It’s been probably more than a decade since various industries including our own started to talk about ‘digital transformation’ – the idea that digital has transformed or ‘disrupted’ everything and that every business needs to rapidly digitise itself, transform or face extinction. Most discussions would invariably involve the doomsday example of Kodak, dramatically illustrating the fate awaiting companies that didn’t evolve from the analogue past.
The notion of digital transformation rapidly morphed into today’s over-used words of ‘business transformation’ or indeed the Frankenstein monster of ‘digital business transformation’. Agencies, consultants, software developers and many businesses have rallied around this term, whether to illustrate how they are changing or to sell services to help other businesses change.
Tautology really, and all missing the point.
Digital transformation talks to channel. Business transformation is internally focused – at best, an acknowledgement of what a business needs to change to improve its chances of success in a rapidly changing world.
The fundamental thing that both miss – and what is truly at the heart of this rapid transformation – is the customer.
While we’ve all been preoccupied with the idea of digital and business transformation, it’s been really the consumer or customers who have been driving this transformation. Consumers have been so quick to rapidly adopt technologies, new services and products that make their lives easier, less expensive or just simpler, that businesses and brands have simply failed to keep up, and at times even failed to catch up.
The biggest problem facing most brands and specifically service-led businesses today is the huge gap in what the customer is rightfully expecting from an experience from a business and what the brand/business can actually deliver.
Whether that’s the simple ability to transfer money across the world (who would have thought that banks would make it so hard and expensive to do that with your own money – enter TransferWise) or the ability to go from the comfort of your home to work without having to stand in the rain and try your luck hailing a taxi (enter Uber).
This lag on the part of businesses is leading to huge customer dissatisfaction and disengagement with brands. Last year, the IBM Smarter Consumer Study found that the proportion of ‘disengaged’ consumers jumped from 24% to 37% and the study also noted a growing trend of customer ‘antagonists’ – customers actively advocating against brands.
But to frame this as the need for digital and/or business transformation is looking through the wrong lens.
The root of the problem often lies with the organisational design of the majority of businesses, which views the customer in silos. No one has a holistic view of their customers because responsibility is split between product, service, ops, IT, marketing, sales, HR – the list goes on.
What’s more concerning is the fact that in trying to fix the problem, we are making it worse. This is the case with companies that are adopting or creating ‘customer transformation’ teams or hiring ‘customer experience officers’ – by doing so they are only creating further ghettos for the customer in large-scale organisations rather than truly putting the customer at the heart of the organisation.
Businesses today should be breaking down the silos, not creating more. They should be handing responsibility for the customer and the customer experience to everyone within the organisation, and most specifically the CMO.
In an increasingly competitive world, a simple organisational restructure can mean the difference between success and failure.
By Lavender CEO Roy Capon