During unprecedented times, how an organization achieves efficiency, customer satisfaction, and lowers business costs are critical factors in whether or not a business will survive. Most organizations take to digital transformation in a bid to navigate the challenges before them, which in today’s climate includes redeploying limited resources and managing a sudden influx of customer queries.
To ensure success, enterprises must first have a clear strategy in place for harnessing digital transformation services. That way, they won’t stray from goals, go over budget, or miss the opportunity to turn plans into action.
According to Globant’s Q4 2019 Sentinel Report, only 18% of organizations have a clear and strong digital vision. This is where transformation consultants come into play, helping enterprises find the right solutions to meet KPIs and develop a strategic framework to successfully make their digital vision a reality.
Digital Transformation Solutions
When it comes to digital transformation solutions, one size does not fit all. You might be a financial service looking to improve transaction accuracy, a retail company seeking to increase customer lifetime value, or a healthcare business that needs to stabilize the new hire process to meet regulations. A digital transformation consultant helps your team identify and evaluate what solution opportunities align with your specific business objectives, to address both short-term and long-term requirements. Together, you’ll assess your current workplace in order to determine what can be improved and what needs to be replaced. Here are two types of actions that your consultant might recommend:
1. Building or enhancing your digital customer experience
Embarking on a digital customer experience transformation journey gives companies a competitive advantage by improving customer satisfaction and boosting lifetime value. 89% of businesses compete mainly on customer experience and this percentage is only increasing, according to Gartner.
Customers are used to simple digital tools in all areas of their lives, and companies need to deliver a great digital experience to keep up with the changing digital economy. Developing or improving an omnichannel AI chatbot to streamline customer conversations and boost engagement is just one example of a digital customer experience solution.
2. Designing analytics and insights tools
Due to its flexibility and scalability, big data/analytics is one of the top five transformation solutions enterprises are currently implementing. Insight solutions accounted for 58% of digital transformations completed in 2018, and 70% of IT executives point to this as a primary reason for revenue growth, according to Forbes. An analytics and insights solution could include implementing a survey tool for managing big data and simplifying reporting in order to make more informative predictions and proper evaluations. Data management tools empower businesses to confidently apply knowledge gained from numbers and turn these metrics into actionable takeaways.
Building Your Digital Transformation Roadmap
Once you know what specific transformation solution is the best fit for your business strategy and digital initiatives, it’s time to plan how your team is going to get there. One of the primary advantages of utilizing a digital transformation consultant is that they guide you through building your transformation roadmap. A digital transformation roadmap serves as your company’s framework for driving change and functions as your digital business model. It implements design thinking so that you can visualize your plan, process, and digital strategy.
Digital roadmaps help businesses stay on track, allocate resources properly, and transition teams into change seamlessly. While no roadmap looks the same, it should take your people, processes, and technology into account by depicting the answers to these questions:
What will your action sequences look like?
Your roadmap represents an overview of your business transformation process, from beginning to end. It will help you decide what to prioritize at what time so that you know where to start and have a general idea of what the final steps are.
What resources will you need?
Your transformation roadmap will illuminate gaps in your resources— both human and machine—because it walks you through who will be in charge of what.
What will the technical architecture look like?
True digital transformation maximizes the advantages of digital technology. Your roadmap will lay out the back-end work that needs to be done to enable your team to transition into a new digital environment smoothly.
How do you measure if you are staying on track?
A roadmap is also a strategy for making sure things are completed in a timely order. You’ll be able to reference certain achievement points so that you always know where you are in the process of your digital transformation. After all, digital transformation is an ongoing process. Your team needs to be able to measure success along the way.
What’s the value in digital transformation consulting?
Digital transformation isn’t just about technology; it involves your people as well. Taking advantage of a transformation consultant will ensure that your team feels confident adjusting to new work processes and using new digital tools. In the planning stage, your consultant will present you with thorough research on the range of costs and benefits to help executive management decide the best direction to pursue. They’ll separate short-term goals from those that will take extensive time so that you can start the process with a clear direction.
While this might be your team’s first transformation journey, digital transformation consultants have extensive knowledge in this area. For this reason, they’ll be able to help identify and evaluate risks that you may not have been aware of in order to help you troubleshoot early on. Transformation consulting firms are also flexible and offer a variety of digital transformation services, giving your company control over what specific areas of the project they want help with.
With a clear digital transformation strategy and defined plan of action, your company can unlock the vast possibilities of prioritizing innovation and modernizing legacy processes while navigating the challenges that arise as a result of unforeseen circumstances. Digital transformation consulting gives enterprises the tools they need for digital disruption and to actualize their digital vision.