DigitalTransformationTalk: Ensuring your transformation efforts deliver customer results

On 21 May 2024, Digital Transformation host Kevin Crane was joined by Tom Andriola, Chief Digital Officer, UC Irvine; Kirsten Jepson, Fractional Product Marketing Leader, Consultant; and Ishan Sellahewa, Digital Transformation Business Manager, SA Partners.

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The root cause of corporate teams being outrun by start-ups and the closure of corporate innovation labs is the disconnect between strategy and innovation. In fact, corporate innovation cannot begin with blue-sky thinking and proceed with the independence of a startup. Instead, companies must learn to link every innovation effort to two pillars of strategy: a clear set of growth priorities, and an understanding of the firm’s unique advantages. It also needs to play to the strengths of the firm, whether it’s customer relations, data or supply chains.

It takes good communication across the company, so everyone understands what the priorities of innovation are, as well as certain guardrails around innovation programmes. Rewarding innovation is also critical. And communication shouldn’t just be about what the strategy is but the why as well to avoid people making their own assumptions.

Aligning technological deployment and employees

First you must understand what the outcomes that you’re looking for are and identify the processes that will deliver them. As digital technology enables us to practically measure everything, it’s easy today to establish a baseline. Prioritising processes that need to be digitally transformed and in what order, however, are the greatest challenges. Before digitalisation, you must improve your processes to make them efficient and consistent.

On the other hand, happier employees who are also bought into the culture will result in better customer experiences. To measure these, there are metrics such as attrition, MPS (maximum potential score) and CS (customer success). Surveys of customer and employee satisfaction are also key to see whether employees come to work every day with curiosity and a drive to achieve continuous improvement. Beside KPIs, you need to measure KBIs or key behavioural indicators as well.

What you must avoid, though, is the shiny toy syndrome. Therefore, you need to ask some basic questions when committing to tools and their suppliers – for example, is the tool fit for what the company is trying to accomplish? It’s also worth bearing in mind that only about 20 per cent of the functionalities that digital tools have are utilised when they are deployed. So, it’s a good idea to aim for leveraging existing tools to the full before shopping for new ones.

Always keep the chain of purpose in mind starting with a digital transformation that is going to help deliver certain success factors, which will contribute to executing on business strategy. Also, if you want to move a big ship, messaging your staff and stakeholders becomes crucial and you must also ensure that the workforce has adopted a growth mindset. Benefits of innovation should be shared with both employees and end users.

SMEs must make even harder choices when it comes to new technology as they have bigger budget constraints. But luckily, there are low-cost and open source tools now, just think of GenAI, which can be leveraged for innovation. GenAI is also revolutionary because it enables people to use their own language and create prompts that helps them write code, which will increasingly result in less need for specialised coders. Low-code and no-code technologies are very helpful too. 

The panel’s advice

• You can’t improve anything without knowing where you currently stand.  
• Never automate your inefficiencies.
• Double down on training and development throughout the organisation in order to rewire people’s mindset.