“Digitization is an opportunity and not a risk to guard against”.
To switch to a business model that’s truly digital, a major revamp of technologies used, organizational structure, data models, measurement frameworks, and operating models is required. Moreover, it’s ongoing. Despite the challenges, businesses are increasingly finding it imperative to engage digitally with their key stakeholders, suppliers, partners, employees and customers. Business are moving towards digitization because if they don’t, the competition will disrupt their business model.
Digitization has several other benefits too, including, but not limited to the following:
- It helps guide the activities and resource allocation needed to give customers a great experience
- It help companies cut costs and improve turnaround times by several orders of magnitude
- When incorporated with data mining, it empowers companies to look for problems early and best deal with them
How Digitization is Helping Companies - Some Examples!
IT has become the major component of the success of “born digital” companies such as Amazon and eBay, giving them a clear advantage over their traditional counterparts. So many others are taking the leap for reasons, discussed below.
To Build Brand Strategy
Australia Post has built a new center for the digital delivery of mobile and online products and services after allocation of A$2 billion to pursue a digital strategy and tap into new revenue sources
For Agility
Singapore’s DBS Bank has rolled out 19 mobile apps covering its various services that allows customers to use smartphones to make payments and send and receive funds.
To Enhance Customer Experience
GrabTaxi, a Malaysian transport startup, has launched a location-based app to help people book a cab ride. The app allows taxi drivers to provide a geolocation service, and an integrated back-end payment system. It also allows family members to track a user’s ride and maintain a driver rating system and all this to enhance customer satisfaction during peak traffic.
Capability Assessment
Having realized the huge significance that digitization of customer experience and operations has to play in the modern era, if you are not digitally-ready - determine your state of digital readiness and start your journey - NOW.
The starting point is a structured approach to assessing your digital maturity based on the ‘big picture’ of what digital engagement means to the business and to go about integrating the two sides of a digital strategy: digital customer experience and digital operational excellence.
For Digital Customer Experience
#Start with brand strategy & properly define it
For every digital channel, incorporate the mission and value proposition of the brand to translate top-level business objectives into an actionable plan. Call out those aspects of customer experience that are most critical to your company's aspirations for differentiating itself.
#Start activities and processes that support the defined experience
Start performing a different set of activities or the same activities differently to combat competition. Adopting a partnership-driven mindset would work well rather than building everything on your own.
#Guide digital channel investments
Prioritize investments in interactions that fulfil the brand promise and avoid wasting money on chasing new shiny digital capabilities. It is best advised to make informed decisions and chase only those features that might work for your company.
For Operational Excellence
Operational excellence leads to a low-price offer for the market and helps build customer intimacy – a strong emotional bond with your customers by providing the best possible service. It is important for the long-term success of any business.
- Review and map your processes (new product/service development, sales and customer relationship management, operations, etc.) in detail and infuse a digital process plan to enable better decision making, performance tracking, and capture customer insights.
- Scan the market for tested and ready-to-implement technologies that have established tangible proof of success.
- Simply automating the existing processes won’t help. So, cut the number of steps required, reduce the number of documents and develop automated decision making.
- Give employees access to digital processes and machines that help them do their jobs better, smarter and with more meaningful impact to the business – in a way re-engineer IT.
Conclusion
A few years ago, digitization meant an IT support team and at the best having a website for the business. But today, it is like a cohesive strategy that treats all digital channels as core to delivering, meeting and exceeding customer expectations via a more thoughtful approach that considers the entire customer journey.
In context of businesses, meaning of digitization has changed and is evolving. Don't wait friends, catch up quickly!
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