What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation will mean different things for individual businesses, but in general, it’s seen as the integration of digital technology into any areas of a business, which results in essential changes to how a business operates and most importantly how they deliver value to their customers. To achieve this, there also needs to be a cultural change that will require the organisation to continually challenge what they do, how they do it and try new ways of working.
We were approached by a local insurance business for advice on using digital technology to help improve their business processes and their customer experience. They had been running their business using largely manual systems, as is common in a largely conservative sector of insurance. Of course, they had a website (what business doesn’t?), but really didn’t know what its purpose was. In fact, most pages redirected customers to call a landline. The site certainly didn’t reflect the business’ excellent reputation for customer service but neither did it offer a good customer experience.
Without really needing to touch the client’s business model, we were able to look at two key areas of digital transformation:
- Process digital transformation: aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the company's operations
- Cultural/organizational digital transformation
Having talked at length with the Director to gain a deep understanding of the business and its objectives, we were able to map the current business processes and identify their customer journey, identifying pain points for customers and areas for business improvement. We then designed a new process incorporating digital technologies to automate/replace many of the manual processes and remove pain points for customers. This involved redesigning and building a bespoke and customer-centric website, updating domain URL and SEO capabilities, providing a level of e-commerce, generating automated email correspondence with customers and partners and advocating the use of integrated social media channels.
With initial plans approved, we finalised the specification, timelines and milestones and began wire framing a new site. Website designs then followed, incorporating a newly designed visual identity. With client approval, we were able to begin the build phase, incorporating new logic that would automate many of the previously manual processes, utilising the website as a central hub for customers, the client and their partners.
Demonstrations of the new site (its front-end and back-end CMS) with the client and key stakeholders were followed by an intense period of user acceptance testing where we challenged those involved to “try to break the system”. Fortunately, they were not able to! They did identify opportunities for further automation which we were able to implement for them. With onboarding completed and internal and external communications activated, the site went live.
The result is a very satisfied client who fully embraced our digital transformation process and is already seeing the benefits, as are his customers and partners. His social media is in its infancy, but used as an integrated marketing tool with his new e-commerce website, this local business has started the digital transformation journey and is fit for the future for further growth.
This is what we call digital transformation.