Digital Transformation:Difficulty for users to achieve tasks and consistent user experience

As I continue with the conversation with the elderly man Kobei Memusi un-bundelling what Digital Transformation is and the impact both positive and negative.

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He gestured as we met and said thanks for the meeting him again. His first question was “why is all of this being done now”, those questions that stop you in your tracks, ponder think and respond. My response was “ as we are transiting from manual process mind-frame to dual format: Digital and brick and mortar, we need to shift our thinking to a culture of striving to offer great digital experience to our customers, ensure we get enough data both on the digital and brick & mortar, ?to understand our clients better, make accurate decisions, be able to transact in the platform world and lastly have a way of moving to more paperless realm with the ability to track.

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For the purposes of the conversation to be had today we will focus on Digital Experience. “ Mzee Kobei, ?If you recall the first foray into the Digital was informational, with websites merely being informational by design, majority of the providers are possibly no longer in the trade of website building.

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Where we are today we have many more digital channels that are transactional: websites, applications, more digitally inclined ATMs, social media including whatsapp chatbots. With different interfaces and channels beyond having a consistent flow where a customer doesn’t have to relearn how to achieve a task it brings in a whole lot of considerations not only for the customer, but also staff whom are supporting the customer, internal, external systems, integrations, requests and transactions in general.

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He stopped me saying “that is a lot to digest, I am a little lost”. So I went back to the Mall example, “ the design of the mall takes into consideration smooth flow of customer journey with the support of signs and staff to guide one’s movement”. The late Clayton Christensen renowned Innovation consultant that created “ the jobs to be done theory: refers to the progress an individual is hoping to make in their life. A “job” is what the person is really seeking to accomplish in a given situation. The idea is that people hire products or services to fulfill a certain job in their lives.” so a customer is renting your product or solutions to do something in their lives, the key word is “renting”, when a user finds another solution that does the job better and more efficient they will move on to rent the new solution. If we look at Sarit Center again you will find shops, supermarkets, eateries and a conference facility mapped out with a flow to cater for the needs to variety of customers, those whom will try to conclude all their activities in one day gym, shop, go to the supermarket and eat, also there those whom are possibly in for a quick meeting in and out of the Mall, with this you will find cafe’s mapped at the corners. It took time to think through a customer journey in the mall.

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So if we use this analogy an organisation will require to do a customer experience, user journey that understands the job a customer intends to do and replicate this in digitally and replicate the same on the various channels a client will access, with these channels there will require to be guides one can access, like chat bots that a sufficiently trained to guide and answer queries and lastly facilitate working with external systems all the time being responsive as customer accesses these services at 1.00 am from different country.

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In the earlier article I mentioned People, process & Technology, so the organisation needs to know that the design teams or external provider is well versed with understanding physical processes and translate the process digitally with a view of creating the most optimal experience while considering thinking and feeling of the user. I pause highlight the role is acronym-ed by CX (Customer Experience). I also will talk about Frameworks, which basic methodologies, one is Design thinking has enterprise consideration which helps capture the process flow encompassing external systems and how they interface and link within a customers journey, design thinking is more of a problem solving framework. When we have this thoughts in place one can use Design sprint methodology developed by google to help design the templates of how the solution will be developed by team of developer (second role: developers of code). If you have external that you engage with the design you will also need an internal resources with the right skill set to evaluate, suggest improvements and manage this new function. With that then this resources will guide for the technology piece to bring this to fruition.

There is need for this team to be aligned with the rest of the Technology teams that manage the piece that will interface and interact with, they will need to get a deep understanding of how these work and to what extent the realm of interaction vis a vie the customer journey, since institutions like banks have multiple systems there is a way of considering standardising this or even adding an additional layer or layers called API’s( Application Programme Interface), which i will discuss at one of our later meetings.

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I sensed he was quiet as I was speaking, I asked “I hope we are still together”, Mzee Kobei said, ”We are still together, I still piecing together”. He also commented, ?“ So when we are complaining that we are paying a lot, their is a lot of work going on in the background”. That defiantly elicited laughter.

“Quickly going back so I do not lose you, there are stages of maturity that we need to consider”, maturity is a really hard thing to say to a person older than you. “So if we go back to the

• ?informational website example we mentioned it is static and delivers a message through a single channel like an email ?
• ?The second level is where you have simple automation to understand where you are and what you are doing on a one to one channel that is still siloed and you pick data points from it
• Deeper understanding that is elevated to to chat bots that will give you information like the sign posts in the mall, data will be picked to understand the customer journey, possibly you can consider web and mobile platforms having a similar look and feel on the pages and under the hood are sharing API’s delivering fast response times.
• The last is Data-driven omni channel where your CX (customer experience)is seamless across all channels and API interfaces are used through the various channels simplifying transactions interface with the underlying systems, through the various channels, to deliver the interactions and transactions with Tracking and harvesting of data that will give insights that can be used for advanced targeting and personalization and also considering performance of the application.

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For organisation to move through theses stages they will need to review their People, process and technology, to attain Data driven phase a lot of underlying technology that supports these various stages needs to architected in the right way and set to achieve these goals. This in reality ends up being a phased approach in single steps like a journey is.

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So as the CX team goes around developing User journeys there is a need to break it down, the journeys, ?consolidate the channels from silos into a simple platform that is know as a Omni-channel ??????????????????????

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