Digital transformation - a unique, personalised journey

This buzzword has been around for almost 3 decades, rapidly evolving in its definition and is often accompanied with an overwhelming sense of urgency, but the honest reality is that it is no longer a buzzword but a fundamental necessity for businesses to succeed in retaining their customers.

In the same breath, it is not a one size fits all approach—each business has their own unique needs in defining a digital transformation journey.

Based on my experience, there are 8 make points to consider when trying to understand the requirements of your personalised digital transformation journey, here are my thoughts:

1.      Strategise and define the digital requirements in each line of business including product and service streams – leave no stone unturned because as you work through the process you will gain a full understanding of your businesses digital requirements resulting in cost savings in the long run.

2.      Develop a blueprint by prioritising the digitisation process up for various areas of the business, breaking it up into bite size pieces and then prioritise which area’s and processes you should focus on first. Develop and refine a successful blueprint for digitisation that can be used to rollout to other areas of the business.

3.      Define this journey for both your employees and your customers – employee productivity is just as important as an optimal customer journey and the two work hand-in-hand when it comes building a strong culture, time-and-cost savings as well as efficiency.

4.      Break each journey up into milestones – baby steps get the job done, but to be overwhelmed kills productivity.

5.      Take the milestones and place them in order of priority – defining a clear path encourages strategic thinking and planning creates direction.

6.      Make sure this is a long-term plan – with the exponential growth of technology, staying current and apprised is essential in staying relevant to our customers.

7.      Assign champions within your business for accountability and to ensure this journey becomes reality and does not just stay on paper.

8.      Take the time to reskill your own team – when you are all singing off the same hymn sheet, your customers feel the harmony.

Now we all know that technology becomes truly meaningful when combined with strategic thinking and a human touch, that is why we have to understand the pain points in order to map out the right process to create optimisation and efficiency, which speaks into the CallForce proven formula for success.

With the rapid deployment of many different softwares and technologies one needs to take the time to go through the exercise of researching more than one option for each individual pain point to find out which one would work best for your business – this is a combination of cost, functionality, integration into your environment, training and out of scope changes.

Once you have found the right solution to streamline the process, take the time to get buy in from both your employees and your customers – you’d be surprised what others are able to pick up when they are not as close to the process as you are.

Remember we eat an elephant one bite at a time – procrastination will make sure you never evolve, lack of research ultimately wastes both time and money and resistance to change will leave you last in the race to exceptional customer service.

Start now, take one step at a time and most importantly, don’t ever stop.

Published by

Candice Roberts
Outsourcing Thought Leader – Transforming customer experience through agile Global Business Services (BPO services)