Every industry is experiencing transformation. With digital technology influencing every aspect of human life, organizations are presented with endless opportunities and competitive challenges. Embracing digital transformation is the obvious way forward. But the question that organizations are asking is how they can be more strategic in their digital transformation efforts to maximize the value of digital technologies. Data is the answer.
Data is a core element of digital transformation. From planning and implementing to measuring digital transformation strategies – data provides direction at each step of the digital transformation journey.
Why should digital transformation be data-driven?
Data-driven organizations are becoming serious competitors. They are capable of building specifications, time-frames, and budgets in unmatchable ways. Consider today’s market disruptors like Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb. They control about 80% of the world’s data, giving them an edge over smaller companies. This is helping them identify customers’ unmet needs and deliver more personalized experiences than lesser-established companies.
The transportation industry, for example, faces disruption from AI-powered autonomous vehicles. What is the main driver of AI products? That’s right – data.
A data-driven digital strategy empowers companies to prioritize transformation projects better, collaborate more effectively, and, above all, have the right vision.
What does it mean in practice?
There are several outcomes associated with digital transformation: improving products and services, customer experiences, and business processes. Let’s look at how data impacts these outcomes.
Products and services
Businesses that want to achieve greater growth must ask themselves how data can enable the products and services they offer. This could mean a simple evaluation to understand if those products leverage technology and data to deliver better performance.
For example, if it’s an app or SaaS platform, you need data to:
- Evaluate new digital technologies that can enhance the product
- Benchmark with the competition to identify improvement areas
- Identify unmet customer needs
Customer experience
Data drives how organizations engage with customers. Gathering the right data allows organizations to measure their current performance, benchmark themselves against the competition, and set goals for customer experience transformations.
In practice, this could mean using tools such as Google Analytics and Omniture to answer questions like:
- How long are customers staying on our website?
- What are they reading?
- Where do they get bogged down?
These insights can answer the ‘what’ about your customer experience. To get to the ‘why’, thereby, determining ‘what next’, it’s important to collect customer data through qualitative and quantitative research. This means getting answers to questions like:
- Do customers find what they are looking for on our website?
- How easily are their questions answered?
- What alternatives are available to them?
Culture
Digital transformation is incomplete without a digital culture. A recent study by BCG showed that companies that focused on culture were 5x more likely to achieve high-impact digital transformation than companies that neglected it. What role does data play in fostering a digital culture?
Data can provide answers to questions like:
- How aligned are employees with the organization’s vision?
- Do they have the resources and support available to them to think digital?
- What are the metrics to help drive their own performance?
- Is the organization investing enough to recruit digital talent?
Answers to these questions allow business leaders to adopt new behaviors to achieve true digital transformation.
Processes
Improving business processes is another major goal for digital transformation. Among other decisions, organizations need to identify the right focus of processes, measures for success, and technologies that can improve processes. Data is foundational for all of those decisions.
Most of the data required for strategic digital transformation comes from outside the company, such as customer wants and needs, competitive activity, and industry changes. Combined with internal data, such as product usage and multi-channel CRM data, organizations can truly achieve digital transformation success.
Case example: Domino’s
Domino’s Pizza has been synonymous with convenience and speed of delivery. To be closer to its customers, Domino’s introduced the possibility of ordering pizza online and directly through its mobile app. It might seem mainstream today, but back then it was the first time a customer could order food over the phone without speaking to anyone.
Domino’s has executed its digital strategy perfectly, giving customers the ability to order pizza through as many channels as possible.
In 2014, the company launched an iPad app that let users customize their pizzas. After that, the company began experimenting with what would become its Anyware campaign. Now, you can order pizza with a tweet or smartwatch. This has now expanded to include ordering via Google Home, Alexa, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and many more channels.
The digital strategy of Domino’s Pizza is built around the customer and its experience. Based on data analytics, the company discovered that 80% of its customers order the same pizza every time. That’s when they introduced Push for pizza on its ‘Zero Clicks’ app, allowing users to order pizza in just 20 minutes.
Companies like Netscribes provide the tools and teams to enable rapid access and processing of data – both external and internal to the organization – to support data-driven digital transformations. Through our research and analytics expertise, our clients can better prevent surprises when accelerators, disruptors, social challenges, customer trends, and technologies become threats, challenges, or opportunities. Speak to us to learn more.
Also read:
How an integrated insights solution can help firms realize their strategic transformation goals
