Your Digital Transformation Programme Sucks

Every CEO of a brick and mortar company knows they must "do digital" or face extinction at the hands of their fast moving adversary - a technology first start up rapidly disrupting the market in which they operate.

A digital strategy is born and a programme of works commences, perhaps something like this:

• Update the website
• Create some apps
• Engage in SEO, PPC
• Adopt social media
• Procure a new CRM, ERP or whatever else is perceived to offer efficiency gains

The company may see some benefit and maybe the programme is considered successful upon its completion. But while it is viewed through a defensive lens that focuses on how to adopt digital products and practices in order to survive the battle with its online rivals it is an opportunity lost and not particularly transformative or inspiring.

To be transformative digital tools and processes must be used by companies to create and nurture customer relationships in ways which are optimal today, which were not previously possible. Customers should be engaged on their terms while staff should be empowered to work efficiently. 

Digital transformation is not something you do because your company is about to get schooled by a startup fresh out of an accelerator. It is something you do because technological advancement has shifted what is possible allowing you to better serve your customers.

Therefore, don't be defensive. Be bold. Reimagine your business. Identify how digital can support that and then use your unique asset, data, to drive a digital transformation programme that will keep you ahead of those digital first competitors.

If you have concluded that you need a digital transformation programme the chances are you have truck loads of data, so use it. Turn it into insights, let it drive your decision making and use it to deliver tailored customer experiences, optimised allocation of resources and streamlined processes. You should aim to extract value from datasets that currently you might not even know exist - unstructured data in various log files can be a gold mine of intelligence.

As an example, we read daily how offline retailers have taken a battering by their online only counterparts. The standard, and obvious response has been to launch an ecommerce website.

But rather than sit back and watch their high street outlets slowly die and their margins evaporate in online price wars, brick and mortar retailers could be doing so much more.

Dedicated followers of fashion could browse online, but rather than worry about the hassle of returning ill fitting items, they could book a time to try on their clothes or shoes in their local store, no queues, no looking for sizes and no delivery or return delays, straight to the fitting room with the clothes on the rail.

The retailer can tailor this experience. Why not use an AI driven recommendation engine to put some other suggested garments on the shopper's rail to try on? Maybe this could consider data from the user's social engagements on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook to make relevant suggestions, with their permission of course.

Once in store, why not let customers ask a virtual assistant to suggest clothes based on their body shape and size, or hair, eye or skin colour, all of which can be harvested with a camera and turned into data.

Make it an experience, learn what music the customer likes, what refreshment they appreciate or what magazine they enjoy reading while decision making and serve it all up to them. You know you can track how these touches impact on sales conversions to determine how effective they are, right?

But once the customer is ready to buy, don't make them queue for it, let them checkout via their smartphone. Or if they want to think about it, convert their in store selections into an online basket, so they can checkout some other time.

The point is this - a digital transformation programme should reposition your company so that it can engage with customers in the optimal manner given the available technology. It doesn't matter whether you are in retail, banking or some other industry, the rules are the same.

Does your digital transformation programme suck?