Tech or treat: Top tricks for digital transformation
When it comes to digital transformation, it’s no wonder that today’s businesses might be going a little batty. With customers increasingly demanding greater speed, service and convenience, and organizational leaders requiring rapid ROI from every technology investment, there’s a deep sense of urgency for companies to get their digital strategy right.
Adopting technologies that drive true transformation and differentiation for your organization doesn’t have to be a scary proposition. Done well and supported by a clear business case, leadership buy-in and the right technology solutions, organizations can implement digital transformation initiatives that create compelling customer and employee experiences while saving a skele-ton of money and time in the process.
A 2020 McKinsey global survey of executives revealed that companies accelerated their digital transformations by a seven-year increase. And with customers expected to spend 25% more this year with companies that get digital transformation right, it’s no wonder that businesses are responding at astonishing speeds. Yet, the full potential of digital channels is yet to be realized.
Failing to take action to leverage the many technology solutions available to drive innovation and transformation will haunt your organization as you get left behind. Take steps now to move forward by dipping into your bag of digital goodies to enjoy the treats that technology and transformation can provide. Here are 5 to consider:
- Get scary good at self-service
The pandemic reinforced customers’ desire to find answers to their questions using a wide range of self-service options. In fact, recent research found that 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative while 91% of customers report they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs.
Customers clearly are willing to find the answers they need themselves, a trend that will only increase. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2030, a billion service tickets will be raised automatically via customer-owned bots. To handle this growing demand, your organization can turn to Contact Center AI solutions. With the number of customer interactions automated through AI expected to grow to 40% by 2023, the time is now to plan to deploy AI to help customers solve problems in the short term and enhance customer experience in the long term.
- Tame the monster Multiexperience trend
Multiexperience is a fast-growing trend that will replace technology-literate people with people-literate technology. It represents the shift in digital transformation from mobile to multiexperience. By 2023, Gartner predicts that more than 25% of the mobile progressive web and conversational apps at large enterprises will be built or run through a multiexperience development platform.
Multiexperience is about leveraging various modalities, digital touchpoints, apps, and devices to design and develop a seamless experience for the customers. The idea is to interact with the customers at as many touch points as possible to offer a consistent customer experience across the web, mobile, app, and other modalities. Not to be confused with omnichannel which addresses customer touch points across all channels, multiexperience is about developing effortless customer experiences across apps, websites, voice, text and chat, irrespective of the channel. While omnichannel is all about the technology, multiexperience is all about people.
To get create compelling Multiexperiences, leverage AI services such as conversational user interfaces, image recognition and voice recognition. Make sure that the business and IT are aligned and that your development team possesses user experience expertise. Multiexpeirence-driven digital transformation necessitates a customer strategy that equally focuses on the physical, contextual and experiential aspects of the customer journey.
- Cast a CX spell with powerful private messaging
A staggering 70% of consumers use private messaging to interact with brands, and by 2025, Gartner estimates that 80% of customer service organizations will have abandoned native mobile apps in favor of messaging for a better customer experience. Organizations that ignore the growth of messaging usage by consumers do so at their own risk. With 41 million messages being sent out every minute, these apps are now 20% bigger than social media networks.
Companies that place private messaging at the heart of a centralized channel strategy will be able meet the demands of changing customer behaviors. Yet, only 13% of customer experience interactions are proactive, an indication that brands are not fully embracing the capabilities of messaging channels. More than just delivering access to transactions, private messaging offers organizations a way to deliver personalized, empathetic customer experiences. Supported by intelligent chat solutions, message apps can improve customer experience by answering questions quickly, creating a trusting relationship with customers and meeting your users where they are with on-demand answers.
- Carve out a conversational AI strategy
Pre-pandemic, artificial intelligence was poised for huge growth. Since then, Covid-19 has only served to increase the potential value of AI in the enterprise. According to McKinsey’s State of AI survey published in November 2020, half of respondents say their organizations have adopted AI in at least one function. Organizations continue to accelerate their AI capabilities to help them operate with more agility and innovation and at scale.
Combining rich customer behavior data, natural language processing and chatbots, organizations can effectively transform customer contact and support, often without human involvement. In fact, IDCdetermined that the deployment of automated customer service agents was the top AI use case based on worldwide spending in 2020.
Conversational AI is making customer experiences richer and more dynamic, facilitating the flow of conversations between bots and the customer. This approach enhances customer self-service when it enables expedited access to backend systems.
- Accelerate AIOps–the devil’s in the data
IT systems have been increasing in complexity exponentially over the last few years. The result is the emergence of another “OPs” acronym: AIOps. AIOps can prove transformative for IT organizations in which the environment generates so much data that decision making has suffered.
Vendors are responding with solutions that enable IT operations and other teams to improve processes, tasks and decision-making through improved analysis of reams of data. Gartner suggests four key use cases for AIOps: performance analysis, anomaly detection, event correlation and analysis, and IT service management. Backed by the power of AI-based operations, IT teams can focus on assessing the health of their applications and gain control of their production data.
Forrester further advises that IT leaders look for those that can deliver cross-team collaboration capabilities, end-to-end digital experiences, and seamless integration into the whole IT operations management toolchain.
Tricks of the digital transformation trade
While enhanced digital capabilities is critical to driving improved customer experience and innovation, conjuring up a full digital transformation takes persistence, planning and patience. Here are three tricks to make sure you reap the benefits of your digital transformation initiatives.
- Map out your transformation roadmap.
Acknowledge the cultural shifts that will be required, define the new business processes needed and make a plan to transition to new business models that are more agile, customer-focused and data-driven. - Obtain buy-in from a digitally-savvy leadership team.
It’s important that every senior member of the organization is committed to the transformation. A study by McKinsey & Company actually found that organizations that engaged a chief digital officer (CDO) to support their transformation were 1.6 times more likely to report a successful digital transformation. - Make sure you understand what’s working—and what’s not—before taking action.
Process discovery can help you lay the foundation and enable faster time-to-automation. Pinpoint exactly where bottlenecks and inefficiencies exist in your business processes before deciding which tasks can be automated.
Getting digital transformation right can prove to be a real treat for your customers, your ROI and your organization’s bottom line. Take steps now to connect the digital dots to implement a digital transformation strategy that’s spectactular, not spooky.
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