Digital transformation is important. 87% of senior executives have made embracing and implementing cutting-edge technology into their business processes a priority — and yet, less than one in six organizations have managed to act on the initiatives of their C-suite members.
Ravi Mehrotra would argue that this is because they don’t have a solid digital transformation roadmap in place. The Charter IT Director and digital transformation expert has spent his career shepherding companies through the trials and pitfalls of technological change. During that time, he discovered several strategies that were particularly effective in setting the stage for companies to use technology to thrive in today’s digital landscape.
In a recent interview, Mehrotra shared three strategies, all designed to deliver a more valuable customer experience and optimize internal operations. Let’s take a closer look:
1. Maintain a Customer-Centric Focus
Digital transformation can accomplish anything, from streamlining inter-departmental communication to 3D-printing a house. Ravi Mehrotra asks, what does digital transformation need to do for you? How can your business benefit from change?
The natural place to go in search of an answer is your customers. How can leveraging digital tools help you better understand your customers’ needs and preferences? You might need something as simple as a quality CRM (customer relationship management) system to organize and better track customer data. This can lead to faster, more targeted customer service.
Data analytics (which we’ll touch on more thoroughly in a second) is another customer-focused way to approach digital transformation. Use the data at your disposal to identify things like buying trends and customer feedback. Then tailor your product offerings to match those customer signals.
A customer-focused approach to digital transformation can also improve areas further up the customer lifecycle, such as the sales experience. Mehrotra mentioned Surbhi Gupta, a former colleague and now Product Management Leader at Zoox, as an excellent example of this. Gupta worked as a lead product manager at Tesla during a period when the electric automaker was experiencing some of its most explosive valuation growth and was constantly in the public eye.
During that time, Gupta developed a zero-touch sales experience. This used data to empower customers with the information they needed while purchasing. The result was a billion dollars in revenue and hundreds of thousands of man-hours saved every quarter.
If you want digital transformation to work, use it to empower your customer journey at every step.
2. Data-Driven Decision-Making:
As is the case with digital transformation, most leaders are aware of the need to use the data at their disposal. With third-party data on the way out, first-party data (i.e., the data you own as a company) has more value than ever. You also have the software to utilize it like never before — if you can harness it.
According to Mehrotra, this kind of digital transformation requires top-down leadership. As Harvard Business Review puts it, it requires CEOs who visibly champion a data-driven culture. They must also be willing to hire chief data officers or their equivalent to help drive data-based decision-making.
Mehrotra says if you can use leadership’s authority and company culture’s engagement to embrace data, your digital transformation initiatives will begin to gain purpose and momentum. Your teams will find better ways to apply data, such as implementing a business intelligence (BI) tool like SimpleKPI or Scoro to track KPIs.
As you monitor data with greater purpose, you’ll begin to identify areas where you can improve or even predict customer behavior. This empowers you to not just execute but optimize marketing and sales activity, as Surbhi Gupta did with Tesla.
3. Streamlined Operations and Automation
Finally, as you build out a data-backed, customer-centric business model, you can begin to engage in the more nitty-gritty, stereotypical digital transformation concepts. We’re talking about automating repetitive tasks to improve internal workflows or streamlining back-office functions.
Mehrotra has a few recommendations to assist this effort: “Tools like Asana and Trello are helpful for collaboration. Slack is a popular and effective communication platform, especially for remote or hybrid teams. RPA (robotic process automation) makes it possible to automate significant portions of time-consuming activities, such as invoice processing and employee onboarding.”
There are endless practical ways to use technology to digitally transform your office and business activities. The key takeaway is that you don’t start with the practical and then try to align your vision and culture after the fact. Do it the other way around.
As Ravi Mehrotra emphasizes, “You have to start from the ground up. The customer is always the beating heart of your operation. Start there. Then, align your data with customer needs and discover its potential value for your operation. At that point, you’ve created a foundation from which you can create targeted and optimized digital transformation initiatives to effectively streamline and automate your operations, ultimately leading to a significant boost in your overall success.”
