A lot has been talked about digital transformation in the past few years. There are several examples of businesses that came out on top and those that failed. The prominent examples would be Amazon and Dominos on the side and Kodak and GE on the other side.
Amazon started by selling books online and wanted to disrupt the traditional bookstore businesses – it was a fool’s errand, or so everyone thought. Amazon’s real purpose was to understand consumer needs and tailor-fit their services to meet those needs.
By focusing their goals on customer pain points, Amazon was able to leverage the internal infrastructure and organizational capabilities to create an efficient solution – the AWS cloud. Today, it leads both cloud and retail businesses.
Domino’s pizza is another success story. While pizza can’t be replaced by a digital alternative, the company realized that it could improve its customer experience by streamlining the steps needed for ordering pizza by transforming the overall experience it delivered to its customers.
On the other end of the spectrum is Kodak. It used to be a leader in all things related to camera and technology. The company didn’t lack innovation in terms of technology. What they lacked was a customer-centric business model and failed to respond to the disruptive marketing trends that soon became a norm, thanks to Amazon.
The Impact of Digital Business Strategy for Enterprises
The blueprint of digital transformation rests entirely on accessing and building the right organizational capabilities that bring a customer-centric mindset to the core of the business. Many companies claim to have big technical teams assisting them in operations and management but are they creating customer-centric solutions?
According to experts at Altimeter in 2018-2019, understanding customer behaviour and preferences was a top factor of digital transformation efforts. Yet a large number of companies haven’t studied customer journey nor used it to define their transformation agenda.
Creating a New Digital Business Strategy
This means that technology on its own is not sufficient to bring about digital transformation. While technology is an important aspect of digital transformation, the other crucial ingredient is to identify customer needs and align the business strategy with those changing needs.
To summarize, there are three key objectives of digital transformation:
Improving customer experience to improve repeat business
Improving the internal process of a business to improve the employee experience & profitability
Creating new business models to drive new revenue streams
Kodak’s failure in the new business establishes one thing: it’s not about who has the bigger IT teams. It’s about having a mindset and framework that digs deep into customer needs and then ties them together into the business model, like at Refresh ideas.
To facilitate successful digital transformation, we use Discovery, Build Customer Persona, Work on Business lean canvas, and other tools to enable a design process that puts your customer at the centre of everything.
A clear digital transformation strategy accounts for bold decision making and lays out the complete map for strengths, weaknesses, responsibilities, budgets, skills, timeline, and actions to be taken for propelling businesses in the right direction.
Are you ready to take a customer-centric approach for your business? Get in touch with the experts at Refresh Ideas.
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