Role of Mobile in Digital Transformation

Our world has become increasingly digital. 

The mobile-first strategy is no longer valid as we live in the mobile-only world.

Today a number of people having mobile phones on the planet is much bigger than bank account holders or credit cardholders globally.

People use mobile devices as Swiss pocket knives: they serve a range of needs, activities, and purposes.

We shop and buy more of our products online or via mobile, we decide where to eat, buy a car, and hire a plumber by looking at the app digitally. Any critical decision that is made, a credit decision, admissions into a top university, accessing your social security benefits statement, etc. are all made electronically.

With the proliferation of new digital platforms, businesses are forced to rethink their physical presence. Gone are the days where you just have an app and a website: it’s vital now that mobile’s role is understood within the larger digital ecosystem.

Mobile is now present along every step of the end-to-end customer journey, from research and inspiration to return. Mobile is one of the most important touchpoints in the customer lifecycle.

Mobile has already stormed the Banking, Travel, Retail industries. Mobile has become an integral part of the shopping experience as consumers spend more time with mobile devices than with desktop and laptops combined.

Users leave billions of data points, which brands use, by applying analytics to personalize & keep them actively engaged to generate revenue. Integrating social media networking channels with mobile apps would further allow the consumers to interact freely with the enterprise, paying the way for increased brand loyalty.

With so many advances in mobiles, the mCommerce has also changed the face. Since the launch of the iPhone, mobile commerce has moved from sheer text messages to apps. There are so many uses for ticketing, money transfers, information services like news, stocks, traffic alerts, etc.

Mobile payments have gained momentum and as more options become available, usage is set to surge. Consumers are adopting mobile wallet apps, Google wallets, smartwatches and devices with Apple Pay, Samsung Pay t capabilities.

Mobile brings various advantages like portability, instant connectivity, personalization & localization of services. Further, it allows businesses to be visible to the customer at all times, build brand and recognition.

Even at work and out of office employees can benefit from mobile access to information, work from anywhere, reduce traveling and increase overall efficiency. While an organization can benefit from easy collaboration with team members, helping sales folks with quick information at their fingertips.

Businesses are focused on delivering growth and profitability with faster; better decision-making, & mobile technologies appear to be in the driver’s seat in this Digital Age.

How do you measure the success of Digital Transformation?

Digitization is disrupting every business and is spreading like a wildfire across every sector such as Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Retail, and Manufacturing.

Digital Transformation does not happen overnight. It is a continuous process. That is why it is very hard to plan too far ahead in a digital transformation program. The technology is evolving so rapidly that your plans will certainly change.

How do you measure return on digital transformation in order to make the timely course correction and improve its success rate? It is even more important that people who will measure the progress know the actual meaning of digital and customer behavior. You will be surprised to know that how many employees/leaders take the customer journey themselves – buying an online policy on their own website, purchasing a merchandise or calling their own customer center to complain.

One of the ways is to break the long-term plan into small doable projects with specific KPI’s. These should not last more than six months.

While traditional metrics of revenue, costs, customer satisfaction should be measured, companies should move beyond these quarterly revenue and margin guidance as they keep pulling them back to short-term tactical focus. The new metrics have to be added to get the right control and visibility of progress.

Some of the new metrics which can be considered are:

·       % of marketing spend that is digital

·       Brand value in the market

·       Reach of an organization in the market

·       Digital maturity quotient of the employees including board and senior leaders 

·       % revenue through digital channels

·       Contribution to digital initiatives from each department like purchasing, finance, HR, IT, Sales & Marketing

Customer Focus:

·       Net promoter score

·       Rate of new customer acquisition

·       Number of customer touch points addressed to improve customer experience positively

·       % increase in customer engagement in digital channels

·       Reduction in time to market new products to customers

·       Change in customer behavior over time across channels

Return on innovation:

·       % of revenue from new products/services introduced

·       % of the profit from new ideas implemented

·       Number of innovative ideas reach concept to implementation

·       Number of new products or services launched in the market

·       Number of new business models adopted for a different class of customers

·       Rate of new apps and APIs to offer new products/services inside and outside the company

Always keep these metrics simple and measure the right things and celebrate even the small successes so employees are motivated.

A digital transformation is a big culture change so there is plenty of fear which leads to resistance. Such inertia has to be changed with clear communication, as to why it is needed to change and what benefits it will bring to each department and employee.

A lack of urgency is the greatest obstacle businesses face when considering the value of digital transformation. Proper planning is important but more than that execution as per the KPIs you select, is what take you through.

How to measure Digital Transformation maturity?

