Digital transformation has reinvented how we improve customer experience across all aspects of the customer journey. It’s more than just technology – digital transformation disrupts business models, allowing brands to deliver more value to their customers at lower costs.
Transformation is usually a long journey requiring extensive data collections and experts to turn the data into actionable insights to drive business growth. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in, making this long journey much easier.
But before we dig deeper into it, what is digital transformation?
Digital transformation defined
Digital transformation focuses on how we engage with customers through their journey. It involves using digital technologies to develop new or change existing business operations, customer experiences, and culture in order to stay ahead of the ever-changing needs of the customer and their business.
According to McKinsey, a significant organizational change of mindset that centers on the customer in conjunction with an improvement in operational and IT capabilities can create a 20% to 30% increase in customer satisfaction and a 10% to 20% increase in employee satisfaction.
However, digital transformation remains a challenge for many companies. Although several brands pursue digital transformation to tap into statistics like this, the success rates for these efforts remain consistently low.
What are the challenges of digital transformation?
To drive the digital transformation process, you need to gather data from your customers to understand their needs.
Customer feedback tools like surveys and focus groups can help shape digital transformation, helping you know how useful or practical your brand is in solving a customer’s need and how they can carry on doing so in the future.
However, surveys are often subject to user-research bias and are limited to participants who are most likely to respond to online questionnaires.
Besides, if the participant doesn’t understand your survey, they might submit fake answers in order to get the reward at the end. Moreover, while survey-based metrics are ideal for gaining customer satisfaction levels for your product or service, it’s challenging to link this experience data with operational figures.
Businesses often find it difficult to connect these experience metrics to other business KPI’s such as customer lifetime value, revenue, and churn, which prevents them from generating actionable customer-centric insights quickly.
Companies also struggle with digital transformation as they do not know how to leverage the data they collect to build a clearer picture of the customer journey. Research shows that organizations typically use less than a third of the twelve most common sources of data to analyze customer interactions across channels and touchpoints.
Furthermore, a business can only encourage the digital transformation process if its leaders combine an investment in technology with the promotion of a culture of organizational change. Leaders should be willing to make radical choices to adapt to changing market demands by rethinking their legacy infrastructure, people, and knowledge.
However, not all leaders or companies are created equally. Organizations with more than 50,000 employees, such as those in traditional industries like oil and gas, infrastructure, and pharmaceuticals still find digital transformation a challenge.
So, what will drive the digital transformation of these types of businesses?
AI and digital transformation
The desire to be better doesn’t mean that all brands should turn out the same way. Most leaders understand that digital transformation is a long journey. It’s a broad area where it’s acceptable for organizations to transform themselves in different ways, and at different speeds to become a more intelligent version of their enterprise.
While businesses are at different stages of their digital transformation process, they all struggle with the same problem: turning their insights into intelligence.
All companies have a selection of operational data that tells you what happens and looks at transactions from a business point of view. Alternatively, brands also have experience data gathered by sourcing feedback or sentiment from customers, employees, and business partners at critical points to quickly understand the quality of an experience at a given time.
While most businesses keep these types of data in silos, AI in digital transformation can be applied to help with merging and analyzing this mountain of data into meaningful intelligence, thus moving forward the digital transformation and improving their customer experience.
If brands are not sure where to start, here’s a quick checklist of what can be achieved by turning unstructured data into insights:
- Focuses on product and service excellence
- Strive to improve customer experience
- Increase your workforce management
- Supply chain optimization
- Drive product innovation
- Cost optimization, and revenue growth
For example, AstraZeneca improved its product and service excellence, as well as customer experience, by analyzing production at its manufacturing sites.
Can AI improve customer experience?
Artificial intelligence can be applied to unstructured data to instantly collect and analyze a range of consumer insights across online sources such as social media, call center data, and customer product reviews.
AI and digital transformation go hand-in-hand. By applying AI, brands get an immediate glance into what their customers think, rather than waiting to get customer feedback solely from experts, focus groups, surveys, or interviews.
Gathering customer feedback manually for a product or service can often take a long time. However, AI can make this process quicker by using text analysis to analyze the sentiment in each sentence from the various sources of online customer feedback data.
For example, we monitored changes in consumer preferences during COVID-19 in the wireless headphones market, identifying new trending topics such as the battery, noise cancellation, value for money, and audio quality.
Your business can achieve digital transformation success when using technology to change business processes and culture to improve customer experience.
The epitome of digital success is data. However, a brand cannot achieve digital transformation if they cannot use their data to provide value to their customers or employees.
Better.
Faster.
Amazing every time.
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