Published: Feb 06, 2020

five signs that you need to look into digital transformation now

Are you still indecisive over your digital transformation priorities? Many organisations are held back in their efforts by the inability to decide on goals, difficulty in justifying budgets, bewilderment over new technologies, lack of digital capabilities, and the list goes on. At NCS Digital, we work with clients across many industries to address these issues.

Where in your organisation should you start? Here are five signs to look out for. Any of these would be good areas to kickstart your digital initiatives.

Take a look at your Net Promoter Score or any other measure of customer satisfaction. In this digital age, your customers will be all too ready to share the experience that they have had with your brand. They will share it with their friends and their networks, and they will do so publicly. Digitally-savvy customers expect their experience with you to be on par with the best-of-breed Internet companies that they have interacted with.

If your customer touchpoints are getting negative feedback, you should be taking a look at how customer experience powered by digital technology can help you to address customers’ frustrations, boost customer scores, increase retention and make a positive impact on your top line. Reimagine how you can transform your customers’ experience with your products and services.

Employees are the ones who deliver that “moment of truth” to customers every day. If your employees are encountering obstacles in their work to the point that they lack motivation to do their job well, customer experience will invariably be impacted.

A common bugbear that affects employee morale is the time they have to spend dealing with manual, paper-based or convoluted processes. This takes them away from time that could be better spent with the customer. So start by looking at how the introduction of the right digital technologies can help to improve your employees’ experience at work - what needs to be in place to create a digital workplace that will support your employees in the digital economy.

An upstart has entered your turf and is making waves. It seems to be able to move much faster than you can - whether onboarding a new customer or bringing a new product to market.

One reason for this could be that, as a new company, it had the opportunity to design its business and processes from ground up and apply a new set of technologies to help it work faster and more efficiently and to introduce business innovation.

You will need to do the same. Take a look at areas in your own organisation where business processes can be re-drawn to deliver business agility. Removing paper-based processes and applying digital technology to augment your middle or back-office operations is another area of digital transformation that can deliver clear, efficient outcomes.

Past track record is no guarantee of future success. Your organisation may have been highly successful for many years, and you may be running systems that were best-of-breed when you implemented them, but the landscape has changed.

Today, advances in digital technologies allow you to provision services on-demand, scale rapidly and design your applications differently. Many of these technologies are now mature enough to deliver enterprise-grade services, and some of the largest companies in the world today depend on them to run their global operations.

It is therefore time for you to review your technology stack. Look for opportunities to modernise your IT infrastructure and systems to take full advantage of new digital capabilities. How can you move to the cloud, what should you move to the cloud? How can cloud technologies improve your business? These are the conversations you need to start having now.

The decreasing cost of data storage has made it easier for organisations to collect more and more data. However, data quantity does not automatically translate into useful insights that can support decision-making.

Despite the amount of data that some organisations are collecting, their lines of business may still be far from making data-driven decisions. One reason could be that they do not know why they are collecting the data that they are collecting, how they can extract useful and actionable insights from it and, most importantly, connect those insights to make sound business decisions.

If this is the situation in your organisation, it is time to develop a robust data strategy. You need a proper plan to ensure you are making the right investments in data and analytics to fuel your business.