8 Inputs To Help You Advance Your Digital Transformation

The New Digital Transformation Era 

Since the term “Digital Transformation” was coined over a decade ago, companies have focused efforts on enabling new customer experiences through different channels in order to increase efficiency, improve CX, and lower costs.

But today, we’ve hit an important inflection point that requires a redirected focus.

Today, digital transformation is about empowering customers on a self-directed journey — as well as the internal changes that your organization needs to make to support those transformed journeys.

And your job as a CX leader is to make your customers’ digital experience smarter. Frictionless.

The good news is, your organization likely has the building blocks and data needed to inform your digital transformation efforts from a customer journey perspective and set you up for success.

The Building Blocks of Digital Experience Change

An effective digital transformation effort must now deliver:

• Intertwined, non-linear customer journeys across channels, including various digital touchpoints
• Informed, personalized digital experiences based on previous experiences, preferences, and customer expectations
• Self-enabled customer experiences that make the customer AND your company more efficient and effective

Before we get into details of where to find the data to accomplish that, let’s remember why it’s so important to evolve your digital transformation efforts.

The Risk & Reward of Digital Transformation

While companies have made huge time and monetary investments in digital transformation, they haven’t all paid off.

In a recent global survey of 1500+ CFOs, 80% said that digital transformation is among their top-five priorities — with 22% citing it as number one¹.

Moreover, 71% of the CFOs stated that digital transformation investments are key to their company’s success.

However, the survey also highlights a warning – only 28% of those same organizations have realized the value they’d expected from the digital investments that they have already implemented.

How to Choose Purposeful Digital Solutions

The best way to ensure a purposeful digital solution that will deliver business value and improve CX is to take an informed approach to what it is, how it works, and the impact it will deliver.  

This includes gathering customer input and feedback, as well as a detailed understanding of how customers interact with your organization, and how they expect and prefer to interact. Customers as well as employees can provide valuable insights in these areas.

We encourage organizations to consider the following information sources holistically to understand how best to prioritize investments in purposeful digital solutions:

• Details for existing pain points in contact center and brick and mortar locations that could be addressed via a digital strategy
• Operational effectiveness and channel utilization that could be addressed via a digital solution
• Digital analytics to highlight current usage, potential pain points, and other aspects of digital channel activity
• Input from employees on digital experiences and how they benefit employees and address customers’ expectations
• Customer feedback and input

How Customers and Employees Can Inform and Advance Digital Transformation: 8 Inputs

5 Ways Customer Input Can Inform Digital Investments
To gather customer feedback and perspective on current experiences, here is the info that we recommend. By asking the right questions, we learn about customer expectations, preferences, and intentions.

1. Digital customer journey: Many organizations may have mapped their customer journeys and micro-journeys. We recommend overlaying digital touchpoints and channel experiences to understand where digital experiences occur today, and to identify opportunities to expand digital channels.

2. Call types to contact center: Review calls made to the contact center to explore:

• Calls made about questions and/or problems related to digital experiences, e.g., website login problems or error messages
• Calls that should have been digital experiences, e.g., a banking client calling to check account balances. This info is a great way to prioritize both investment in creating new digital experiences, and opportunities to improve existing ones.

One reason that CFOs may have yet to realize the value of digital investments is because they have not met customers’ expectations. Customer input and an understanding of customer experiences can help to ensure that investments are connected to what customers expect. 

3 Ways Employee Input Can Inform Digital Investments

Employees can provide a unique, front-line perspective of how technology and digital solutions enable their jobs and responsibilities, but they also fully understand how digital solutions can improve customers’ experiences.

Opportunities to engage employees in digital transformation and investments include:

1. Perceptions of technology and digital: Most organizations conduct annual or semi-annual employee engagement surveys. Most of the time, questions related to technology focus on how well technology enables their work. However, for front-line employees who interact with customers, it’s also important to ask how technology enables their support of customers to spotlight areas where the company may be falling short.

2. Customer-centric voice of employee: We also strongly suggest a customer-centric employee survey focusing on customer experiences that are not currently available via a digital channel, as well as available digital channels that customers are not actively using.

3. Involvement in continuous improvement: Employees that have exposure to problems or issues should be asked to provide their perspectives on ways to improve. This is especially true when the goal is to find the best-fitting option among many to meet both the organization’s needs and customers’ expectations.

Taking an Informed Approach to Your Digital Transformation

Companies have an opportunity, and an obligation, to evolve their digital transformation beyond creating and enabling more digital channels to focus instead on creating smart, frictionless digital-first experiences.

Hopefully this blog provided you with a head start for where to find the customer and employee inputs and feedback required for such an evolution so you can create meaningful interactions that fully meet your customers’ expectations around personal, self-enabled journeys.

You can learn more about these themes in our latest eBook: Beyond Digital Transformation: Evolving to Smart, Frictionless Digital Experiences.

And if you are lacking some of the key inputs and feedback mentioned here, NICE is here to support you, with comprehensive customer journey mapping, VOC programs that deliver a detailed understanding of customer preferences and expectations, omnichannel feedback, and a contextual understanding of how the info you have in your CRM, digital analytics, and input from your employees can help shape better, more personal digital experiences.

Request a digital transformation evolution
consultation today!

Source:

[1] 2021 CFO Peer Insights: Digital Transformation and IT Spending Priorities, Dimensional Research, April 2021.