Invest In Technology For Customer Engagement
Digital experience used to be simple. It was your marketing website, a handful of social media platforms, and maybe an e-commerce operation. Then came mobile apps, and APIs, and chatbots, and notifications, and IoT, and so on. Multiply that by number of brands, regions, lines of business, products, and more, and you have hit a level of complexity that is close to breaking many organizations. Digital experience leaders need an organization structure that’s extensible, adaptable, and customer-centric.
To overcome the limitations of traditional ROI models, digital investments need to be analyzed at a more granular level. They need to take into consideration the desired customer outcomes — such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, revenue growth, or Net Promoter Score improvements — and tie the desired operational process improvements to these same customer outcomes.
Transformative digital investments, which tend to be longer-term, have broader implications for business processes across the entire value chain.
Reimagine your business - define your business around your customers, not your products or competitors. The rapid development of technology is making data and software integral to almost all businesses. If you are an incumbent be careful to not ignore the shift in customer needs in response to changes in technology. Customers expect to use a variety of digital touchpoints. Your customers' journeys are no longer linear, as they switch back and forth between different channels. Technological changes requires you to rethink your business model: how you create and capture value. The new players who have entered into established markets have caught many incumbent companies by surprise!
Reevaluate your value chain - Organizations recognize that ecosystems are reshaping enterprises, industries and economies. Not only can ecosystems value chains redefine the way organizations manage and govern business, they facilitate access to new markets and new customer propositions. Incumbent organizations risk missing out on the transformation that is taking place in our increasingly digitalized economy. Digitization is transforming the marginal cost of production of digital products and changing how companies develop products and services, how they organize their internal operations, how they go to market, and how they engage with customers and partners. Move beyond operational process-fixation!
Rebuilding your organization - As you are evaluating business outcome improvements, you need to have a general objective of what you want to achieve. The best thing incumbent companies can do is to make their organization accessible to startups and innovators. Rethink who you hire and how you hire them. The most significant bottleneck in any digital transformation is the company itself - its skills, capabilities and organizational structure. Focusing on internal efficiencies provides a tangible benefit for digital transition. Digital transformation alters business processes, business models, and culture. Digital investments do not simply target hardware or software projects. The impact on processes and culture over the longer-term is much more transformative. Design the organization for innovation!
Think carefully about what investments are necessary to obtain a particular customer benefit. Stay focused on this benefit and do not get side-tracked. As a digital business leader, you can help shape your firm's success by partnering with your CIO to develop a customer-obsessed strategy.
Do you have a digital transformation experience investment story?