Building and delivering digital transformation for your customers

The customer view

Today, customers can connect to a wealth of information in an instant. They can assess products, make comparisons and purchases and share information thanks to digital technology. Customers base their expectations on the experiences they have with leading disruptive B2C brands. The challenge for companies lies in delivering against these expectations. It cannot however be about delivering at any cost. A cost and experience trade-off needs to be made.

To meet these expectations, companies need to understand their customers' journey today and their pain points. These insights will then inform improvements needed to create an excellent digitally led customer experience. An integrated company-wide digital transformation must connect across front to back office. This joined-up approach allows a company to deliver customer intimacy by exposing all stages of their journey digitally. Identifying insights gleaned from the data throughout the customer journey then allows for customer personalisation at scale.

Why digital transformation fails

Our research shows that 75% of digital transformations fail to deliver the anticipated benefits.

A key factor often overlooked is the important role of employees. Delivering the transformation is heavily reliant on the people in the company. Digital transformation typically requires operating model change and transcends different teams and functions. Therefore we see it as imperative that any digital transformation has an employee change program that embeds the new ways of working. The programme should also drive performance in the organisation. These key elements ensure that the benefits of the digital transformation efforts are fully realised.

The best approach

Undertaking digital transformation to improve the customer experience requires planning across your business. Taking a reactive stance, making changes in a siloed way, or starting with a technology-led approach will not work. Instead, it is important to create a culture and an environment that promotes innovation and disruption. This will enable your business to transform how it operates while remaining relevant to customers.

When it comes to execution, incremental transformation is best. Tackling the digital transformation in digestible chunks sets the organisation up for success. Remember this is a journey, a collection of changes that together moves a company toward achieving its vision.

When executing digital transformation it is important to bring together multiple perspectives to solve the challenges on the journey. Our BxT (Business, Experience, Technology) approach unites the often fragmented viewpoints of business, experience and technology. This allows everyone to focus on a single purpose and solution. The Business perspective focuses on the changes required to shift the way an organisation operates and generates profit. The Experience perspective looks at the human-physical-virtual interface required to create a relevant and engaging customer experience. The Technology perspective brings the tech required to enable and deliver the new solution.

When everyone gets together to consider the problem, we create transformational solutions. And it's these solutions that create competitive advantage and increase profits.