Reimagining Customer Experience: How Digital Transformation is Reshaping Industries
By Sameer Danave
Digital Transformation is a key to catalyzing innovation, building agility, and propagating customer-centric philosophy throughout the value chain of businesses across industry verticals.
With new trends in technology and consumer behaviour sweeping the world, the need to digitally transform the business has become strategically important. Digital tools not only help firms deliver superior value but also allow help in reimagining ways to connect, communicate, and serve their target markets. No wonder, the World Economic Forum has projected a $100 trillion value addition in the global economy through digital transformations by 2025. So, what exactly is digital transformation, and why is it significant? Here’s everything you want to know about the game-changing phenomenon.
Digital Transformation: What is it?
At the heart of the digital transformations lies the use of technology to deliver superior value to customers. The philosophy includes using digital tools and technologies to transform businesses by catalyzing innovations, elevating efficiency, and providing superior experiences. The strategic relevance of these transformations is in streamlining operations so that a win-win situation for all stakeholders across value chains can be created.
Elevating Customer Experience: Role of Digital Transformations
The significance of delivering superior customer experiences in today’s business environment couldn’t be overemphasized. The flickering tastes, fast-evolving technology, and decreasing loyalty have mandated firms to transform their businesses digitally and offer customers quick, reliable, and superior value than competing propositions. Firms lagging in this transformation are facing existential threats and are under serious threat of losing customers and eventually becoming obsolete from the business. Digital transformations can play a crucial role in helping firms reimagine their customer connect. By creating, communicating, and delivering superior value, digital tools can offer rich dividends to organizations on crucial indicators of performance and profitability.
Scaling Personalisation through Digital Transformation
Delivery of personalized experiences to consumers has remained one of the sure-fire strategies to stay ahead of the competition. Digital tools such as AI, ML, and Data Analytics are used in offering personalised solutions aligned with individual customers’ specific preferences. These digital technologies are already being used in the retail, automobile, and consumer goods sectors and are likely to be adopted by many organizations in the coming years.
Facilitating Omnichannel approach
The omnichannel philosophy can help firms elevate customer experiences and strengthen brand equity among target markets by offering a holistic range of options to connect and interact with businesses. Digital technologies are playing a key role in the development of an omnichannel approach for delivering superior experiences irrespective of the platform customers choose to interact with firms. Take, for instance, the use of digital tools in the banking industry. Customers today can choose from myriad ways to manage their money and avail services in the banking sector. From in-person interactions and banking apps to online logging and mobile banking, customers have several methods to choose from. By adopting a complete omnichannel approach, the banking sector offers customers the flexibility of handling their finances in whichever way they want.
Digital Transformation: Leading Industries
a) Healthcare Sector: The healthcare industry is leading digital transformation by offering patients new-age facilities such as telemedicine, remote consulting, and real-time healthcare monitoring. Digital tools such as health tracker apps, wearable devices, and personalized workout regimes are also emerging as game changers for preventive and therapeutic healthcare approaches to treat patients.
b) Industry 4.0: Digital transformations also herald a new revolution in the business world termed Industry 4.0. The advent of smart factories characterizes the philosophy, the use of IoT devices, and the extensive use of predictive analytics, all of which have come together to take both functional effectiveness and operational efficiency of manufacturing practices to a whole new level.
Digital Transformation: Key Challenges
Offering a host of benefits, digital transformation can help firms achieve superior business results and sustainable competitive advantage. Despite all these benefits, organizations face critical challenges in digitally transforming their businesses. While at the corporate level, the issues of securing investment, convincing shareholders, and obtaining approval of top leadership prevail, the functional level presents the integration, implementation, and operational challenges associated with the digital transformation processes. The lack of skilled workforce capable of deriving optimum results from the digital transformation process is also a challenge that firms face in their journey of transforming their businesses.
Digital Transformation: Road Ahead
Digital Revolution is upon us and firms must embrace digital tools to stay ahead of the innovation curve as well as competition. Adopting digital technologies can help firms stay agile and nimble, helping them respond swiftly to the constantly changing business environment. To successfully adopt digital transformations, organizations must consider the process as a continuous journey that will take medium- to long -term time to deliver desired results. Remember, when applied in their true spirit, digital transformations can change the fortunes of firms by encouraging innovation, elevating performance, and providing personalized solutions for target markets.
(The author is Sameer Danave, Senior Director, Marketing at MSys Technologies, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
