The business world has gone digital. With benefits like more collaboration among teams and between organizations, better customer engagement, increased employee productivity and innovation, and superior insights from data, the benefits are quite vast. Is your organization already embracing digital transformation?
The Benefits of Digital Transformation
Evolving Customer Experience
Customer experience is at the very heart of any digital business. Customers are always on the lookout for valuable and easy solutions to their problems and they want it fast. Organizations are increasingly aware of this, with plenty of time and effort being dedicated to creating layered digital transformation strategies, to enhance their customer’s experience.
Data-based Insights
Digital technology enables easy and accurate tracking of metrics and improves transparency. These insights allow businesses to optimize processes for better results. Such data-driven insights help understand customers better, improves business strategies, help with better decision-making, and lays the foundation to achieve higher RoI.
Collaboration like Never Before
Digital transformation paves the way for organizations to analyze inefficiencies in processes. It also enables open communication among the different stakeholders. It offers an excellent opportunity for leaders to set organizational goals and create roadmaps for individuals and teams, to achieve a state of digital congruence.
Enhanced Profitability, Agility, and Innovation
When the operations of an organization are digitalized, it leads to better savings and increased sales. Digital transformation is intrinsically linked to reducing manual interventions, making processes faster and error-free. This fosters agility and innovation in meeting customer demands.
COVID has Accelerated Digital Transformation
One significant business consequence of COVID has been that organizations have had a glimpse of a possible future without physical customers and physical stores. This has led to existing transformation programs being sped up and new ones being put in place. According to Dell’s Digital Transformation Index 2020, which surveyed more than 4000 business leaders across the world, 80 of all organizations prioritized their digital transformation programs in 2020.
A big part of the new normal that we talk about so much, is the fact that people have turned to digital channels for almost every aspect of their lives. Consumers will keep shopping online and have created new digital habits for themselves. Their expectations are much more than the experience they were used to in pre-COVID times. And of course, remote working is here to stay. What better time to reset your understanding of your customer. What better opportunity to think big and pivot your business model to match digital expectations.
How do you Approach Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation for businesses relies on the core principles of business design, lean-startup thinking, customer centricity, agile best practices, as well as the more classic approaches to change management. We adopted this approach to launch Foodl, the first open food marketplace in the Netherlands. A holistic approach can help give your digital transformation efforts the best chance of succeeding. Here’s a quick checklist for you:
Make sure you have a strong partner with a holistic understanding of your specific business context. Get in touch to find out how we can tailor digital transformation to your business.
Digital Transformation and Culture Change
You can digitalize all the processes, policies, and technologies you want. But without the buy-in of your team, lasting change will remain elusive. It’s important to start with a shared vision and purpose for your digital transformation initiative. By fostering a culture where employees’ contributions are valued, you’ll be able to use culture to drive digital transformation. Here’s our rule of thumb:
Define your Digital Values
Interpret what digital transformation specifically means for your culture and how it can be incorporated into your day-to-day, beyond just an improvement in technology and process.
Transparency is Key
Communicate clearly and create a culture of transparency. Regular townhalls and articles from leadership will communicate authenticity and build rapport, creating a culture of ownership.
The 5 P’s of Digital Culture
Tailoring the 5 P’s of Philosophy, Process, People, Policies, and Programs to your digital transformation initiative will help in homogenizing your company culture across geographies.
Let the change be organic. Share your vision of what can be achieved so that your team understands how crucial digital transformation is. Use digital channels to reinforce your message and get your team excited. Include your team in decision-making and seek feedback from them on what makes sense and what doesn’t. This creates a culture of trust and empowerment and involves your entire organization in the success of your digital transformation efforts. And take pains to remove barriers across teams and technology. Every member of your team has their own touchpoint in the digital business model and the customer journey. Assume the role of an enabler in making these touchpoints memorable.
Author
Markus Tillmann
Executive Vice President