The digital revolution has created significant opportunities and threats for every industry. Companies that cannot or do not make significant changes faster to their business model in response to a disruption are unlikely to survive

It is extremely important to do digital maturity assessment before embarking on digital transformation.

Digital leaders must respond to the clear and present threat of digital disruption by transforming their businesses. They must embed digital capabilities into the very heart of their business, making digital a core competency, not a bolt-on. Creating lasting transformative digital capabilities requires you to build a customer-centric culture within your organization.

This requires new capabilities that organizations need to acquire and develop which include disruptive technologies like Big Data, Analytics, Internet of Things, newer business models.

Digital maturity model measures the readiness of the organization to attain higher value in digital customer engagement, digital operations or digital services. It helps in the incremental adoption of digital technologies and processes to drive competitive strategies, greater operationally agility and respond to rapidly changing market conditions.

Business can use the maturity model to define the roadmap, measuring progress on the milestones.

The levels of maturity can be defined as per multiple reports available and adopt the ones which make more sense to your business.

·     Level 1: Project-based solutions are developed for a particular problem, no integration to homegrown systems, unaware of risks and opportunities

·     Level 2: Departmentalized projects but still not known to the organization, little integration

·     Level 3: Solutions are shared between the departments for a common business problem, better integration

·     Level 4: Organization wide efforts of digital, highly integrated, adaptive culture for fail fast  and improve

·     Level 5: Driven by CXOs, customer-centric and complete transformation changes happen to the organization

Here are the 7 categories on which business should ask questions to all the stakeholders to gauge the maturity of Digital Transformation and identify the improvement and priorities.

1.   Strategy & Roadmap - how the business operates or transforms to increase its competitive advantage through digital initiatives which are embedded within the overall business strategy

2.   Customer – Are you providing experience to customers on their preferred channels, online, offline, anytime on any device

3.   Technology – Relevant tools and technologies to make data available across all the systems

4.   Culture – Do you have the organization structure and culture to drive the digital top down

5.   Operations – Digitizing & automating the processes to enhance business efficiency and effectiveness.

6.   Partners – Are you utilizing right partners to augment your expertise

7.   Innovation – How employees are encouraged to bring continuous innovation to how they serve the customers

Finally, you know when you are digitally transformed?

·             When there is nobody having “Digital” in their title

·             There is no marketing focused on digital within the organization

·             There is no separate digital strategy than the company’s business strategy

Customer 360º view in Digital age

In today’s digital age of customer hyper-personalization, organizations identify opportunities for real time engagement based on data-driven understanding of customer behavior.

Customers have taken control of their purchase process. With websites, blogs, Facebook updates, online reviews and more, they use multiple sources of information to make decisions and often engage with a brand dozens of times between inspiration and purchase.

It’s important that organizations collect every customer interaction in order to identify sentiments of happy & unhappy customers.

Companies can get a complete 360º view of customers by aggregating data from the various touch points that a customer may use, to contact a company to purchase products and receive service/support.

This Customer 360º snapshot should include:

• Identity: name, location, gender, age and other demographic data
• Relationships: their influence, connections, associations with others
• Current activity: orders, complaints, deliveries, returns
• History: contacts, campaigns, processes, cases across all lines of business and channels
• Value: which products or services they are associated with, including history
• Flags: prompts to give context, e.g. churn propensity, up-sell options, fraud risk, mood of last interactions, complaint record, frequency of contact
• Actions: expected, likely or essential steps based on who they are and the fact they are calling now

The 360º view of customers, also often requires a big data analytics strategy to marry structured data (data that can reside in the rows and columns of a database), with unstructured data (data like audio files, video files, social media data). 

Many companies like Nestle, Toyota are using social media listening tools to gather what customers are saying on sites like Facebook and Twitter, predictive analytics tools to determine what customers may research or purchase next.

What are the returns of Customer 360º:

• All customer touch point data in a single repository for fast queries
• Next best actions or recommendations for customers
• All key metrics in a single location for business users to know and advise customers
• Intuitive and customizable dashboards for quick insights
• Real time hyper personalized customer interaction
• Enhanced customer loyalty

Customer 360º helps achieve Single View of Customer across Channels – online, stores, marketplaces, Devices – wearables, mobile, tablets, laptops & Interactions – purchase, posts, likes, feedback, service.

This is further used for customer analytics – predict churn, retention, next best action, cross-sell & up-sell opportunities, profitability, life time value.

Global leaders in customer experience are Apple, Disney, Emirates.

A word of caution though - Focus & collect only that customer data, which can help to improve the customer journey.

