- In the post-pandemic era, where one needs everything at their fingertips, what can digital transformation do for businesses today to keep up with customer expectations?
Customers today do not have patience for complex, lengthy processes, and long waiting times. From shopping through e-commerce portals, booking flight or movie tickets from home, to even swiftly setting up bank accounts online, customers now desire an “Amazon-like Experience” across channels.
This is where digital transformation becomes a strategic tool for companies. With digital, enterprises can simplify operations, enable seamless customer engagements, and eliminate any form of latency. While digital transformation has been well underway over the past decade, the pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated it. And it is not an option anymore.
- Newgen has published a research report on the State of Digital Transformation. Can you shed some light on the findings?
To get a better insight into the global phenomena of the state of digital transformation (DX), we commissioned Eleven Market Research to survey over 300 respondents split between medium and larger enterprises across the world including the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, and the Asia Pacific. The respondents were primarily senior business and IT leaders, among which around 58% were senior leaders and 42% were C-level executives.
The findings disclosed that digital transformation is at its peak of interest in 2022. While all the organizations surveyed have started engaging with DX in some way or the other, for most of them the actual DX journey started in the past two years. Around 24% of these organizations are at the discussion stage, and another49% are presently transforming. Only 27% said that they have completed their DX efforts.
We rated the surveyed organizations based on the stage each organization was in the DX process and how successfully they digitally transformed simple or complex business processes. One surprising discovery was that almost twice as many top-tier enterprises have started implementing their digital transformation as compared to bottom-tier enterprises. Eight times as many top-tier enterprises have completed their DX implementation than the bottom-tier, despite having a head-start of just two years.
- What should be the priority list of CxOs and digital leaders today to ensure success in their DX initiatives?
Rather than just being a technological advancement, DX is more about reimagining business complexities. It is about how one can smoothly engage with their customers across channels.
Through this survey, we also tried to ascertain the major roadblocks that organizations face in the DX journey. And surprisingly, lack of management support is seen as a major challenge. Given that digital transformation initiatives often run company-wide spanning complex processes, departments, and functions, support from the management is a must. Cybersecurity was another concern that most organizations face as moving from manual to 100% digital increases the threat surface. So DX leaders need to strategize to tighten their cybersecurity measures. Also, DX entails leveraging modern technologies like AI/ML, RPA, low code, and more. Not every organization has the sufficient in-house expertise to drive DX initiatives. So considering a holistic DX platform can be the way around.
DX leaders need to prioritize smoothing out these challenges to see success in their initiatives.
- Transforming business complexity for digital transformation – can you share some in-depth insights on this?
During our evaluation of digital transformation initiatives, we found out that businesses were engaged in transforming varied levels of business complexities in terms of processes, information, and customer engagement.
For instance, it’s easier to transform simple processes (self-service portals for employees), simple information (structured data), and simple engagements with customers (a browser window). However, when it comes to dealing with complex processes like insurance claims adjustment, complex unstructured information, or complex engagement with customers that span across, channels, it’s an entirely different story.
Now the most interesting takeaway was that enterprises (more than 90%) are more focused on transforming the complex part of their business.
- Successful DX enterprises – what are they doing right?
Enterprises succeeding in their DX endeavors tend to keep customer experience as their primary focus and commit to their digital transformation initiatives. They tend to undertake end-to-end transformations instead of just front or back end and focus on transforming complexities.
Successful DX enterprises have embraced low code to keep up with the constantly evolving business needs as it helps organizations to take their products and services faster to market.
