Building Blocks for Digital Transformation

69% of decision makers use social media for purchase decisions. 90% of buyers trust peer recommendations. 94% of B2B buyers conduct online research before making a purchase. Companies like Amazon and Alibaba continue to raise the bar, forcing every company to rethink its digital strategy. Companies such as Airbnb and VRBO continue to wreak havoc in the hotel industry and threaten to disintermediate additional industries. Uber and Lyft have transformed the taxi industry using powerful digital tools.

89% of executives say that digitization will disrupt their businesses. Yet less than one-third of these executives believe that their digital strategies are correct, and only 21 % believe that the right people are setting their digital strategies. What is causing this disconnect, and why are so many digital transformation projects underperforming or failing?

Executives are still not sure how best to tackle digital transformation. They do not have the right road map to drive digital transformation success. And they are falling short in one or more of these five building blocks:

CRM

At the core of every successful digital transformation are holistic customer profiles that get leveraged at each step of the transformation. Most companies need to spend more time, money, and effort to create truly holistic customer profiles that integrate transactional, CRM, and third-party data and that integrate both offline and online customer information using identity resolution tools. 

The shortfall is not the technology component: Most CRM software vendors have the tools, including artificial intelligence (AI) and process automation tools, to create these profiles. The shortfall is in leveraging a structured business process to create these profiles, i.e., what information really needs to be collected and to keep these profiles clean and useful over time.

Data and analytics

Data-driven decision making has become a requirement for effective digital transformation. Successful companies perpetually data-mine their holistic customer profiles to gain customer insights. They also leverage data and analytics processes and tools to enhance customer profiling and segmentation, to achieve insights into customer life cycles and journey maps, to target lead scoring and routing, to achieve better forecasting and cross-selling, to model customer behaviors for more effective marketing campaigns, and more.

Social Media

Customers expect to be able to communicate with organizations digitally. They expect 24/7 customer support. Social media communities address these requirements by helping to maintain and increase the kind of customer engagement and interaction that drives customer acquisition and retention. 

They provide members with an online, private platform with a corporate URL, accessible from work and available 24/7, helping to drive customer satisfaction. They reinforce product/industry leadership and expertise, which creates long-term competitive advantage. They are a company’s best lead nurturing tool. Most importantly, social media communities allow a company to listen to the voice of the customer, which is a key component of successful digital transformation.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement, especially cross-channel customer journey mapping, omnichannel management, customer experience management, and customer success programs are very important. Effective customer engagement shortens sales cycles, increases customer spending, lowers customer churn, increases brand awareness, and secures higher customer loyalty and advocacy. 

To achieve these benefits and to secure digital customer engagement, companies increasingly are using videos, content sharing, chatbots with conversational AI, and robotic process automation tools in their digital transformation efforts.

Emerging technologies

The list of emerging technologies is long and growing all the time, and it currently includes these: mobile apps/technology, identity resolution, virtual and augmented reality, AI and machine learning, personalized digital videos, digital portals, wearables, addressable TV, the Internet of Things, and blockchain. 

These digital technologies provide new ways to capture customer knowledge and insight, enhance data integration and dissemination across channels, digitally connect and collaborate with customers, create better products and services, help shorten the sale cycle, drive down operational costs, and stay one step ahead of the competition. A sound digital transformation includes multiple emerging-technology pilots.

Every company’s digital transformation needs to be based on an integrated framework where individual projects connect and feed each other, e.g., leveraging data and analytics as a foundational platform to analyze and provide insights used in social media communities, CRM, and customer engagement; leveraging customer journey mapping and customer experience surveys to feed holistic customer profiles; leveraging emerging technologies like AI in CRM systems to provide next-best-action recommendations for individual clients, and so on.

In other words, an effective digital transformation strategy pulls together all of these components. Successful companies tackle digital transformation by implementing these components in bite-size chunks, supported by a long-term road map that focuses as much on people and process issues as technology.

The result of a successful digital transformation strategy? More satisfied, engaged, and loyal customers who purchase and then advocate for your company’s products and services, which provides the type of sustainable competitive differentiation that companies like Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber thrive on. 

Is your company’s digital transformation ready for prime time? If not, please contact us for a free consultation.

Mastering Fractured Data

Data complexity in companies can be a big obstacle to achieve efficient operations and excellent customer service.

Companies are broken down into various departments. They have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of employees performing various tasks. Adding to the complexity, customer information is stored in so many different applications that wide gaps exist among data sources. Bridging those gaps so every employee in the organization has a consistent view of data is possible and necessary.

Various applications collect customer information in different ways. For example, CRM solutions focus on process management and not on data management.

Consequently, customer data is entered into numerous autonomous systems that were not designed to talk to one another. Client data is housed one way in a sales application, another way in an inventory system, and yet another way in contact center systems.

