Ford launched Ford Smart Mobility LLC in 2016 with the aim to develop digitally enabled cars with improved mobility and emerge as a leader in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience, and data and analytics.
The digital transformation effort by the company shattered into pieces because there was a lack of a clear vision regarding digital transformation initiatives. Eventually, in the first-quarter earnings, Ford reported a loss of $102 million during the period on its Smart Mobility segment. The company experienced more financial damages later and noticed a dramatic fall in its stock prices.
Most companies, including well-recognized organizations, fail to digitally transform due to incompetency in determining and executing digital transformation objectives.
Improper implementation of digital transformation initiatives and misinterpretation of digital challenges proves to be a costly affair. Before diving into digitizing your business system, understand the difficulties, expected positive changes in CX, and the process of executing digital transformation successfully.
Customer-Oriented Challenges in Digital Transformation
Enforcement of digital transformation demands a focus on change management. During the alteration phase, staff members face various customer-oriented challenges.
Accepting changes might be inconvenient as a brand can expect internal opposition or chaos regarding the motive of the modifications applied. Accomplishing effective digital transformation becomes effortless if the companies identify problems and manage the alteration accordingly.
Below given are 3 customer-related challenges while executing digital transformation -
1) Evolving Customer Needs
An organization can witness frequent changes in customer needs due to the growth of new technologies and facilities a consumer can enjoy today. Customers expect the best service every time they interact with the brand, and it becomes a huge challenge for organizations to keep upgrading with evolving customer needs.
Solution:- Stay agile with digital transformations. To illustrate, transforming customer experience with the continuous Voice of the Customer (VoC) data helps a brand to take in agile characteristics and listen to the customer's needs continually to address them.
Agility empowers a brand to adapt to new changes quickly, fulfilling customers' wants, lowering the risk of failure, and producing desired results for the customers.
2) Adopting New Tools & Processes
Employees get comfortable with the tools and processes they operate on a daily basis. It becomes difficult for them to accept the new approaches that will allow the company to compete efficiently in the consumer market. Without the latest tools and processes, infrastructural changes bringing profit to an organization seems impossible.
Solution:- While transforming digitally, adopting new technologies becomes easy if organizations conduct training sessions and performance support for employees to increase their productivity to serve customers with better solutions.
Walmart understood that digital transformation changes the nature of the jobs and started to invest in training its employees. In 2018, the company introduced a program for Walmart’s workforce that offered employees an opportunity to enroll in online degree programs.
3) Lacking Customer-first Mindset
Adding value to the customers needs to be the ultimate goal of an organization to flourish as a leader in its industry space. Most companies lacking a customer-first mindset fail to survive in the long run. Digital transformation efforts become worthless on not putting forward the customer's demands.
Solution:- “The internal organization needs to orchestrate around the customer— strategically, creatively, technologically, and operationally.” Jared E. Fink, Group Director, Experience at Siegel+Gale, says in Clootrack's 102 CX Expert report.
Foster a customer-first attitude in your system while performing transformational activities. Educate all departments about the importance of fusing digital transformation and a customer-first mindset to achieve a better Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score.
Role of Digital Transformation in Enhancing Customer Experience
Nowadays, buyers are hyperactive when it comes to purchasing any product or service. Any flaw in customer experience can induce a negative outlook of brand solutions in the customer's mind. Moreover, a non-digital customer solution can disappoint consumers as it lacks precision and authenticity in metric measurement that enhances CX.
Shameel Abdulla, CEO at Clootrack, speaks about the relationship between customer happiness and CX metrics in the Forbes Technology Council Member post. He says, "The ultimate measure is whether your customers are happy or not. When a CIO or CTO tries to understand why customers are unhappy, it will lead to discoveries about areas such as customer service, price, employee experience, product issues, packing issues, delivery issues, and other areas that need improvement. Tracking customer experience metrics turns the focus to what you need to change."
Integrations backed by the latest tech solutions help a brand to measure customer metrics accurately and make necessary shifts, allowing it to deliver a top-notch customer experience and maintain a good brand image.
Disney's digital transformation is one of the best examples that enabled enhancement in customer experience. Disney's MyMagic+ initiative is the combination of a website, a mobile app, and a MagicBand that entitles visitors to personalize their experience at Disney park. This initiative helped Disney accommodate 3,000 additional daily visitors. Another instance where Disney implemented digital transformation is when Disney decided to sell its content on Disney+, a streaming platform allowing the audience to access content from Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, and Star.
Implementation of digital transformation through creative and systematic approaches not only brings revenue but also enhances the customer experience to the extent that drives customers to make repeat purchases, increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
How to Prioritize Customer Experience During Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is of no use if it does not produce outputs that increase the customer base and help a company thrive. A brand must acknowledge CX during transformation processes to deliver customers what they want.
