6 Reasons Why Digital Transformation Is Essential 2020

These are the changes this 4^th industrial revolution is bringing now:

• Worker centric approach to the workforce
• Customers want multiple channels to interact
• Customers want to self-serve
• User experience is positive, intuitive and consistent
• Technology is up to date, secure and underpinned by robust data

We will discuss each of these below:

1. Worker centric approach to the workforce

This is a business-driven culture that has embedded into the workplace the fair treatment of staff. With this approach, you can improve workforce performance level in the area of design thinking, inside-out and outside-in perspective, and essentially, welfare. Employees will switch employer, process or system that no longer focuses primarily on paying attention to employee’s engagement, but rather supports the total employee experience. In terms of Employee experience, this is the BIG BOOM! A great employee experience, like a great customer experience make employees stick around for a very long time. It saves the company time and money in turnover and rehiring and training costs and builds up the company and tacit knowledge.

2. Customers want multiple channels to interact

To satisfy your customers, make things easy for them. Customers are after quality, comfort, and value, and a great percentage have migrated from an outdated to the digital smart life. Customers are tired of the old, they want to break out of the norm, and they are looking leaders who are shaking up the status quo. Look what Revolut is doing to the UK banking market with Open Banking, nicknamed a Challenger Bank for taking on (and winning) against the incumbent High Street Banks that refused to adopt to growing customer need for new and integrated technology. The traditional way of communication might be holding you back, you need to up your game to regain business stature. The smart phones does the magic, a communication system built around email or app or chat bot can make all the difference. TechCrunch, reported one-third of all purchases during the 2018 holiday shopping season were made on smartphones. That means, if you aren’t on mobile, or your products and services aren’t accessible by or on mobile, they’d better be! Just as Customers are building expectations and they don’t just want their problem solved, they want the best experience, so are Employees, looking for not just companies that stay up to date, but are leaders in their markets.

3. Customers want to self-serve

The self-service option has become the preference of today’s customers. They would rather help themselves with their own hands than pick up their phone to call for support. That old model is dying fast. Previously it took too long to solve the problem having to wait on a phone queue or a receive an reply to a support for a query. It’s actually easier to get more customers to self-serve than to get more customers you can serve. To do this though, you need to understand your target market, then choose the right channel to launch out your service deliveries. An (Interactive Voice Response) IVR tool is the commonly used tool for self-service, but with too much background noise or strong accents, they become more painful than useful so if you us IVR, it needs to be good, or you risk receiving more complaints about your IVR on top of complaints or queries about your products and services. If you want to scale, you need to set a self-service plan. And this plan must be built with everybody in mind, for audiences that can access support in any location, and on any device from desktop, mobile or tablet. Depending on the size of your business, you can set up self-service from suppliers from IBM, SAP to Infusionsoft, fully automating your front and back offer services, from payments, receipts, to account opening, including integrating your support Chatbot to automated email responses.

4. User experience is positive, intuitive and consistent

User experience is the overall experience your customer (and employee) has with your organisation, including using your products and services. That experience has to be positive, intuitive and consistent. In the era of ‘digital’ and ‘instant gratification’ Consumers want everything now, and they don’t want to think too hard about it. Sometimes, they don’t even want to think?! What this means for Business Design, and product and service design for that matter, is User experience should be designed in a way that people from every department or walks of life (including people with disabilities) can gain access to your service, find it easily and the experience is consistent whether they were speaking with people in different departments, within the same department, or via different challenges (e.g. website, or telephone). How many times have you spoken to different people in the same department and got different answers to the same problem? This doesn’t just instil lack of trust in your company but potentially loses the customer. The key to a good Customer experience is to:

• Removed waste from your processes and systems (TIM WOOD – Time, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over processing and Defects, the LEAN acronym for the 7 Wastes)
• Remove handoffs between staff members in the same and different departments (i.e. solve the question or issue at the first point of contact)
• Provide enough information (i.e. the minimum) at each steps of the process for the customer to make a decision to proceed to the next step (i.e. it adds value) to allow the User to progress on their own, and not raise any unnecessary queries.

These tips can set the pace for designing ground-breaking plans that will reform your Organisation. Use User experience design to enable your Organisation to become intuitive, swift and effective, and organise itself in a way that users don’t have to think, they only have to touch, read, scroll and interact.