A to Z of Digital Transformation

Today every part of the business is subject to new expectations, competitors, channels, threats, and opportunities. Every business has the potential to be a digital business.  

Businesses that digitally transform will be able to connect more closely with customers, speed up the pace of innovation and, as a result, claim a greater share of profit in their sectors. Today digitally transformed companies have an edge; tomorrow, only digital businesses will succeed.

Here is my version of A-Z of Digital Transformation.

Artificial Intelligence: AI is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. BMW, Tesla, Google are using AI for self-driving cars. AI should be used to solve real-world tough problems like climate modeling to disease analysis and betterment of humanity

Big Data: This serves as a foundational backbone for digital transformation. Hyper-personalization and real-time recommendations based on the geo-location of the customers will be the key to success. Big Data Analytics is driving force for action.

Customer Centricity: The most important theme of digital transformation is it should be customer focused with a consistent, enjoyable and very personal experience to customers.

Disruption: Digital has disrupted many businesses so far who did not take it seriously like Blockbuster, Kodak, Borders and brought new leaders on the horizon like Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, Spotify.

Employee-driven: Digital Transformation will be successful only when employees are involved, educated and empowered to enhance the customer experience.

Fail Fast: Digital is all about deploying quick PoCs and check the outcome. If it does not work then drop the concept/idea and move on to a new one. Be prepared to change the pace or direction as necessary.

Growth Hacking: Focuses on building products that fit the market needs, with a viral push to market with a very simple idea & all the digital tools like email, tweets, blogs. Zynga used FB alerts and online adverts while DropBox offered extra storage space for referring friends for growth.

Hyper-personalization: Use of browsing histories, past purchases, social media data, and internal customer data to provide more personalized and targeted products, services, and content. It is about being relevant at the right place and the right time to the right person.

Internet of things: All the businesses are aiming at reaching their Customers anywhere, anytime, any platform with any device.  All such smart devices or physical objects that are connected to the internet, are continuously emitting data and communicating with each other. IoT based real-time predictive maintenance in manufacturing is becoming important to save costs and downtime.

Journey Maps: Creating customer journey maps is the prime and initial milestone for digital transformation where you understand the pitfalls and pain points with every touch point you have with customers. Once they are in place then plan with most impacting problems.

KNN: K nearest neighbor algorithm in Machine Learning used for classification problems based on distance or similarity between data points.

Leadership Support: Without actual drive from CEO and Board members, digital will not move further as it involves cultural business transformation.

Mobile First: Today we live in “always on, always connected” world, and use mobile for almost everything. We spend more time on mobile than any other digital channel. Start your digital implementation with mobile first in mind. More than half of the world population is on mobile now and

NFC: Near Field Communication used for a contactless, WiFi-style technology that could already be in your smartphone. A few years from now your credit cards, bus pass, train tickets, loyalty cards for high street coffee shops will be gone due to digital transformation and you only carry your phone.

Omni-Channel: It is about true continuity of customer’s experience even when they flip channels to complete a single transaction. Disney, Virgin Atlantic, Starbucks are great examples of Omni-Channel digital transformation.

Prioritize: Spend where you’ll make the biggest difference for the business. Small and quick successes will be drivers for digital transformation.

Quality: Quality of data collected by all the channels is extremely important in digital transformation for generating meaningful insights. Garbage in, Garbage Out still remains valid in the digital age.

Robotics: Robots are machines with programmed movements that allow them to move in certain directions or sequences. Artificial intelligence has given robots more ability to process information and to learn.

Sentiment Analytics: Sentiment analysis is all about helping companies gain better insights into their customers, and helping them to bridge the gap between insight and action by analyzing positive and negative sentiments.

Talent: To deliver on the digital transformation, organization have to get the right talent. As Jim Collins said in his book “Good to Great”, get the right people in the bus put them in right sits and then decide where the bus will go.

User Experience: This is extremely important considering the focus on the customer. Use of responsive web designs to adjust to any screen sizes with ease, make the website accessible on any platform, intuitive and pleasant to use is the key.

Virtual Reality: Virtual Reality is making a lot of impact on the world we live in today. Everything that we know about our reality comes by way of our 5 senses – Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch & Taste. Today Real Estate, Travel companies are coming up with VR gadgets to give the feel of virtual walks of houses or destinations like Eiffel tower / or Grand Canyon experience on your living room couch.

Wearables: They come in various forms, like smart watches, health trackers, Google Glass, interactive clothing, gesture controllers and the list goes on. Sooner or later, all of us are identified by the data we generate, and wearables represent a quantum leap in the type and quantity of data collected — which is both an interesting and a scary proposition

Xamarin: A modern programming language for iOS, Android & Windows mobile platforms.

