Map Your Customer’s Journey With Digital Transformation

Enterprises are rapidly transforming their businesses into a digital business. They are now in a competition to offer unique customer value concepts and products, break the stereotype business models with the new kind of potential and engaging different organizational designs. In a Gartner’s report, GE a multinational conglomerate company has said, “it will become a digital industrial company — developing on software and analytics to transform its customer value proposition and become a significant ($20 billion) annual revenue source.”

As the digital experience has eased the complexity, customer experiences have become the priority for all digital leaders. Customers’ expectations have revamped and this is the major reason behind the digital transformation. Encompassing customer experience in all the top strategies of enterprises, oblige digital leaders to empathize, identify each customer persona and their journeys, and embrace design thinking that boosts customer experience. Ford an American multinational automaker company has started investing hugely in technologies and target fully autonomous vehicles for use in ride-hailing and sharing models by 2022.

Redefining the Customer Experience Journey

In the coming future pricing will no longer be an issue, the wrangle will be on who delivers the best customer experience. Survey says, 44% of business leaders desire to improve the customer experience as a key foundational element of their digital transformation. It has become a priority investment for an enterprise to enhance their upshot systems with effortless engagement processes to deliver continuous and better experience. This helps an enterprise to be more enthusiastic and more approachable. It is very essential for an organization to know their audiences and at the same time it should be able to manage the experience in the entire customer journey.

Digital transformation has touched and reshaped every aspect of a business today. The profound transformation became vital for all enterprises, be it retail, healthcare, manufacturing, automation or the infrastructure that enables a reliable web throughout an organization. Offering a great digital experience to customers requires a network that facilitates real-time seamless collaboration with the aim to deliver flawless customer experience.

According to Forrester’s Prediction 2017, “Digital Transformation: In 2017”, digital business professionals will accelerate work to break down the silos between web, mobile app, and offline engagement. Omnichannel retail experiences like digital stores or click-and-collect, app+ strategies that transform smartphones into control panels for cars and home security systems, and wearables that feed health data to insurance firms will become increasingly mainstream, cross-touchpoint customer experiences.”

Digital Transformation Challenges

Well, it’s not easy to transform any business into digital. Digital transformation cannot be done overnight. Enterprises will have to take more substantial steps. The transformation will require more advanced steps, new strategies, ownership, finances, and so much more. Forrester analyzed if enterprises are yet to adopt customer journey mapping, this is the best time. All the c-suites need to focus on the role of each touchpoint in a wider customer journey and loyalty experience. They need to blur the boundaries between the web and apps, and find out multiple sources to reach the target audience by sending them notifications, messages, and connected devices and shift from product-centric to customer-centric.

Change equals pain: In any organization, only 20% of employees are willing for change. They are up for new challenges and always excited about learning new things. Change keeps motivating them. On the other hand, the rest 80% of employees think change equals pain. For them changes mean uncertainty. Once they find their comfort zone they are less willing to come out and let the good thing going. Encountering digital transformation is the paragon of inconvenience, the reason why 80% of employees say no to organizational change.

However, change is essential. For an enterprise’s long run in this digital era, change is required because if it fails to do so then soon it will bury like Kodak who designed the digital camera but was resistant to change. It becomes the responsibility of the digital leaders to ease their employees with consistency and transparency. Employees should know what they are doing and what is expected and involve them through the entire business process.

Creating a clear vision for the digital transformation journey: Enterprises who were able to successfully transform into digital business had a solid strategy. They had a clear vision of how to set goals, their customers’ expectations, what they want or need as they grow in the digital era.

The Digital Transformation journey needs digital leaders to take prompt action along with an absolute strategy for continuous enhancement down the road. Building a clear transformation vision is a key to drive successful digital transformation organization-wide.

Experts to Implement Digitization strategies: Emerging technologies have made it essential for an enterprise to see if they have right people in place to gather and leverage customers’ data. There are billions of customer interactions data out in the market, and the company must have a clear system to pull them together in order to transform their customer experience. So this needs experts who have the ability to bring the most effective way to gather and store customers’ data and make it accessible to everyone when needed via any touchpoint.

Tina Nunno, a research vice president at Gartner, said, “the secret to digital is analog and by analog, we mean people. It is about augmenting the people you already have and modernizing your talent for scale. There has been a 60% growth in technology skills required for non-IT roles in the past four years. Talents like being a customer empath, a skilled mentor, a process hacker and an app savant will all require a rich blend of digital and analog competencies at a broader workplace.”

Customer experience is one thing that helps the enterprise to successfully drive digital transformation and separate from the others. Although there are many challenges as ‘Digital disruption’ is omnipresent, it continues to accelerate, and explore new business models and technologies. These competitive pressures are pushing all digital leaders to smartly invest in the emerging digital transformation and put their focus on which business model to practice and how to connect their traditional methods with new digital capabilities to provide agility and surpassing experiences.