3 Essential Steps to Hone Your Digital Transformation Strategy

Digital natives know everything there is to know about delivering responsive, engaging, and convenient customer experiences; the approaches they’ve taken have disrupted industry business models; changing the tempo and leading to the birth of a new breed of digitized company.

When the iPhone was released a decade ago, the mobile phone industry got disrupted, and everything changed. New industries emerged, transforming the way people communicate, do business, and consume media. The end result following iPhone’s release: the demise of Nokia and Blackberry, two companies that got left behind.

“We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” said CEO Stephen Elop when Nokia has been acquired by Microsoft. Doing things by the book is no longer a guaranteed success if your competitors catch the wave and create disruption faster than your business can adapt. So, it’s time to plan and execute your digital transformation strategy today to avoid being replaced by the trends of tomorrow.”

In 2006, a popular online store we know today as Amazon disrupted company models selling software, routers, hardware, and server management solutions when it launched the first set of cloud service solutions. In 2016, Amazon Web Services reported an estimated revenue of $12.2 billion.

In the following lines, we detail the 3 essential steps you need to take to: drive alignment with digitized customer experiences, accelerate change by transforming operational processes, and reconfigure business models to make a difference at a global scale.

Transforming customer experiences
With consumer demands on the rise, new companies are stealing the show with unbiased ideas and strategies aimed at providing outstanding customer experiences. Multichannel architectures and digital channels that empower enhanced salesforce efficiency are revamping the way companies tackle consumer pain points.

Enhanced customer experiences with optimized multi-channel customer service
In today’s cutthroat business context, industries are dealing with a lot of pressure. Striving to provide enhanced customer experiences is becoming a key differentiator in many industries, such as banking, insurance, healthcare, public safety, retail, manufacturing, construction, engineering, and more.

Industries have started to realize that there are benefits associated to switching to a seamless multi-channel business model. To live up to the expectations of the modern consumer, new technologies and pioneering business solutions help you craft a well-defined customer engagement strategy to generate new revenue streams and explore untapped potential.

In the hospitality industry, data is the new “oil”. HotelCo uses disruptive technologies to provide excellent customer service by improving operational efficiencies. The company’s centerpiece is their loyalty program; which adheres to a unique approach to understanding customers before selling them anything.

HotelCo executives leverage the power of technology to foster customer intimacy and improve processes. They optimize customer experience with new technologies like analytics and transactional IT solutions. Property managers can use HotelCo’s digital marketing tools to manage property content. Recently, the company has started paying better attention to mobile and social media marketing.

Optimized multi-channel customer engagement is fundamental when attempting to provide outstanding customer experiences. Banks and financial institutions recognize the importance of catering to the demands of the people. Today’s savvy financial institutions and banks go beyond traditional ATMs and call centers to provide customer service.

Since client preferences have changed, increasingly more people demand for 24-hour accessibility and convenience compelling banks to go digital. BNP Paribas aligns processes at a global scale with internationalization. The international banking group is planning to spend €3bn on digital transformation; aiming to leverage digital assets to improve security and provide cloud solutions to their customers; they also want to craft an end-to-end digitized process and move into mobility; developing a strong, well-defined analytics strategy that supports multi-channel integration.

Amend customer experiences with a digital transformation strategy tailored at the needs of your business
Before settling on a digitized strategy that tackles the main pain points within your customer service department, you should answer yourself the following question: How can I leverage advanced technology to provide scalable, streamlined customer experiences?Every industry is different, and every sector within an industry has its own demands for providing customer support and engagement. Start by addressing real-world challenges, and find a way to provide solutions that cater to the needs of your consumers across the entire spectrum of channels.

In the healthcare industry, for example, there’s a need to use on-line conversion solutions anytime, everywhere and from any device. Pager.com is the perfect example. The online healthcare service connects users to doctors on-demand through their app; the concept of “liquid” customer expectations makes Pager unique.