Yarn: The earlier map-reduce has undergone a complete overhaul and now called yarn that allows multiple data processing engines such as interactive SQL, real-time streaming, data science and batch processing to handle data stored in a single platform.

ZooKeeper: ZooKeeper is a Hadoop centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services.

Digital Transformation brings changes in product creation and delivery, changes in IT infrastructure, changes in the consumption and payment methods to ‘go digital’.

Do you need a Chief Digital Officer?

Today introducing basic digital capabilities and creating some pilots for customer interaction are days of the past. The challenges of the new digital age make the jumping on Digital Transformation inevitable and subsequently the need of executive like Chief Digital Officer is a no-brainer.

The recent times have seen the rise of the Chief Digital Officer, who sits next to CEO and is seen as instrumental to the future of the organization.

Traditionally, for the past several years digital was looked up as ownership of the marketing function, responsible for driving the organization’s online presence and connecting with customers, but now it is every department that has to contribute to digital enablement of customer journeys.

The spike in demand for Chief Digital Officers has been felt globally to drive digital across the organization.

Some of the CDO responsibilities are as below but not limited to:

• Define the digital strategy
• Map the digital capabilities to business strategy
• Leads digital transformation and customer centricity
• Providing detailed analysis of industry trends and developments in technology and customer behavior, both inside and outside the business sector
• Deliver analytics across customer touch points to enable better business decisions and enhance the customer experience  
• Use of all the digital transformation technologies like Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Internet of Things, API, UX etc.
• Responsible for the strategy for digital consumers, identify and implement relevant Omni-channel solutions 
• Embark on use of latest trends of Robotics, Drones, Artificial Intelligence, Beacons or NFC based payments, Blockchain etc

As digital is becoming a norm, every CXO will have to integrate their business and benefit from the CDO’s efforts.

Over the next decade, the Chief Digital Officer will be very exciting and strategic role for going near to customers.

Some of the well-known brand’s CDOs who have steered their companies on digital are:

•  Adam Brotman of Starbucks
• Ganesh Bell of GE
• Daniel Heaf of Burberry
• Atif Rafiq of McDonald's
• Lubomira Rochet of L’Oreal

The true measure of a CDO’s success is when the role becomes redundant, as a high-functioning digital company does not need a CDO.

Digital Transformation in Banking - my POV

The digital banking landscape has never been more dynamic than it is today. 

The number of people going into branches to do their banking is falling dramatically. Customers are changing the way they bank, which requires banks to be flexible and agile.

A lot has changed about today’s customers. In this digitally connected world, customers search, learn, communicate and shop with technology. Easy access to abundant information, web connectivity & smart phones which are key characteristics of the digital age, may have impact on customer loyalty. 

On top of that new competitors & new technologies are impacting the banking industry faster and to a more significant degree than ever experienced.

With rising pressure from agile digital competitors, whether fintech startups

like Sofi, Billguard, Wealthfront and Moven, or larger entrants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, every financial services organization must think like a tech company.

Today’s banks are facing various head winds that require shift to digital:

• Channel overload – mobile, online, branch, ATM
• Growth required – competition from non traditional players
• Budgets are allocated to risk and compliance

Banks are introducing digital financial advisers called Robo Advisers, which helps customers to make more informed savings and investment choices.

Recent analysis shows that over the next five years, more than two-thirds of banking customers are likely to be “self-directed” and highly adapted to the online world.

Consumers already take great advantage of digital technologies in other industries like booking flights and holidays, buying books and music, and increasingly shopping for groceries and other goods via digital channels.

Banks are using fintech companies to co-develop new services that meet their business needs in areas such as money management, payments, lending and mobile on-boarding.

There are several challenges in digital transformation:

• Data quality as it is coming from disparate sources
• explosion of Big data sources like social, audio, video, beacons data
• Lack of data integration across various lines of business
• Resource shortage to develop and maintain digital solutions

Some of the trends in Digital Transformation:

•  A Blockchain based payment system
• Increased focus on data science – machine learning, Artificial Intelligence
• Lending industry consolidation

How to start this digital journey:

• Understand and assess what customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders want.
• Map the customer journey for each touch point.
• Analyze the quality of experience and identify the challenges to be resolved.
• Prioritize and deploy social, mobile, analytics, cloud, IoT as necessary.
• Test and move fast on failures to new innovations or business models

Banks must focus on humanizing the digital relationship, not digitizing the human relationship. They should use any technology or innovations which has to ultimately benefit the consumer.