The Missing Piece of Your Digital Transformation: Digital Ops and CX

The phrase “digital transformation” is everywhere, and there’s a reason for it. Companies that have succeeded in the digital transformation emerge stronger, faster, and smarter than their peers and their competitors and are prepared for a sustainable future.

However, more than 70% of digital transformations fail.

In this issue, we’ll get into why the failure rate is so high. Companies are missing a key piece to digital transformation—perhaps the most important piece, and the most difficult: a digital operations and customer experience (DOCX) platform.

This sounds complicated, but it's an essential step to #DigitalTransformation that the vast majority of companies fail to take. This step involves the creation of an enterprise-wide operating system that enables all product, services, and business and operations support systems to connect to, and communicate with each other.

We’ll be referencing this paper by George Humphrey, TSIA's VP and Managing Director of Service and Delivery Research, which also appears as an appendix in our book, Digital Hesitation.?

This step to digital transformation is often avoided because it's not easy—it's very hard. But, as George Humphrey says,

“The harder thing is almost always the right thing to do.”

Complexity Kills

This is a key assertion made in Digital Hesitation . Complexity is silently killing #B2B companies today; and the worst part is—the company may not even be aware of it.

Any company can say, “We’re obsessed with customer experience.” But in practice, commitment to CX often falls short. Why? Many companies only look at CX from the customer interface level, and they miss the underlying operational complexity that, ultimately, affects the customer.

Companies may make the mistake of adding new features, features they believe customers want. But the truth is, it’s not about features.

Often, these features add complexity to customer experience where it may not be needed. There’s a misconception that features add value, by adding to the #CustomerExperience—but maybe we don’t need to add anything to the customer’s plate.?

Perhaps these features only contribute to “The Complexity Avalanche ” and the consumption gap.

“Nobody cares about features if they make it harder to do business with you or harder to operate.” [George Humphrey]

Perhaps we need to pause thinking about features and start thinking about experiences. Looking at the most successful CX-focused companies of today, such as Apple, Disney, McDonald’s, Amazon—they have completely solved for complexity.

#CX truly starts within your operations. When the company is operating within disparate systems, the end result will be a complex experience—not only for your customers, but for your employees and partners as well.

“The next killer feature is simplicity. But, it’s going to require a massive rethinking of your business.” [ J.B. Wood ]

The Problem

Tech companies love silos. People, in all levels and departments of the company, let systems get out of control. The main issues affecting operational complexity in the B2B tech companies of today are:

• Departments operate within silos.
• Manual processes are still widespread; data is still kept within Excel spreadsheets.
• Data from different departments is put into disparate systems.?

Sound familiar? These are all common problems.

For example, Customer Success might operate in Gainsight, which stores their customer and revenue data. But Sales is putting their revenue data in Salesforce, where they operate. Finance uses Excel spreadsheets to store revenue data—yet another system, a manual system that leaves room for human error. Revenue data, extremely important data, now exists in silos.?

And that’s just one example. Revenue data isn’t the only thing stored in different systems. Documents, customer data, opportunities… it’s spread out across the company. So what do we do about it?

Some people think it’s the CIO’s problem, because it’s an information systems problem, or the CTO’s problem, because it’s a technology problem, or is it a COO problem??

It’s a CEO problem. It’s a company-wide problem, and if the CEO doesn’t own it, it won’t work. Even if someone else tries, they’re only fixing part of the problem, because they don’t own the company. They own their silo.?

This is why at least 70% of digital transformations fail. No one thinks it’s their problem, and we continue to fund our silos.?

The Solution

We need to develop the digital capabilities to get customers the experience we want them to have, and we can’t do that when we are operating within disparate systems.

We must centralize information and systems into a unified digital operations and customer experience (DOCX) platform. This approach allows departments to keep their silos, but unify and translate the information into one foundation that they are all connected to.

“If you are truly committed to customer experience, then you don’t have a choice but to do this.” [George Humphrey]

This paper by George Humphrey explains the necessary steps to simplifying digital operations and customer experience.

He recommends taking three key steps:

1. Take a complete inventory of every system generating data today.

2. Route and map data into a data warehouse via application programming interfaces (APIs.)

4. Implement data science mapped to business requirements leveraging data ontology, which connects the data to the business results you want to drive.

When your data is clean and unified, your company becomes exponentially more powerful.?

“Whoever owns the data, owns the customer. Whoever masters data, increases growth, productivity, profitability, and retention.” [J.B. Wood]

In the end, the solution comes down to a company’s philosophy. This problem can only be solved with a unified approach, support from the CEO down, and a true dedication to great customer experience.

If you're ready to make waves at your company, we invite your team to TSIA World INTERACT , May 8-10, an immersive digital transformation experience for tech executives driving global change.

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