After gathering a total of $24.4 million from investors, the service provides value by emphasizing on affordability, speed and convenience. Patients no longer have to visit hospitals for expensive treatments, and treatments can be prescribed via online forms (which are sent by the chosen physician to the insurer). Taking about staff shortages (according to the World Health Organization), by 2030 we’ll need to train and deploy 40-50 million new health and social care workers globally), tighter healthcare budgets, the critical importance of data security, privacy and compliance organizations need to redefine the way they work, collaborate on medical records and connect with their patients and build their patient engagement around value-based healthcare.

Transforming operational processes
Using digitization to transform operational processes enables businesses to keep their people more focused on strategic tasks. Process automation streamlines operational processes, reducing labor requirements in a wealth of industries, like healthcare, retail, banking, transportation, manufacturing, telco, and more. As customer expectations evolve and digitization takes the lead, transforming and matching operational processes with the goals of your company enables greater efficiency; reducing costs and boosting ROI.

Leveraging the power of operational analytics and metadata.
Operational analytics makes companies smarter and more productive. Enhancing the quality of your operational processes depends on how robust your data strategy is. Regardless of your industry, you have to make the most of the data you have available; and integrate analytics into your decision-making process. Digitizing processes with automation enables you to regroup and refocus your people on core-business tasks; greatly increasing productivity, time to market and streamlining revenues.

American multinational software corporation Autodesk switched to a SaaS business model after realizing that process automation and integrating mobile apps into their strategy can lead to increased profit margins. With 10+ million users to date, Autodesk aims at leveraging the SaaS model to generate over 70% of their revenues by 2018.

Autodesk felt the need to change in 2011; when it started designing easily-deployable SaaS-platform products. Consumers were eager to adapt and try out cloud-based services because the company was able to increase product features; making tools available across a variety of operating systems and devices.

By putting operational data to good use, you have viable chances of making better decisions; bringing services and products out on the market with a lot more ease; and gaining the insight to surpass the competition in a volatile economic environment. From supporting new growth strategies to transforming the way you work, operational analytics is a fundamental part of your company’s digital transformation strategy. Become a game changer by adhering to a robust, data-driven strategy.

In the current highly competitive business environment the information is the most important resource of organizations, and that, in most cases is found in documents on paper that generate a lot of issues according to studies conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Gartner:

• 60% of the employees spend more than an hour recreating documents that exist already
  One document is multiplied in average by 19 times;
• Professionals spend up to 15% of their time lecturing information, and up to 50% searching it;
• 80% of the total information within a company or institution is contained in documents;
• 7.5% of documents are lost and 3% from the rest are not archived correctly.

Digitally transforming paper based documents and effectively managing business records (store, search and retrieve, navigate and enforce security, view, share, classify, retention, advanced audit), leveraging the associated metadata is key to create structure to otherwise unstructured content that at the moment is over 80% from the entire content generated at global level. An enterprise information governance, archiving and records management solution that will enable companies to protect, reuse and securely share their electronic records while maintaining compliance is essential in the digital age.

Transforming business models
With digital transformation you are not just changing how your company functions; you’re also redefining interaction, changing completely the company culture. Digitization is not only about adopting new technologies; it’s also about making your strategies more agile and restructuring the way you do business. A digitally modified business stays true to traditional models; but leverages advanced technologies to grow; and have a chance at staying competitive among today’s savvy Digirati.

Schneider Electric uses cloud-based solutions to get back in control of their data; and at the same time cut back on costs. The company came up with an idea addressed at the direct needs of the users for mobile access and external collaboration.

After conducting an audit of cloud solutions - emphasizing on key criteria like user-friendliness, universal mobile access, and global document-sharing - the IT department of Schneider Electric founded Box; a cloud-computing solution that makes handling and managing files a lot easier. With the help of cloud technology and Box, Schneider Electric cut back cost by 30%.

With the advent of the cloud, the IoT and advanced mobility, your company’s IT needs must change. By adopting a digital transformation strategy that matches with the demands of your customers, you create disruption; revamping the company culture and having a chance at survival in a talk full of digital sharks. How digitization helps transform today’s core business models?