Bridging the Digital Gaps with Connected Experience

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As we embark toward social revolution, the foundation of which was laid in the IT revolution during 90' to the early 20s, we still struggle to have an unanswered question at each leadership layer on how much more we have to invest in further to reap the real benefits. If we all take a step back and look at our current IT revolutions, each industry has built successful tech strategies against replacing a tech stack. It has yielded tangible cost and people reduction benefits from a transformation perspective. These benefits undoubtedly have been the fundamental drivers for transitions these last few years, but are we also looking beyond tech stack replacements to address the existing gaps?

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Today, I want to touch on some challenges that hinder a healthy balance between what we invest in and the return on that investment.

The deal way is to view this challenge through a customer or employee lens. Think of an employee who joins an organization, especially the big giants, and is introduced to multiple tools as part of induction. Everything is the new normal for that employee, be it requesting transport, using the payroll app, claiming expenses, or ordering a simple IT accessory. It comes as BAU being a part of that organization. This adoption of familiarity might take weeks to months only because every tool and team are working in silos. Let's talk about the impact now. On average, every industry has at least 12-15% growth and 20-27% attrition, considering four weeks of onboarding for a cost of 1.5m each year of unproductive employment. To overcome this, how do we ensure that all organization users have seamless access to tools to enable productivity on Day 1 or Day 0?

?The recent industry buzzword to address this challenge is "Connected Experience." Simply put, it's about targeting the tech stack of every unit deployed in silos and making them co-exist to create user value. "Connected experience" is not a new concept, and previously multiple design experience principles often recommended it for their design thinking workshops. What went wrong was that a layer of experience with "Just" data integration creates an illusion of fake experience easily prone to breakage, as other system stacks still exist under the bridge.

?As per one of Accenture's research reports, it would probably take less time to answer the question "What isn't a smart, connected product?" rather than asking what is. The question that emerged was how product leaders could build successful next-gen products. This report has identified four operational course corrections that product companies must make to become experience-led businesses.

?Digital Transformation is a major driving force?that can create an overall and consistent experience breaking down silos and combining user experience, customer experience, & employee experience to transform businesses. It enables a platform that does not consider every business unit as an individual wing but focuses on integrating and binding technologies and their capabilities to develop a consistent value addition. Transformation can build two significant results via connected experience: improving employee productivity and enhancing customer experience.

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The journey is more complex than it sounds and requires massive coordination, correlation, communication, innovation, and reality checks at every step. However, to achieve successful transformation outcomes, the system's creator must acknowledge the change before creating a new strategy. Today, the firms are already working toward creating ecosystems and data sources that will allow them to deliver connected experiences. These developments will eventually reach across different market segments and change how users interact with them. The food for thought is - Are we ready to adapt to this change as the creators?

?Approach to deal with challenge

?This first step is a collective exercise that requires the alignment of senior leaders of all functions, as well as the engagement of the wider organization. It starts with a clear, honest appraisal of current employee needs, supported by data as well as by tools and assessments grounded in organizational science. For example, one company wanted to focus on financial performance and customer impact. Looking across all levels of the organization, the company identified leaders in both functions and developed an EX plan to transform how these individuals experienced key moments in their journeys, such as onboarding and their first few months as leaders. This exercise helped the company attract and keep more people who thrived in these roles.

?Step two-Design thinking involves a “discover, design, deliver” cycle that involves a deep understanding of a particular employee journey over a relevant stretch of time. For most product- and customer-service journeys, that cycle is shorter than those of employee journeys—and often only applicable to their main components. For instance, the onboarding journey in a role may take as long as a year to play out completely, longer than a typical product journey. But the process is otherwise remarkably similar.

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Step three-After identifying personas and moments that matter, the final step involves implementing systems that let the organization scale EX—through better data, measurement, systems, and capabilities. While HR is a central partner here, tools and resources are put in the hands of employees and managers to transform their experience. The changes to operating models and performance-management systems are linked to business performance so that organizations can assess financial impact.