For a long time now we've been living in the Digital Age and every company I've worked with have an initiative called "Digital Transformation". In all of these initiatives the emphasis is on moving what have traditionally been manual tasks to the web and promoting "self-service" so the clients can do it themselves. These are important initiatives, but the question is why do we want "Digital Transformation"?
A couple of the answers I hear commonly are "we want to reduce costs" or "our competition is doing it", but the only answer that really holds weight is "to improve the customer experience".
It's only through improving the customer experience that any of the other benefits are realized in the long term. You might save money in the short term, but if your customers don't feel it provides a benefit to them they aren't going to use your digital solution, or are going to be dissatisfied with it hence sabotaging any competitive advantage you might be looking for. Even internal efforts should ultimately result in an improved experience for the customers.
Several companies have done the "right things" when it comes to digital transformation, but aren't seeing the benefits they expected, or are even seeing a degradation in exactly the areas they sought to improve. They are now searching for additional solutions and automation to receive those benefits, using criteria like expected Return on Investment and Process Analysis, but they may still be missing the point. Any of these kinds of efforts should being with "how will this improve the customer experience?" if they are to be successful in the long term.
"The customer's perception is your reality." - Kate Zabriskie
Of course that's just my opinion, I want to hear what you think...
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