Here are 3 ways a brand can prioritize CX during digital transformation -
1. Take in the Customer Service Team
Customer service teams directly interact with customers, making them a prime source of customer-based inputs. They hold a clear and solitary perception of customer issues. The customer service team can suggest well for the digital transformations required that improve customer experience.
2. Re-Wire the Customer Journey
Digital transformation reshapes the path a customer used to follow for purchasing the product from the company as changes positively influence customer interaction at different touchpoints. Consequently, the brand must ensure that the ideology and execution of transformation procedures should align with the customer journey to enhance CX and maintain customer loyalty toward the brand.
3. Align Customer Service Goals with Business Objectives
One of the reasons why digital transformation measures of an organization fail to provide better CX is that the customer service pursuits do not match with the business objectives. Analyzing the results produced due to digital transformation brought in by customer service can help a brand recognize if or not the company has achieved its CX purposes.
5 Steps To Accelerate Customer Experience During Digital Transformation
A study by Boston Consulting Group found that 70% of digital transformation falls short of their goals even if the leadership is in good form. Digital transformation is not an easy chore to execute as firms need to consider enough customer-facing proceedings.
Following a well-defined approach can assure the success of your transforming endeavors.
1) Understand Needs of Digitally Conscious Customers
The way customers interact end-to-end has altered, and keeping up with them is essential to increase customer acquisition and retention rates. Comprehending digital-conscious customers and technically advanced solutions together assist brands in delivering personalized customer experiences.
Organizations need to gather customer data with the help of data collecting tools to create buyer personas and divide customers into different segments to characterize and understand them thoroughly.
2) Plan for the Digital Initiatives
Every brand has different requirements that can never match even with the competitors. A brand must look for the scope of transformation, considering the resources available. A digital initiative with less limited resources drains the potential of business expansion and results in losses that badly damage the brand assets.
To maintain the authenticity of the transformation program, define the metrics for measuring your digital transformation success. And plan for executing the digital ambitions considering the overall expected consequences.
3) Put Strategies into Action
In a 2017 Gartner report, a survey conducted with 388 CEOs and senior business leaders in user organizations worldwide stated that 56% of CEOs said their digital improvements have already improved revenue.
Putting the strategies into action, you might see results in no time. Brands must promote agility for applying and refining their transformational activities to enforce an impactful digital transformation. Besides, agile methodology for implementing strategies can provide flexibility that enables brands to experiment without making much revenue loss.
4) Inform Customers About Changes
Assure the customers do not miss the major transformations your brand implemented for their convenience. For example, if your brand started using AR and VR technologies at retail stores to allow the customers to experience the essence of the product, brief them about the same through different channels.
An organization can conduct email campaigns, post on social media, publish blogs on the features, and market the transformations by collaborating with several publications, influencers, and top organizations to spread awareness among the target audiences.
5) Capture Customer Thoughts
Examine the effect of transformation on consumers by collecting and analyzing customer reviews. Customers are vocal about their experiences on forums, social media, surveys, and feedback forms. Capturing their thoughts and emotions will authorize a brand to revise and rebuild its adaptation plans and actions.
Many organizations opt for trusted AI-driven customer experience analytics platforms to generate real-time customer insights reports. These reports include information regarding market research, brand health, and a unified view of CX that makes revamping digital transformation initiatives.
Never Lose Human Touch During Digital Transformation
Being customer-oriented while transforming facilitates a brand to keep the human entity alive in its business and fetches significant returns.
With digital transformation, a brand focusing on customer experience can generate a 20-30% increase in customer satisfaction, a 10-20% improvement in employee satisfaction, and economic gains ranging from 20-50%.
Digital transformation has the power to modify the experience of customers as well as the employees of the company. Keeping the human element intact for stakeholders is crucial for all companies implementing changes for better results.
In a Q&A with Harvard Business Review, Barbara Martin Coppola, CDO at IKEA Retail, says, "To automate or digitize IKEA, it may sound at times like we’re moving away from the humanity of it all, but in fact it’s the other way around. We are enabling people to do more of what they love, to learn and try new and different jobs that weren’t possible before. We want to relieve people of repetitive tasks, so a lot of our work right now consists of reskilling and helping people carry out a variety of roles."
If a brand brings clarity in its digital transformation intents, the results of executing changeovers will help a company retain the human component in its operative techniques.
Final Remark
Digital transformation embraces customer experience as the foremost objective of bringing alterations is to serve customers' requirements through digital technologies. Successful digital transformation guarantees continuous enforcement of approved CX activities, boosting the ROI.
Technically driven operations help a brand to understand the needs of target customers in a short span of time and act appropriately. It enables the customer to connect pleasingly with the offerings and enjoy a personalized experience. With digital transformation, furnishing the best customer experience and monitoring new CX initiatives becomes painless.
Read More:- Data Analytics: The Key To Real-Time Adaptive Customer Experience