All businesses today are affected by rapid advancements in technology, increased mobile adoption, and evolving customer expectations. These trends have created a need for organizations to take a fresh look at their business strategies and review all aspects through a digital lens. Here are 16 ways you can start to digitally transformation your organization.
STRATEGY & GOALS
- Create a formalized digital roadmap
- Look to create a small digital team internally. Have some white board sessions to brainstorm ways to digitize the business. Prioritize and select the most impactful quick win as your first project to tackle. From there, prove the model internally before asking for more time and budget.
- Set formal Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your digital strategy so you know what will drive ultimate success
- Create a business driven whiteboard session with key stakeholders that have P&L responsibilities within a business unit. The outcome should focus on creating a list of top 5 metrics that will have the most impact on your business meeting its growth and profit goals.
- Put your customer at the center of all your strategies. Customer can mean end consumer, internal employee or customer, or client
- Start with creating a strategy. This requires help from internal resources with digital transformation knowledge.
- If you are not treating your customers well and delighting them at all touch points from pre-sales to POS to support, you will likely end up chasing your competition and playing catch-up in the future. Customer today expect to do things their way, through their desired interaction channels, with very low friction.
- Establish executive support
- Starting at the CEO-level, it is important to recognize the influence digital transformation will have on your company’s success over the next 5 years. Make sure there is someone on your executive team who owns digital transformation for the entire organization.
INTERNAL CULTURE & PROCESSESS
- Digitize/automate most or all of your transactions between you and your partners/supply chain
- Look to automate higher volume interactions and transactions with your key partners or clients if they currently require manual work.
- Create a culture of digital innovation where you don’t run into many internal barriers to get stakeholders to buy in to implementing digital changes
- Innovation will only work when woven into the fabric of a company’s culture. Work with a Change Management group to create a safe environment that motivates staff to innovate.
- When developing new systems and capabilities, look to deliver them from a mobile-first perspective
- On your next website or mobile app project, start by creating a mobile UI and Mobile Journey Map. Then move into Tablet and create the desktop version last.
- Ensure your internal processes are efficient and based on automation using technology
- Look for people running manual reports, sending reminders via e-mail, creating spreadsheets and manually manipulating data for reports. Those are all areas to automate. Look for natural trigger points to implement rules and logic to kick off automated transactions.
- Dedicate resources to Organizational Change Management (OCM)
- Change in most organizations is very hard and met with a lot of resistance. Get OCM buy-in at the highest-level first (typically CEO-level) and assign dedicated senior leaders to own. Drive the group by identifying an enterprise-wide project where groups are working in silos. Emphasize transparency, urgency, teamwork and the benefits to fostering an environment of change.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
- Create your marketing strategy with a digital-first mindset
- Marketing departments today are getting a larger piece of the financial pie each year, which is putting pressure on IT.
- Research how much your traditional (Print, TV, Radio, mail) marketing budgets versus what your digital marketing budgets are. Try getting small budgets for digital marketing to test and prove out model.
- Solicit feedback from your end customers on how well you handled their interaction with your company
- Create a survey or implement a Net Promotor Score process into your customer touch points.
- Create customer loyalty programs to build brand affinity
- Look for how competitors are handling loyalty. Create a strategy to execute and build a loyalty program.
- Make loyalty programs the primary focus of your sales and marketing strategy for retention
- As you personalize your targeted marketing, put marketing loyalty at the forefront of that strategy to help build brand affinity and retention.
- Personalize communications for your customers
- Today’s customers expect to be pushed important information at the right time, via their preferred device and communication channel (mobile, tablet, desktop, SMS, eMail, etc). For example, if you have a service call for someone who is coming to your home for a scheduled repair, it is considered best practice to push either an SMS text or an automated outbound phone call to your customer to tell them a service person is on their way and giving them an ETA.
- To personalize your communications and marketing, you need to research what data elements you store at the personal level that can be leveraged. Create a marketing and communications plan to utilize your big data elements.
- Track each consumer uniquely
- Do some investigation with your data and analytics groups to find out what data you currently track. If you find gaps in your ability to dedupe and link disparate data inputs to a unique customer, then queue up a gap analysis internally so that it can be more clearly understood what changes will give you a 360-degree look at your customer.
- Invest in a campaign management system
- If you need to develop a marketing campaign, seek an outside Digital Consultant to help you create a plan.
I realize some of these ways are more challenging than others. However, it is imperative to start moving the needle in a digital direction. Keep looking for ways to have quick digital wins or incrementally shift your processes and culture to a digital-first mindset.