Overcome digital transformation challenges: Look back to move ahead
The need for digital transformation has reached a new sense of urgency. But, resources that could be used to create simple and intuitive digital experiences, are instead being deployed to maintain and modify legacy IT plumbing.
27 Aug 2018
Overcome digital transformation challenges: Look back to move ahead
The need for digital transformation has reached a new sense urgency for numerous industries, but never more so than the technology, media, and telecom sectors. Those that succeed in providing a seamless digital customer journey in an omnichannel environment will see significant returns for their investments. Digital transformation isn’t a buzzword, it is a strategic imperative.
The problem is that successful digital transformation can be quite difficult to execute and is exacerbated by the increase in bundled offerings, disparate legacy systems and billing environments. At the same time, advances in technology are not slowing down. Distribution channels keep growing, face-to-face agents are now supported with hand-held or tablet-based guided workflows, while chatbots are incorporating artificial intelligence, and the smart speaker channel is next.
Yet, resources that could be leveraged to create simple and intuitive digital experiences are instead being deployed to maintain and modify all of this plumbing.
Looking back 15-20 years will help us understand how to solve this problem. When companies rushed to get onto the web years ago, website designers created an abundance of hypertext markup language (HTML) code. Content creation and management was extremely difficult because of the need to work within this code. When new content became available, all the code had to be updated through scheduled releases, which required a lot of coordination. Moreover, the cost of maintaining all that content prevented companies from delivering great designs. Then someone asked the question, “Why is this a problem?” The answer in retrospect was fairly simple: It shouldn’t be a problem because there is an easy solution.
As great an idea as it was, CMS did not go far enough. Truly great digital customer experiences cannot be created with content alone. Instead, great digital customer experiences need to be delivered in the context of a customer journey and at every touchpoint the customer has with your company. This includes not only content, but also actions and sequencing. Companies need to focus on what customers are thinking, doing and feeling because a customer journey is the full storyline, not just common subjects and objects.
Looking forward, a firms need a unified method of delivering true omnichannel customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey. It must be an easy-to-use, low-code platform that is supported by rich data abstraction and integration capabilities, and designed to create, modify and optimize customer journeys across all channels for any type of product or service.
The challenges
The problem is that successful digital transformation can be quite difficult to execute and is exacerbated by the increase in bundled offerings, disparate legacy systems and billing environments. At the same time, advances in technology are not slowing down. Distribution channels keep growing, face-to-face agents are now supported with hand-held or tablet-based guided workflows, while chatbots are incorporating artificial intelligence, and the smart speaker channel is next.
Yet, resources that could be leveraged to create simple and intuitive digital experiences are instead being deployed to maintain and modify all of this plumbing.
Learning by example
Looking back 15-20 years will help us understand how to solve this problem. When companies rushed to get onto the web years ago, website designers created an abundance of hypertext markup language (HTML) code. Content creation and management was extremely difficult because of the need to work within this code. When new content became available, all the code had to be updated through scheduled releases, which required a lot of coordination. Moreover, the cost of maintaining all that content prevented companies from delivering great designs. Then someone asked the question, “Why is this a problem?” The answer in retrospect was fairly simple: It shouldn’t be a problem because there is an easy solution.
This is when the content management system (CMS) was born. CMS provided a graphical user interphase (GUI) that allowed users to control the creation, modification and removal of digital content from websites without needing to know anything about HTML. It solved a big problem by simplifying content creation and management.
The path forward
As great an idea as it was, CMS did not go far enough. Truly great digital customer experiences cannot be created with content alone. Instead, great digital customer experiences need to be delivered in the context of a customer journey and at every touchpoint the customer has with your company. This includes not only content, but also actions and sequencing. Companies need to focus on what customers are thinking, doing and feeling because a customer journey is the full storyline, not just common subjects and objects.
Looking forward, a firms need a unified method of delivering true omnichannel customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey. It must be an easy-to-use, low-code platform that is supported by rich data abstraction and integration capabilities, and designed to create, modify and optimize customer journeys across all channels for any type of product or service.
Only when channels are decoupled from backend integrations to enable business functions, flows and experiences to live within a customer journey, instead of being hard-coded in multiple channels, will providers will be free to focus on the experience, not the plumbing. We win and the customer wins.