Other organizational factors further splinter the data, which can vary depending on the products in which a customer is interested, where the product resides, and who (the company or a partner) delivers it.

In addition, information is entered in various ways, including manually, either by the customer or an employee, or via voice recognition. And applications store the information in unique ways. One system might limit the field for customers’ last names to 16 characters while another could allow for 64 characters.

The challenge is further exacerbated by software design and vendors’ focus. CRM vendors concentrate on adding application features and do not spend as much time on data quality.

Customers can input their personal information 10 different ways. Most applications do not check for duplication when new customer information is entered.

Human error creates additional problems. Employees are often quite busy, move frequently and quickly from one task to the next, and, consequently, sometimes do not follow best practices fully.

Data becomes very fractured and there appear different versions of truth. The data features a tremendous amount of duplication, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies.

The inconsistencies exist because fixing such problems is a monumental task, one that requires companies to tackle both technical and organizational issues. Master data management (MDM) solutions, which have been sold for decades, are designed to address the technical issues. They are built to clean up the various inconsistencies, a process dubbed data cleansing.

The work sounds straightforward, but it is time-consuming and excruciatingly complex. The company has to audit all of its applications and determine what is stored where and how it is formatted. In many cases, companies work with terabytes and petabytes of information. Usually, they find many more sources than initially anticipated because cloud and other recent changes enable departments to set up their own data lakes.

Cleansing Process

Cleansing starts with mundane tasks, like identifying and fixing typos. The MDM solution might also identify where necessary information is missing.

To start the process, companies need to normalize fields and field values and develop standard naming conventions.  The data clean-up process can be streamlined in a few ways. If a company chooses only one vendor to supply all of its applications, the chances of data having a more consistent format increase. Typically, vendors use the same formats for all of their solutions. In some cases, they include add-on modules to help customers harmonize their data.

But that is not typically the case. Most companies purchase software from different suppliers, and data cleaning has largely been done in an ad hoc fashion, with companies harmonizing information application by application. Recognizing the need for better integration, suppliers sometimes include MDM links to popular systems, like Salesforce Sales Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics, and Marketo.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are emerging to help companies grapple with such issues, but the work is still in the very early stages of development.

Still other challenges stem from internal company policies—or a lack thereof—and corporate politics. Businesses need to step back from their traditional departmental views of data and create an enterprise-wide architecture. They must understand data hierarchies and dependencies; develop a data governance policy; ensure that all departments understand and follow that policy; and assign data stewards to promote it.

The relationship between company departments and IT has sometimes been strained. The latter’s objectives to keep infrastructure costs low and to put central policies in place to create data consistency often conflict with the company departments' drivers. And while departments have taken more control over the data, they often lack the technical skills to manage it on their own.

It is a good idea to start with small area and then expand to other areas.

Having clean and organized data would make company's operations much more effective and would enable to optimize customer service. They can take steps to improve their data quality.

Please contact us for more information or for a free consultation.

Digital Transformation

Digital technology is drastically changing how companies do their business and companies' relationship with their customers. While customers gain the power of information and choice, digital technology dramatically improves the economics of business. The rules of business are being rewritten nearly every day with new digital technologies. Every company has a unique digital transformation opportunity.

However, doing so involves far more than merely converting paper processes to electronic ones. Companies undergoing a digital transformation also need to make sure that all of their digital processes are interconnected. Even more important, though, digital transformation requires a company-wide culture transformation.

For successful digital transformation, first we need to understand that digital transformation is more than simply a technology change or software adoption. It requires a cultural shift and a change in how a business behaves, given changes in customer demands. The shift and change require complete support within the company, from top managers to rank-and-file personnel.

A well-timed adoption and utilization of technology and software can support this bridge by enabling seamless flow of information between the company and the customer.

Digital transformation is also about being focused on the company's customers. It is about you enabling them to be intelligent and self-educated and to go along their own journey in a self-guided manner, and then you figuring out where you need to intersperse human touchpoints along that journey to add value to the digital touchpoints.

The best practice is a mix of digital content and human interaction that is orchestrated around customers and how they want to learn about and experience the company and its brands.

Another critical element of digital transformation is the interconnection of all company's data. Companies are broken down into various departments. They have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of employees performing various tasks. Adding to the complexity, customer information is stored in so many different applications that wide gaps exist among data sources. Bridging those gaps so every employee in the organization has a consistent view of data is possible and necessary.

But the task requires large investments of money and manpower and sweeping process changes, steps that most organizations have not been willing to make thus far.

It’s not an easy task, but it is getting simpler, particularly as a wide and growing variety of applications emerge. Vendors are now building solutions to streamline workflows for employees inputting data or responding to various triggers, like customers calling in with a problem.

Please contact us today for more information and for a free consultation.