Considerations, Risks, and Benefits of Digital Transformation

A strong digital transformation strategy to usher a company into the digital age is critical for the company’s legacy. While digital transformation is not a golden ticket to success, it is necessary to compete in today’s environment.

“Digital” is a way of working. This three-part series on digital provides insight on the following:

• Why organizations hesitate to go digital
• Consequences on not going digital
• Considerations, risks and benefits of digital transformation

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There are clear benefits and risks to going digital.

Benefits: 

• Going digital allows companies to offer a personalized, connected customer journey
• Technology will continue to change, and today’s upgrades are much more fluid than legacy systems
• Systems are scalable
• The ability to increase revenue and efficiencies, as well as improve agent/employee satisfaction
• Improve customer satisfaction/experiences
• Streamline operations
• If there is an issue or outage, a company is not on complete hold; maintenance and upgrades can happen without downtime
• Simpler integrations
• Edge over competitors

Risks: 

• The risk of not going digital is costly. Competitors who made the move to more modern systems are ahead
• Risks of maintaining legacy/ on-premises: outdated, difficult to scale, and expensive to maintain, difficult to integrate with modern cloud software investments

 To end this three-part digital series, below are some considerations for digitally transforming a company contact center.

Going digital doesn’t mean changing a company’s identity

Pay attention to your company’s core competencies, strengths & opportunities, and focus on who you are and who you want to be. Don’t get stuck with wanting to be “Amazon” or “Apple” or the “Amazon/Apple of your industry.” When needed, bring in subject matter experts. Examples include cloud infrastructure providers, call center solution experts, CX Experts, etc.

Build out a strategy to get off legacy and onto a new, digitally transformed platform

Understand your digital transformation objectives and marry business and technology in the final deliverable. As you build out a strategy, research industry and non-industry trends as well as the key technologies. Consider what risks leadership is willing to take before, during and after executing the plan. Honestly evaluate current customer experiences and how digitally transforming your contact center will improve that experience. Ask yourselves:

• What are the current pain points?
• What do you want your reputation to be?
• How can you turn your customers into promoters?

Define your outcomes, timeline, metrics, roles, and digital road-map, including expectations, roles and responsibilities, and timing. And, make sure you define how you will manage, communicate and support the change.

Include organizational change management at the beginning

While digital transformation is about technology, it is more about change. With the excitement, angst, and anticipation of a large change, it is easy to focus on the new technology and forget to invest in those that are impacted by and need to adopt the change. Hence, invest in your people; make sure they are aware of the change, and even if they don’t like it, at least understand the necessity of it. Equip them with tools, materials, and training to understand it and act. And, reinforce the messages, behavior changes, etc.

Embracing an organizational change management plan requires both stakeholder support and a targeted, strategic communication strategy. Leadership buy-in and constant, two-way communication is essential to change adoption. Consider conducting pulse-surveys or asking employees – especially those ‘young’ in tenure – if they see your company as change resistant or not, as they are often not yet ingrained in your culture.

In conclusion, becoming digital is about understanding and leveraging consumer and third-party insights, incorporating current and new technologies to digitize the business, and enhancing the customer and associate experience.

By seeing ideas through to fruition and shifting employees’ mindsets about technology and the way they work, you will ensure your company is positioned today and well into the future.

A digital transformation strategy and new solutions to see it come to fruition are long-term investments. Current contact center solutions are built to adapt. A company may not use all tools today, but leaders want to make sure they have the ability to adapt to continue to provide expected customer experiences.