Digital transformation is poised to penetrate into every vertical of your business. Undergoing what we call a digital metamorphosis, is seldom uncomplicated as it impacts the most important aspect of your business – finding and retaining loyal customers.
Based on our experiences with our clients, here’s what we think is the best advice that you, as a CEO, would need in 2017 on embracing digital transformation:
Related: The digital transformation trends that would dominate 2017
Adopting digital transformation: A CEO’s vision
But first the problem. Today’s CEO faces two critical problems:
Problem 1: Companies look at digital transformation in silos:
Digital transformation is the holistic makeover of your business so that you can attract as well as retain more customers. Most of the businesses today look at digital transformation components in silos. All the principal constituents of digital metamorphosis- the enablers, the platforms, the front end organization, the R&D wing- should team up to break the silos and help penetrate digital into every aspect of business.
Related: 5 Principles for Smooth Digital Transformation
Problem 2: Absence of optimization and customization:
Nearly 60% of searches now happen through mobile devices. Out of the total number of people accessing internet across the globe, around 80% own smartphones, and 61% tend to leave the mobile site if the loading time is high. However, it is not enough that your website is device responsive/ optimized. Users look for more business intelligent interactions. For instance, a healthcare app that reminds you to take your pills, a smart refrigerator that can alert you when to replenish food stocks, or a retail mobile app that can notify you with valuable product combos when you place one item in your shopping cart.
The Solution: Optimize your customer experience
Provide a seamless customer experience through integration of advanced digital technologies like social, mobile, analytics, cloud, IoT, and AI.
“Customer Experience is the undisputable key driver of digital transformation.”
According to the 2016 Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, which surveyed more than 1000 organizations across 81 countries, 78% of them recognized customer experience as the most important board level strategic performance measure.Your interaction with a customer begins at the point where the customer touches your system. For digital transformation to be meaningful and complete, you must be able to deliver a seamless digital experience to your customer across the entire customer lifecycle. A strong integration of various aspects of your businesses- like experiences on web/ cloud/ mobile, your customer relationship management software and presence of a flawless and convenient transaction option- is inevitable for businesses to successfully transform.
How do you go about it?
Step 1: Build strong customer relationships using data
Data is one of the key tools for the CEO. Make provisions for collecting, analyzing and correlating data from multiple touchpoints in order to understand customer expectations and to improve the overall customer experience.
A good customer relationship management (CRM) tool will help them collate such qualitative data and convert them into actionable insights. Business leaders must, thus, use these digital tools to bridge the gap between customer expectation and customer experience. Being in constant touch with your customers and responding proactively to their feedback will not only increase customer engagement, but also cement a strong and lasting relationship with your customer.
Step 2: Provide a stable and consistent experience at every touchpoint
Digital transformation calls for placing the customer at the center of your model and building a comprehensive and consistent experience around them. CEOs must guide their teams to use smart data to deliver personalized shopping/purchasing experience to each customer.
Related: How Digital transformation affects the lifecycle of products and services?
Step 3: Transform the human element first
The effort should be to harness the power of digital tools to encourage convenient buying and increased engagement across various platforms. In fact, although it is being heralded as a ‘digital’ or device-centric transformation, the core idea is to connect humans through this network of devices. So make sure that the transition between digital and human interaction you provide to your customer is fluid enough.
How can Suyati help?
Our digital success stories stand a testament to the strategies that we have implemented in our business successfully. Click here to learn how we transformed the experiences, relationships and transactions of three of our major clients. Click here to read the the second part of the digital transformation advice series for CEOs.