Everyone is mobile, everyone is social. It’s easier than ever to switch to a competitor. At the same time, devices are increasingly connected. It’s a whole new world where the customer has control. Having a deep understanding of customers and being able to create a compelling experience is critical to any Organization’s business strategy. In fact, by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Forty percent of workers’ productivity time is lost when switching tasks, costing the global economy $450 billion per year. While many companies have begun to automate business processes, they have yet to embed productivity tools directly into business processes to save time and increase employee productivity.
New technology is not only enabling new business models but also enabling them at a much faster rate than ever before. To be successful and capture new revenue opportunities, your people and processes must respond with speed and agility to changes in the market. Recent research shows that organizations embracing digital transformation generate an average of $100 million (or 8 percentage points) more operating income each year than those who lag behind.
Digital transformation is not simply about technology, it’s a business strategy that requires organizations to re-envision existing business models and embrace a different way of bringing together people, data, and processes. The goal of digital transformation is to create value for your customers and capture new opportunities for your organization. Digital transformation means re-envisioning how you:
Along with their value chain. As they reinvent to connect and engage with the customer in new ways, an organization will also need to transform how it empowers employees. Empowered employees will help drive optimized operations and processes and lead to organizations to transform products and services.
With the rise of mobile and social technologies, customers are now more powerful than ever. Their always-connected status and ability to find information in seconds puts them in control of their own experience, and this trend has forced organizations and businesses of all sizes to rethink how they engage and connect with their customers. We now need to engage in meaningful, ongoing relationships that involve frequent online and real-world interaction.
Customer engagement starts by understanding customer behavior. Intelligence plays a critical role in understanding and dissecting massive amounts of data to recognize patterns of sentiment and behavior across our customer base. The roadmap for digital-first business translates into these key priorities:
1. Build the infrastructure to enable customer engagement, such as telemetry, a 360-degree view of the customer, and modern commerce systems.
2. Drive viral find, try and buy opportunities that help cross-sell and upsell, and build these capabilities into our product services.
3. Ensure core services are API-enabled to allow simpler integration
Organizations can’t digitally transform unless their people do. Digitization and automation are outpacing organizations’ skill level and the workforce’s ability to become proficient with new technologies. Eighty percent of organizations agree the difference between current workforce skills and future business requirements is very real. To ensure trend doesn’t disrupt an organization’s health, IT Leaders are introducing digital literacy strategies and increasing employee engagement with new technology rollouts.
The internet of Things (IoT) is accelerating technology disruption at a rapid pace when it comes to optimizing your operations. For example, field equipment once isolated and siloed, can now be connected on a continuous basis-enabling business to shift from merely reacting to events, to responding in real-time or even preemptively.
As we think through the application of these capabilities, they hold the potential to reshape relationships with customers by supporting unprecedented levels of service –service that is able to be improved continuously by gathering data across a wide, dispersed set of endpoints, drawing insights through advanced analytics and then applying those learnings to introduce improvements on a continuous basis. Arguably this is something software companies have done historically, but now organizations across a breadth of industries can take the same approach and tap into new efficiencies, such as applying machine learning to anticipate and solve customer issues before they become issues.
Digital technology now allows businesses to move at incredible speed and accelerate the responsiveness to uncover issues and inefficiencies, predict what will happen, and then adjust as needed.
The opportunity to embed software and technology directly into products and services is evolving how organizations deliver value, enabling new business models and disrupting established markets.
By making customers your business partner, you can try to understand where your business interests intersect with your customers in a digital-first world. This can help find opportunities that increase your access to new markets while decreasing technology and security risk.
Every organization and company is becoming a data company. We need to create connected services and generate insights to see what can be monetized to unlock new business models.