Four Reasons Why Your DX Project Is Slipping

In an era when digitization is transforming industry infrastructures, company owners might be tempted to get on board immediately and implement the latest technologies in a competitive frenzy. Hasty reactions as a result of panic can be financially devastating. It can also mar its long-time feasibility.

Sometimes, putting too much effort to win through technology is the ultimate reason for digital transformation failure. Technology has paved the way for innovation. But it should essentially enable all-embracing business strategies as well.

To achieve this, companies need to focus on four fundamentals below. When combined with technology, they can revolutionize digital transformation.

1. Design Thinking across Multiple Customer Touchpoints

You might come across diverse explanations and meanings for "touchpoint" in the field of marketing and customer experience design. It is quite like a plethora of flavors offered in an average restaurant menu. This is because there has been a rapid evolution in these disciplines over the last few decades. 

In lucid terms, a touchpoint is communications that might modify the way your clients feel about your brand, business, and products. Uber is a company that is a perfect example of design thinking across multiple customer touchpoints. Uber's disruption of the taxi industry was a demonstration of empathy rather than a sheer business strategy.

A startup back in 2009, the company decoded the factors that frustrated riders like erratic waiting time while hailing, dissatisfactory ways of lodging complaints and payments in cash. Their solution was a speedy, transparent, and convenient mobile app with booking facilities, in-app feedback options, and cashless payments. Design thinking, in such cases, has little to do with an artistic taste. Instead, it is more about resolving customer-oriented problems.

Adapting to design thinking demands detailed inspection of the present services, products, and systems of your company from the standpoint of an end-user. Once you successfully identify the bottlenecks and customer touchpoints, effective digital marketing solutions naturally come your way. You do not just derive additional strategic investments; you get to deliver real customer value with a competitive edge. 

The fundamental business model by Uber is rooted in numerous technologies like payment integration, mobile, and geolocation. Nevertheless, the essential services provided by Uber stem out of an awareness of customer expectations, needs, and problems – collectively called design thinking.

2.  Design-to-zero for a Frictionless Customer Journey

Customer expectations have been on a high, keeping up with the explosion of to-the-doorstep, on-demand, and mobile services, to which companies must acclimatize. With "frictionless" customer journeys being the new success standard, businesses are looking to reduce the human touch and minimize inefficiencies. 

So how can companies re-design the business process to minimize human touch? The primary objective of design-to-zero is not to eliminate inter-personalization from the customer journey.  It merely involves a strategic deployment of digital skills to enhance the customer experience from the moment of engagement.  Conceptualizing from the customer's point of view helps figure out the pain points with ease.

3. Product Modularization

Starting with product architecture and modularization frameworks can help to identify the common elements in products. These become the basis of modularity. In turn, they allow better simplification of products while driving greater reuse of product modules.

Modularity combines business aspects with technical aspects. It allows the analysis of data from this very intersection and involves both management and design of product modularity.

4. Data

Speed is one of the most vital aspects of digital transformation. As a company prospers, it tends to move faster in an automated world as the associations formed in data start to emerge. It then allows the proper transformation of what the business stands for.

A data-driven market allows on-time and complete end-to-end customer experience. A robust end-to-end data model, which links customers to services and services to resources consistently across the technology components, a solid understanding of the data migration approach and expertise in data wrangling are critical for success.

Digital transformation is poised to benefit both companies and end-users. The road to success has hurdles. However, taking into consideration the four vital elements of design thinking, design to zero, product modularisation, and data, will ensure that these hurdles are leveled, thus, improving the odds of success.

Sundi Balu, partner at DigiB, contributed this article. DigiB focuses on helping telecommunications service providers succeed in digital transformation, including building sustainable internal capability.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends.