The importance of a Digital Transformation Plan to Improve Customer Experience
Whether you run a large, medium, or small enterprise, your chances of survival in this very competitive global market, is digital transformation. The reason is not far-fetched; according to a report, 77.3% of CIOs interviewed revealed that digital transformation is their top priority.
Going by that, it means that if you are not on the digital transformation trail, your brand will end up being irrelevant. Your products and your services are almost useless if customers don’t patronize you, and that largely depends on what their experiences are about your brand.
It’s not enough to embark on digital transformation projects, if you actually want to improve customers’ experience and ultimately your ROI, you need to have a digital transformation plan. Digital transformation means that you will have to introduce a lot of changes to your business model, and that is not something you just wake up one day and initiate.
It affects your overall vision, the brand’s culture, sales and marketing processes, and IT infrastructure and operations. An attempt at digital transformation does not come easy, you must align your digital transformation strategy to the strategies you had in place and enforce the enabling digital transformation technologies.
Why must you embark on digital transformation?
The sole reason for any brand to embark on digital transformation is to have a competitive advantage. You need to survive, enhance customer experience, improve operational efficiency, increase your ratings, increase ROI, increase customer retention, eliminate churn, and convert new customers. If, therefore, you refuse to embrace digital transformation, you are on a sore foot.
Though digital transformation has been around for some time, the COVID-19 pandemic made a strong case for it. What we have now is more employees working remotely, and even customers do most of their purchases online.
It has become expedient that brands must transform to meet up with these new changes. The better you plan for digital transformation migration, the more opportunity you have of positioning your brand to fit into new market trends faster and more successfully.
Knowing where to start
Digital transformation will greatly impact your organization as well as your customers, so it’s not something you just dabble into. You must have a strategy in place, this is more like your roadmap or blueprint.
You must know where to start. There is the need to carry out researches and analysis to understand how positively the transformation will impact your organization, what you stand to gain, and how customers will eventually react.
There is a great need for total collaboration, the senior management level has a lot to contribute, finance has to be made available, cultural and operational views will drastically change for a successful digital transformation program.
Any digital transformation program that will be successful must leverage both technology and people for an improved customer experience (CX); by doing this, you stand the chance of ensuring that your brand reaps some tangible benefits. You must understand from the onset that digital transformation does not come easy and be prepared for the difficulties you’ll encounter.
It’s good to plan for your digital transformation projects, but it’s best to have a good plan. What are the necessary steps you need to ensure you have the best plan?
1. Careful examination, research, inspections, and analysis
This is the time when you need to compose the digital transformation team; the team will go ahead to gather the necessary data that will give it insights into how your business operates. Some information the team will glimpse from this data includes the resources you use to run your business such as infrastructure, available skills, processes, and technology.
There will be the need for the team to review any corporate strategic plan you have in place, and it should verify the level of accomplishment of your IT strategic plans. Documents that stipulated the brand’s policy and procedure, organizational charts, and anything that can give a clear picture of how the organization operates will be useful to the team to come up with a digital transformation plan.
The team needs the collaboration of key personnel who have valuable insights into how the organization operates for data that will help in the execution of its task, these include senior executives, division leaders, department heads, and subject-matter experts.
2. Formulate digital transformation strategy
The whole idea is to find out how the brand will improve customer experience, and embarking on digital transformation without a clearly spelled out strategy will be an exercise in futility. The team will now use the data it gathered to formulate a digital transformation strategy.
While embarking on this task, there is the need to collect inputs from the senior level managers and other employees. The strategy will describe what the brand wants to achieve at the end of the project and how to achieve it.
The strategy the team will come up with will define the technologies that should be employed, the migration process, parallel activities such as employee training and technology infrastructure modifications, and other relevant activities that may be useful.
3. Secure approval for funding
Funding is central to the success of any digital transformation project; the team must understand the need to gain the approval of senior management, as this will facilitate any effort at securing funding.
The senior management may want to understand all the intricate parts of the plan, hence the team must prepare a comprehensive breakdown of necessary systems and technologies, network resources, and what migration activities are essential for a successful outcome.
It should also include new technologies, upgrades of existing systems, new apps, and specialized systems such as the integration of AI and machine learning, internal and external expertise, alterations to physical facilities to fit in with new components, and any other necessary input that will make the digital transformation project a success.
If all these have been put together, the next stage is to present the project to the senior management for final approval and launching. The fact that the project has been launched does not mean everything has come to a stop, there is the need to constantly monitor the sentiments of your customers about the project and innovations you have introduced.
When customers are satisfied, you have a big chance of turning them into brand loyalists. You can measure their degree of loyalty and satisfaction towards your innovation by using the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
