What should you focus on in your digital change or transformation programmes? What’s most important for transformation success? In this video, Andrew Salmon outlines:

5 things to focus on for transformation success

Insights gained from experience

These valuable insights have been gathered over the last 10 years and have proven to be successful. Particularly relevant over the last 18months where conducting business digitally has become more important than ever.

1. Direct-to-customer capabilities

It’s vital to be able to sell via a transactional website or mobile application, ideally both. The pandemic has just accelerated people’s desire to interact with your business digitally, and it’s just not going to go away. If you don’t have a digital channel available to your customers, they will look elsewhere.

2. Digital customer experience

You can’t just sell digitally; you have to offer the complete end-to-end service digitally. People have changed over the last 16-17 months en masse. They have adjusted to using digital channels to interact with organisations, and that’s precisely the same when things go wrong.

You’ve got to have chat, threaded messaging, and email response capabilities. If you do that, your customer experience will improve because you’re meeting your customers’ needs.

3. The right digital tools for the job

Invest in the right digital tools and services for your staff and your teams to use. This has numerous benefits.

Firstly, it protects productivity, especially as people look to work increasingly remotely. Many organisations have realised that a hybrid combination of being in the workplace and working from home is here to stay. Make sure your team have the right tools to perform their job efficiently.

Secondly, it upskills your people in the use of digital. So, when you’re going through your digital transformation programmes, people are more used to using digital applications and apps. That’s a good thing because changing people’s behaviour in your organisation is the hardest thing to do.

4. Get better at creating

This one is a challenge and can be pretty tricky, but it is worth the investment. Get better at experimenting and creating things, so you’re more responsive. If you can develop things faster, you can adapt to the marketplace. Put in the right creation processes, get the right team, put the right skills in place. You must put the proper working practices together. If you just focus on the technology and not on the ways of working, then you risk jeopardising your transformation success.

Creating a digital-driven culture in your organisation will allow you to adapt to turbulent market conditions quickly. It’s probably the most important thing to get right.

5. Improve your operational tasks

There’s no point trying to transform if you are going to keep the same back-office tasks that have been part of your business as usual for a long time. Look to improve your operational processes, review what is redundant and what can be made more efficient. Using automation for the most repetitive tasks can save you costs and allow you to redistribute your people into more value add roles in the organisation.

Business benefits

If you follow these 5 things to focus on for transformation success, you’ll see some real business benefit. Your customer experience will improve, your revenues will go up, and your profitability will increase because you’ve also controlled your costs.

But probably most importantly, you’ll innovate faster, which will give you a competitive advantage out in the market.

 

Clare Carroll
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