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With the growth of digital transformation, businesses are being forced to move into new business models and working methods. Clearly, the ability to implement decisions rapidly, adaptively, and the willingness to embrace and leverage change are all crucial to an organization’s global competitiveness. Since we have discussed the goal of digital transformation and the approaches to achieving it in previous blog posts of this series, we will continue to illustrate the benchmarks of the digital transformation movement and recommend a guide for business and technology executives to identify areas in need of improvement in this chapter.
This part of the Digital Transformation series is the collaborative effort between SimiCart and Magenest thanks to valuable resources from Prophet. We are always trying our best to bring the latest data and insights to our valuable readers and hopefully, this article can help you get real insights into the most updated data of the digital transformation stage.
How does company create value from digital customer data?
The capacity to use data effectively is maybe the most significant skill gap between top performers and average performers. In fact, the majority of businesses (28%) can use digital data to track key performance indicators such as reach and engagement across various digital platforms. However, they struggle with more advanced data practices, such as leveraging it to optimize content and customize messaging/experiences in real-time.
In addition, the top performers are also substantially more likely to use Al to produce predictive insights that enable real-time interactions (35% versus 15%) than average performers. It demonstrates how Al is becoming increasingly popular as a tool for improving analytics and informing decisions in the business world.
This advanced capability in Al can only be reached through early investments in Al-powered tools or features. It also necessitates a culture that does not despise Al and views it as an augmentative insights method rather than a replacement for existing ones.
How the organization is transforming employee collaboration and engagement?
The notable difference here is between average performers who just provided adequate means for employees to communicate (36%) and successful companies that intentionally invested in employee engagement in order to foster alignment around a common goal (40%).
The key insight is that the transformation will succeed when they are focused on a common and clear objective, rather than for the sake of platform updates only. Changing the way people work together is more likely to succeed if everyone is aware of the benefits and expected outcomes of the changes. This formal approach to transformation also applies to customer-facing transformations, which is why it’s no surprise that top performers have prioritized both employee and customer experiences in a similar way.
Which executive officially owns or sponsors the digital transformation initiative?
Businesses that successfully transformed their digital operations were significantly more likely to have the CEO lead the transition (34%). With average performers, the CIO or CTO is most likely to be the one in charge (34% of the time).
As a result, there is a clear distinction between a transformation program that is driven by technology (most likely with the CIO/CTO agenda) and one that is driven by a top-down vision and purpose for the organization. The CEO seems to be the best person to carry out the latter task successfully.
Additionally, the CEO (with the assistance of an open-minded board of directors) can allocate resources and manage an overall transformation, rather than leaving it to functional roles like CIO, CXO, or CMO. While these executives are empowered individually, they will always be constrained to transforming their own departments and will be ill-equipped to deal with the increasingly convergent transformations of other departments and functions.
Transformative success requires a culture of agility and autonomy
The majority of businesses (31%) are aware that they must alter their corporate culture in order to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change. There are several ways to achieve this goal, including raising employee digital literacy and allowing them to experiment with new tools and technology as well as to respond quickly to changes in the business environment.
In fact, 37% of high performers had a culture in which employees could quickly respond to customer encounters and launch experiments with minimal supervision compared to only 5% of medium performers.
By encouraging this level of autonomy and risk-taking, businesses not only promote innovation in their products, business models, and processes but also make it easier to place larger changes to the whole business or organization. It is better to implement small changes at a time in order to create confidence and overcome resistance from skeptical employees than to implement large changes all at once.
A majority of companies use a converged customer journey map, spanning several functions
Multiple customer-facing tasks (such as sales, service, and marketing) are becoming increasingly convergent and interdependent, which is a critical development that most businesses have identified and are presently planning for.
The first stage in preparation for convergence is to create a single digital customer journey map, which is drawn across all of the digital touchpoints maintained by the various services. More than two-thirds of organizations (26%) have already completed this exercise and are utilizing it to continually improve their unified digital customer experience.
As you can see from the graph, top-performing companies are even more advanced, with 42% relying on artificial intelligence to get insights from the unified customer journey and continuously improve the experience for their customers.
The current state of digital marketing operations
When it comes to digital marketing, corporations have made significant progress compared to any other business activity. The majority (30%) can operate “always-on” ads that respond to client interactions in real-time via data-driven, customized messaging or experiences. Furthermore, they have the ability to run these ads in a coordinated manner across a variety of digital media.
Besides, more advanced and top-performing organizations are delivering personalized, real-time messaging and experiences to customers through both traditional and innovative channels such as in-store or in-product interactions. These companies can also get data from additional sources and create content in different formats.
Companies are investing more in data leadership and prescriptive analytic capabilities
Using data to make prescriptive decisions is the main difference between top-performing companies and average performers. In other words, it is the ability to use analytics to make or automate decisions that improve operations such as providing an excellent customer experience, developing a new product, or establishing new strategies. At this point, only a third of the average-performing organizations (34%) have made this shift yet.
In contrast, 39% of the world’s best-performing companies are at the maximum degree of maturity, meaning they have put in place processes and systems that allow the entire organization to consistently create value from data. For an organization to reach this level, a few important aspects must be in place, including data science leadership, a clear strategy for how to use data, and platforms that can store multi-source data, do analysis, and generate recommendations that are accessible to the entire organization.
There is increasing convergence between marketing, sales, and service goals and operations
Most top performers (40%) have completely embraced the convergence of their sales, service, and marketing teams, allowing them to share revenue targets and operate under a single set of strategies to engage with customers and create possibilities for cross-selling and upselling.
Because all customer-facing functions are becoming increasingly digitally sophisticated, this convergence is an inevitable byproduct of that evolution. Each one interacts with the customer across a variety of digital channels and must give individualized, relevant messages or experiences in order to elicit a positive response or move the customer forward. Due to a large number of similar objectives, including target audiences, and content strategies, it makes sense for marketing, sales, and customer service to combine their efforts and work in a much more integrated manner than they did previously.
While businesses as a whole have made progress toward this level of convergence, the majority (28%) continue to focus on shared objectives such as customer satisfaction and revenue rather than unified operational plans.
In Conclusion
For the next phase of transformation, digitally mature companies almost look to invest in data-driven decisions, optimize the customer and employee experience, and develop external alliances and networks. So, if your digital maturity benchmarks show that you can do better, Simicart and Magenest will be the best partners to assist you in gaining a high-level overview of the organization’s preparation for digital transformation and transformational change. In the final chapter, we will focus mainly on future investment as well as come up with some key insights for businesses to take full advantage of the opportunities of digitalization. Don’t miss it!
