies have set up incubators or centers of excellence during the early stages of a digital transformation to cultivate capabilities. The adage “what gets measured gets managed” still holds true. Most successful digital companies are zealous about metrics that focus on the customer journey, such as customer lifetime value, omnichannel behavior, and share of influence across stages of the decision journey.
Most Organizations have been through waves of IT transformation in the past and understand that overhauling legacy architecture is a multiyear process. Yet today’s fluid marketplace requires technology that can drive innovation, automation, and personalization much more quickly. So, the best are moving to a two-speed IT model that enables rapid development of customer-facing programs while evolving core systems designed for stability and high-quality data management more slowly.
This typically means that high-speed IT teams are charged with rapidly iterating software, releasing updates in beta, fixing kinks and bugs in near-real time, then re releasing. Their goal is to continually fuel an accelerated development infrastructure that can support near-instant cross-channel deployment and real-time decision making.
New developments in DevOps (the integration of technical development and operations) and continuous delivery (the automation of testing, deployment, and infrastructure processes) have introduced capabilities that radically increase speed to market and lower costs.
Companies that make extensive use of customer analytics see a 126 percent profit improvement over competitors. Companies that see that kind of return are adept at deciding which data to use (both inside and outside the organization), focusing the analytics on delivering on goals with clear and useful insights, and having the right capabilities and processes in place act on them. That requires people with the right kinds of skills—particularly “translators” who can articulate business goals and use cases with respect to analytics requirements and turn data output into business insights.
Many companies have set up incubators or centers of excellence during the early stages of a digital transformation to cultivate capabilities. The adage “what gets measured gets managed” still holds true. Most successful digital companies are zealous about metrics that focus on the customer journey, such as customer lifetime value, omnichannel behavior, and share of influence across stages of the decision journey.