Analysis: What must happen beyond introducing digital policies

By Edwin Yapp October 31, 2017

Enhanced customer experience

As clichéd as the adage is, the customer should be central to our business, more so in a digital realm. Customers have been spoiled by the choices they have today thanks to the consumerisation of technology.

They want 24/7, real-time services at their fingertips, and to receive all these services with an undertaking that the privacy and security of their transaction will be protected to the best possible levels.

To ensure that the customer is the centre of any organisation including the citizenry, there is a need know your customer and empower them with all the above by means of being data driven. Everyone knows this, but again, how true is it? Even as the world has talked about big data, data-driven businesses, and data being the new oil for some time, the simple fact is that it is eminently difficult to succeed in mastering data.

Like many other organisations or governments who readily admit the importance of data and have been striving to use it better for some time, the reality is that most are struggling to take it to the next level.

One of the challenges is that most analysis initiatives focus on trends from the past. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but in order to stay ahead of the aforementioned customer expectations, that there is a need to establish a culture of trying things, failing fast, accepting that things have not worked out and trying again.

This is a digital mindset that could help address the perennial challenge of understanding customer behaviour. Established processes may continue to provide benefits, but it doesn’t mean they are necessarily suited to a digital world. Being willing to embrace new processes is important.

Some questions an organisation or a government could ask themselves are:

When was the last time your leaders/ stakeholders spoke directly with customers/ citizens to ask them what they want?
Was a review conducted to evaluate customers’ journeys to see if you’re truly meeting your customers’ needs in a digital context?
Do you have one data source of truth on your customers in order to find out their core needs?
Have you established an agile, startup-like team that will use insights to look at the customer’s needs from an end-to-end perspective?
Are you developing new strategies to listen to your customers on an ongoing, real-time basis by using self-service and on-demand services driven by mobile and web apps, virtual and augmented reality, chatbots, robo advisors, and cognitive analytic services to help replace legacy systems?
Have you begun re-educating and retraining your entire organisation on the culture change to support a digital customer experience?
Does everyone in the organisation have accountability and responsibility for the customer's digital experience?
Have you designed a plan in which you will frequently revisit your customer experience initiatives and evaluate if milestones have been met and address any failures, rectify them quickly and set up new opportunities?

Digital models

The final pillar really is to pivot an organisation or a government machinery towards a digital model of thinking and doing. Now one may be tempted to think that going digital is merely about having a transactional web presence or deploying a storefront marketplace or just making your services mobile-enabled. But that is just a start.

It’s very common to find many equating a new digital model to how Uber and Airbnb have changed the transport and hospitality industries respectively. My argument is that this is passé, and while it isn’t wrong per se, new digital models are far more than that. Put simply, it’s about challenging the status quo and existing paradigms of how things are done within an organisation.

This is particularly true of private companies which could open themselves up to non-traditional partnerships and collaborations with new trends such as the gig economy, the professional freelancer marketplace, regional and global business and technology partners and platforms, as well as venture capitalists and private equity firms to fund and fast track your expansion into other markets as quickly as possible.

It’s about leveraging heavily on technology underpinnings such as open application programming interface (APIs), open data, cloud and mobile technology, AI cognitive services, and advanced analytics to drive change within the organisation or within government.

The overarching driver behind all this is a change in cultural mindset of how things are done. This necessarily means driving things from the top as well as from the bottom. From the top, so that the powers that be can ask what culture needs to change and what change management plan needs to be in place to activate it. From the bottom means co-opting younger talents within an organisation to adopt early changes and who can be ambassadors for change within the organisation.

Of course, where applicable, the aforementioned points could be applied to government machinery looking at digital models with the society they are trying to digitise.

Some questions that could be asked include:

What are the characteristics of successful digital business models you’ve identified and are going to pursue?
Have you done a risk assessment for digitisation on your current business model and how it impacts your revenue and profits? For governments, how would digitisation impact society and the citizenry?
What are the characteristics of successful digital business models you’ve identified and are going to pursue and how specifically are you pursuing these characteristics, measuring them and ensuring that they are achievable?
Have you empowered a dedicated team to look at current and emerging technologies in a bid to work out what can be done to carry out the digital business model within your organisation?
Have you co-opted the right stakeholders into this team – comprising business, governmental and technology leaders, compliance and regulatory – to take ownership and accountability?
Do you have the entire value chain backing up your digitisation efforts – from sales to marketing to communications to corporate affairs/ public relations – in order to tell a compelling narrative of what you’re doing to both your customers and the public?
Have you looked at security and privacy not as an afterthought but again in a holistic way? This is especially true for governmental projects vis-a-vis society.

At the end of the day, digital transformation isn’t just about meeting your goals and getting across the finish line. Rather it’s about a continuous cycle of goal setting, implementation of those goals, constant evaluation and improvement to meet new challenges and opportunities.

The first step to looking at this is to establish a purpose for your digital transformation and outline what you want to continuously achieve. The key is to create an ongoing plan for doing useful, tangible, measurable things, which will bring quick wins and help change cultural expectations within the organisation and/ or within society. This will then serve as a template for future endeavours.

Edwin Yapp is contributing editor to Digital News Asia and an executive consultant at Tech Research Asia, an advisory firm that translates technology into business outcomes for executives in the Asia Pacific.

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