Digital & Customer Experience Transformation
By Shameem Smillie, CCaaS Consultant.
Digital Darwinism remains a challenge for businesses. We are still in an era whereby technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can adapt. When anything and everything is at the end of your fingertips, and the need for transformation is something most agree with, why is it that McKinsey still reports that 70% of transformation programs continue to fail?
“We are still in an era whereby technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can adapt.”
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) promised the ability to scale to reach new speeds, which also brought new levels of complexities—bringing a fusion of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT). With it came disruption that impacted nearly all industries and businesses. It also brought opportunities for people, processes, and technology.
The pandemic hyper-accelerated the use of AI and digitisation, and the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) bubbled to the top. This evolution came with the promise of a more balanced relationship between these technologies and humans. Humans did not have to fear competing with robots for jobs (a significant concern of the 4IR). Instead, it would be a harmonious collaboration. Robots or Bots would carry out mundane and repetitive tasks, while humans focused on complex and emotion-led interactions and functions.
Digital Transformation encompasses using digital technologies to create new or modify existing – business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements.
Customer Experience Transformation encompasses optimising and streamlining your processes and tools within your business to improve a customer’s interaction with the organisation.
Implementation goals are improving efficiencies, reducing cost, and increasing value while innovating.
Digital Transformation goes hand in hand with Customer Experience Transformation. Customer Experience isn’t a product that you can touch. It’s more about how consumers feel when interacting with your business. It refers to all consumer interactions with a business and includes all services. Add the fact that Customer Experience (CX) is finally getting the recognition and attention it deserves; why aren’t businesses adapting to technological changes and consumer behaviour? Indeed, by now, we should all be skipping through the meadows.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Customer dissatisfaction is at an all-time high. The cost of living and inflation crisis is forcing some industries into the cost centre category, not a profit centre. An increasing number of customers are calling businesses for additional support and alternative ways of paying their bills. These conversations are not straightforward. They are highly complex and very emotive for the customers and employees who are helping them navigate to a conclusion or obtain the answer they seek.
Setting the right expectations from the get-go is critical. If the digital experience matched the expectation, customers would embrace these options. Tolerances tend to match the experience. Self Service is excellent for those customers who want it – when it’s necessary, easy and when it works. Not so great, is when the outcome and experience leave a customer more frustrated than ever. More often than not, simply because the concierge bot can’t process the request, and/or can’t facilitate the ability to transfer the interaction to a human, and the business has proactively implemented IVR deflection to push customers to another channel because they can’t manage the volume.
“Setting the right expectations from the get-go is critical. If the digital experience matched the expectation, customers would embrace these options.”
The promise of new technologies with digitisation begins with the idea of being able to do more with less. In principle, this should work, but only when you’ve streamlined and optimised your processes, back-end systems, and tools with clean data available for the applications to leverage. The move to next-generation technology is all well and good. However, if you haven’t addressed the foundations or the basics, you’re on a highway to exacerbating a negative experience for your customers and employees. Digital does NOT mean voice is dead. Voice remains as essential a channel today as it ever has been and continues to be the primary choice of communication for many customers.
A leader in Digital Transformation is Microsoft which recommends a strategy that focuses on these areas:
Empowering employees. Reinvent productivity, build a culture of trust, and enable a data-driven culture. Empowered employees encourage employee motivation and improve employee retention.
Engaging customers. Customer engagement matters just as much as employee engagement, meaning businesses must meet today’s customers' evolving expectations. Give customers new, frictionless, meaningful, tangible experiences and add value.
Optimise operations. IT infrastructure streamlining and modernisation is one of the best ways that digital transformation can help improve organisational effectiveness and efficiency.
Services and products. Continuous improvements and innovation are among the best ways to fuel success in the modern age, helping organisations improve their market position, capture more revenue, and stay relevant.
With the right strategy, approach, and execution, an organisation can change how it operates and deliver real value to customers and stakeholders.
Businesses need to thrive, not just survive when faced with many disruptions. Customer retention should be a top priority as well as net new customers. You can innovate without having to start all over again. When you formulate your 3–5-year business planning, vision and strategy, all stages should include people, processes, and technology.
People – Employee buy-in from all key stakeholder groups, including the organisation leaders.
Process – The right tools and applications to support and enable employees.
Technology – Tech is the enabler and is only as good as the people and processes.
You may already know most of the answers; however, it remains critical that you begin with ‘Discovery’. The discovery process and engagement should factor in an outside-in perspective that can be correlated with your internal findings. Understanding the ‘as is’, is critical before you try and address or solve any problems. If the problems are not fully understood, the solution can create new problems.
A discovery engagement process provides the structure around how the business can transform. It will also support the strategy by providing valuable data and insights that identify the current challenges and pain points. Thus, avoiding being in the exact same position again in the not-too-distant future.
Discovery includes:
Business objectives and challenges – This should be completed with the key stakeholders to ascertain the business's operational processes, departments, and teams.
Identify quick wins (low-hanging fruit) – it’s important to clean house and carry out housekeeping which will yield further opportunities to streamline and optimise existing and new processes and tools. You can still increase efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve the bottom line at this early stage.
Organisation and environment – Used to identify the departmental structures and the services they deliver.
Customer base – Profile the types of customers, both internal and external. Understand the demographics. Why do customers contact you? Why do you contact your customers?
People – Understand the people within the organisation, identify additional stakeholders, their skill sets, training requirements, performance measuring etc.
Technology – What is in place now, what is working and what isn’t, and what is the future – can it be upgraded/redeployed/replaced? Identify areas for improving efficiencies, value, and innovation.
Contact Management Process – Methods of contact for inbound and outbound. ID&V – Identification and Verification. Self Service capabilities. How is the information logged and reported? This is about understanding the customer's end-to-end journey and capturing each touch point.
Agents/Advisors/Team Leader/ Manager DILO (Day in the life of) – Understand the processes and day-to-day functions. Identify pain points and areas to improve efficiencies and effectiveness.
Service performance monitoring and reporting – Understand service levels (SLA), key performance indicators (KPI), reports, statistics, and data structures. What do good and bad look like?
Financials – Is there a budget allocated? Who are the financial team? Do you understand their objectives?
Return on Investment (ROI) – Understand the cost of the business, which includes staffing, retention, and attrition. If areas and/or all the business were unavailable to transact or do business, how would this impact the business financially and the brand reputation?
The output of a thorough discovery will translate the value of the people, process, and technology, the ‘as is’ and the ‘to be’ for the business, operations, and functional processes and strategies. It also supports the creation of a business case that will deliver better outcomes.
The Experience Economy continues to boom as customers increasingly expect access and engagement across every touchpoint – both physical and digital; customers want command and control of their experiences at a convenient and optimum time. Business and innovation improvements should support a culture of empowerment and inclusivity. Employee and Customer experience should be united to ensure digital and customer transformation experiences continually evolves and never stands still. Customers want value with authenticity at the moment when the situation necessitates it. Those businesses that will go on to thrive will put their customers and people at the centre of everything they do.
Finish what you started, and don’t run out of steam because the status quo is more accessible than evolving; remember the why, and make sure the why is compelling for all stakeholders. Maintain outcome-based actions, don’t get distracted by the shiny and bright, and validate each milestone with meaningful data and insights. People are at the heart of nearly all interactions, and we should be humanising the interconnection between technology, business, and systems. Technology for technologies sake, because you can rather than because you should, is a mistake that should be avoided.
