Why & How You need digital Transformation?

Few years ago, I flew to attend a client meeting in Far east. I must say, It was an interesting experience. When I purchased my ticket online, it took me quite a while to enter all the required information. My contact details, my passport information, my credit card details, all re-entered from multiple times. I finally got my ticket, but I couldn't believe that I actually have to print it out and take the hard copy with me. 

At the airport, I saw at the departure board that my plane was delayed, so I tried to find out if I will still reach my connection. Nobody knew, so I ended up standing in line at one of the counters to ask. The assistant told me that there will not be a problem to reach the connection since the other plane is also delayed. Finally, I took my flight. 

After landing, I asked the flight assistant how I can reach my connecting flight only to learn that my other plane has already left the airport without me. I ended up missing my connecting flight and the important meeting I was supposed to go to. 

I don't know about you, but I got unhappy if a product or service isn't working the way I expect it work. I sense that my level of tolerance to bumpy customer experience has decreased. 

Why is this?...... 

We are accustomed to seamless interaction with digital innovation, to Amazon, Netflix, Ubers of the world. We expect everything to work smoothly into greater and intuitively switching to a new Smartphones. 

What does that mean for companies? 

When I talk to some of my clients about what they do in terms of digitization, I sometimes get answers like, "We are making all processes paperless, or we have a whole department for digitization." 

The first thing I asked them is, why? 

Digitization needs to fulfill a business purpose not because it is fashionable. This purpose can be efficiency, getting to the operational excellence. 

The current economic environment in many parts of the world puts more and more pressures on company to become leaner, and digitization can help with that. 

However, I would argue that this must go hand in hand with enhancing customer experience. In fact, a study from the MIT Sloan School of Management found that companies that increases both digital operational excellence and customer experience outperformed industry average net margin by up to 16 percentage point. 

The study also shows that enhancing customer experience alone doesn't get you to the industry average profitability, but focusing on operational excellence doesn't make  you an industry over performer neither. It is doing the two together. 

However, only 25 percent of companies managed to excel in both dimensions. It is hard, but rewarding. This is why it's critical to have an end-to-end approach to digitization. 

One that isn't limited to automating existing processes, but completely rethinking how value is delivered to the end user. 

To help you see the difference clearly, let me give you an example from the last century. 

In the early days of car adoption, driver used to use their hands to indicate that they are about to turn left or turn right. This was the ancestor of the turn light. 

But before getting where we are now, the first step was a pure automation of the human gesture. Cars have mechanical hams in the back, one on the left and one on the right, 

and they move to indicate where the drivers intend to go. 

So, when a business wants to digitize the subscription process for example, 

the elegant solution is not to put that form on an iPad to go paperless. You should rethink the whole process from the lens of what today's customer expect. To achieve this, I invite my clients to shift their mindset from thinking about a process, to thinking about a customer journey. 

What is customer journey? …..

It is a step by step experience a customer goes through to use a service or product. 

It can go from the first inquiry to the after sales service. 

And it is not just about one journey. Every business would typically managed dozens of different customer journeys through different channels for different products and services. 

For a bank for example, there's one customer journey for opening a deposit account, 

one for applying a loan and another one for transferring money. And there's a different set of journeys if you do all those as a business owner versus individual consumer. 

Throughout the journey, the customer is at the center of the universe. And whatever change or automation, you want to make sure the processes should be triggered and assessed from the lens of that consumer. 

Let's go back to my flight and see what I would have loved it to look like. When I search for the tickets online, I could already select different options. Not only which flight and connection I want to take, but also meals, carry on luggage options. My payment details were already preview of 

my last purchase instead of filling them every time again. 

And with just one click, I bought the ticket and downloaded it to my E- wallet instead of printing it out. Also, my calendar was updated automatically with the flight details. 

On that day, I receive a push message that there is a lot of traffic on the way to the airport and that I therefore should leave 20 minutes earlier. The app also informed me about gate changers, delay, chances to reach my connecting flight and alternative connection if I don't. Even though my initial flight was still delayed, I was able to reach my destination city on time through an alternative connection and I would have my successful meetings.

So, how do companies develop great digital end to end customer journey? 

Design thinking is a great option to provides a compelling framework to re-imagine customer journey, with the customer at the center of attention. 

What this means?...

In essence, the design thinking process is iterative, is flexible, and focused on collaboration between designer and user. 

It consists of five steps.

The first stage aims to give the designer team and empathetic understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. 

What is the customer looking for? 

What are the so-called moments of truth? 

What really bothers him or her? 

Is it a complicated online purchase process for the airline ticket? Or is it the missing information on the flight delay? Or both? 

In the next stage, the team analyzes this observation from the first stage and synthesizes them. They might need to re-frame the problem in human centric way or even define a new unmet need that should be tackled. 

In this example of my flight, it is the lack of transparency on gate changes on delay, 

and on alternative connection. 

In the first stage, the ideating stage, the team members start to identify new solution to the problem. 

How could you create transparency? By providing push messages on the smartphone. 

How could the airline go further? Anticipate customer questions. 

In the fourth, the prototyping stage, the team produces a number of inexpensive skill down version of the product or services feature they want to change.

It is an experimental phase, and the aim is to allow rapid improvement on the initial solution. The app I used to buy my tickets and get notification might have just been a "draft version." A minimum viable product. It doesn't need to look fancy, but it incorporated the key features that are important to the customer. 

In the fifth stage, the testing phase, the team tests the prototype in real life condition, 

to see how it impacts the customer experience along the whole journey. 

That is basically a trial and error process. The successful features will be rolled out as skill. 

The failed one should direct the team back to the drawing board, talk to the customer, again, we think new solution, prototype them, testing them and so on. 

This five steps approach is carried out in a very flexible nonlinear fashion, meaning you can always jump back to an earlier step or different groups within the design team may work at different stages depending on their respective features. 

I want to stress that this approach is equally relevant for products and service innovation, 

for back end operations, for go to market, and even re-thinking support function. The difference is that, if we are talking about, which are for example, the end to end digital journey is the internal employee's experience during recruiting, on boarding, skills development, etcetera. 

When companies embark on, the digitization agenda, they need to aim for both higher operational efficiency and better customer experience. This is how companies maximize the value they can generate, versus industry peers. The right lens to rethink value delivery is to shift from focusing on process automation to what they mean for key moments in the end to end customer journey. To re-design a customer journey, digitization teams can follow a five step iterative process centered on the customer needs and feedback.