by Dan Abernathy
2024 is to be the year of generative AI. Wait. Haven’t we already been asking Alexa to play ‘Yanni Live at the Acropolis’ only to experience the public shame of having it play Micheal Bolton’s ‘Time, Love & Tenderness’ instead? It’s Friday night, you’re in the kitchen with your significant other and you’re putting the finishing touches on a robust charcuterie board, and as you pop the bottle of sauvignon blanc open, Alexa falls short leaving you reaching for a ‘redo’ when your weekend’s barely begun.
It’s time to instead dive into a proven approach that can unleash your organization’s dormant revenue opportunities–let’s confidently cover the digital transformation bases here.
By simply monetizing your organization’s existing products and services, Digital Transformation enables you to achieve an online marketplace’s many comparative advantages that pave the way to meaningful scale within a repeatable approach that I’ll extoll the virtues below… And yes, Yanni IS vastly underrated, and I do not need an AI large language model to tell me that.
Let’s focus on the 5 main pillars of digital transformation:
1. Customer Experience (CX)
Customer expectations have never been higher. Purchased goods are literally dropped at our doorstep a lá ‘The Jetsons’. Cultivating a seamless, personalized customer journey across ALL touchpoints is no longer a nice-to-have, it is now a have-to-have. CX will supersede price and comparative advantage as THE key brand differentiator in 2024. Customers are more digitally empowered than ever, and without digital transformation, you risk losing customer loyalty and lifetime customer value thus making a severe dent in revenue and your brand’s reputation. A study by Mala Srivastava and Dimple Kaul found that customer experience impacts both attitudinal and behavioral loyalty, as well as consumer spending. A good CX change management approach simply provides the undeniable lens of priority that helps your organization graduate from internal speak, and operational contingencies to a more outward-facing customer-centric approach that adds fuel to revenue. You will thank yourself for it.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS:
- Reach across the cross-functional team aisle and set the table for Business, IT, Digital, Customer Care call center and more–enable a CX workshop-style approach where you air out ‘the good, the bad, and the ugly’ to inform meaningful customer personas that you currently sell to.
- Utilize your customer personas to inform an ideal customer journey that helps identify key milestones that can be enhanced through digital transformation.
- The above approach will reveal generative AI opportunities to automate customer service while also exposing key data points, automated marketing advantages, digital content strategy, and appropriate UX resource needs. Enjoy.
2. Operational Agility
According to McKinsey an organization’s adoption of agile transformation delivers 30% gains in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement while also resulting in a 5x increased likelihood to experience faster growth than their non-agile competition. Operational agility enables an organization’s ability to pivot, respond, grow, and even gain from their competition’s advantages and outside pressures. By streamlining, operational decisions happen faster, are more responsive, and more efficient.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS:
- Adopt agile methodologies across departments by enabling the acquisition of meaningful data that enables the transition of graduating from reactive to proactive improvements to the customer journey, speed to market, and your organization’s competitive advantage.
- Augment data analytics that inform decisioning. Management theorist, Peter Drucker, reportedly said, “What gets measured gets improved.” The trick is to understand the value of data, identify measurement of business-critical data points, and then make sense of it all to inform more proactive decisions.
3. Culture & Leadership
Often considered the “soft” aspect of business, culture has a concrete impact on digital transformation and enables an organization’s ability to foster innovation, collaboration, and a willingness to take calculated risks. An organization’s digital transformation will only be as strong as its ability to adopt its many optimized advantages. MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte Digital find that 71% of digitally maturing organizations have conquered this barrier by encouraging their organizations to experiment and accept the risk of failure. Digitally maturing companies are increasingly organized around cross-functional teams revealing that a collaborative culture is essential for galvanizing digital maturity.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS:
- Boldly foster and support a culture that encourages experimentation and learning from failure.
- Invest in leadership development programs that focus on digital literacy.
4. Digital Technology Integration & Adoption
Integrating digital technologies and better ways of working is more than just about staying updated with the latest tools; it’s about transforming the way the company operates and delivers value to its customers. More than two-thirds (68%) of CEO respondents from the world’s largest companies say that they plan to take on a major investment in data and technology over the next 12 months, while 61% plan to undertake a major transformation initiative over the same period. This shift is indicative of the growing importance of digital technology in driving business success.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS:
- Conduct a technology audit to identify areas that can benefit from digital integration.
- Invest in emerging technologies like cloud computing, IoT, generative AI enablement and blockchain.
5. Data & Analytics
Data analytics enables companies to make informed decisions, identify new opportunities, and predict customer behavior. For instance, the McKinsey Global Institute indicates that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain those customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result. Tagging, tracking and visualizing key data points graduates your revenue-generating effort from reactive to proactive.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS:
- Invest in data analytics tools that provide real-time insights.
- Hire or train staff to become data literate.
Conclusion
In 2024, digital transformation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a have-to-have. From customer experience change management and alignment to revealing measurable key data points–your organization’s ability to adopt, act, measure, and improve is only as strong as its digital transformation experience design. It may appear to be a complex but necessary journey that requires a multifaceted approach. By understanding the deep-rooted importance of each of these five pillars your organization will continue to grow and it will be 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result.
About the Author
From coaching UI/UX designers to designing experiences that deliver multistage value, to revealing eCommerce dormant revenue opportunities–Dan always seeks the solve. Armed with a CX change management approach, he enables the type of cross-functional team alignment that makes problem definition self-evident and helps to collapse the idea-to-market telescope in ways that usher in meaningful digital transformation for big brands. If you are seeking to monetize your consumer, target customer, product or service solution, Dan can add value with a smile.