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The digital transformation comes of age

Digital transformation is a term widely used, but not clearly understood. It’s defined as “the change associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society.”

We consider the digital transformation to be the use of technology to improve business processes and enhance the digital customer experience. Beyond this, it’s a way of using digital technologies to build new business models to adapt to the new digital consumer environment and ecosystem.

It’s only 10 years since the first iPhone was introduced, yet the smartphone has driven the digital transformation to the point where it is today. It has completely disrupted the way we interact, communicate and buy. We are in the Internet gone-mobile era which has created a new way of doing business.

The digital customer is knowledgeable, demanding, and connected 24/7. According to a Bank of America study, nearly four in 10 millennials (39%) say they interact more with their smartphones than they do with their significant others, parents, friends, children or co-workers.

Beyond the initial digital disruption, where are we headed in 2017?

  1. Convergence of Web and Mobile Strategies
    Separate versions of a website – desktop, mobile, and app – are unnecessarily confusing and difficult to maintain. Gartner predicts that 20% of brands will have abandoned their apps by 2019, with some enterprises taking a “Mobile First” approach.
  2. Recording of Digital Customer Journeys
    Tracking the journeys that customers take online has become increasingly complex, with increasingly personalized interactions entering every single point of the journey from awareness to purchase. Retrieving and replaying the digital journey – exactly as it was experienced by the customer – will help us gain insight into customer needs and expectations.
  3. Cross-Departmental Business Analytics

    • The siloed approach to business analytics has led to the confusing scenario of IT, marketing and compliance all running their own analytics systems.
    • A holistic approach to analytics will benefit digital operations and the customer experience.
  4. Predictive Analytics and Automatic Insights
    Advanced behavioral analytics allows for the prediction of whether current trends in online consumer behavior will become major issues in the future. All enterprises – from Google to IBM – are using machine learning and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to learn everyday business processes, such as customer service, data capture and data mining in order to make them better. Increasingly, digital analytics solutions will be expected to provide real-time automatic insights to business users to increase organizational agility and drive revenue.

The role of information in digital transformation

According to John Mancini of AIIM (Association of Information Management Professionals), we face four information chaos challenges:

  1. How do we automate business processes?
  2. How do we get any business insight out of all the information we collect?
  3. How do we use information to better engage customers, employees and partners?
  4. How do we manage the risk of growing volumes and complexity of content?

The Glassbox solution to information chaos

  • Provide digital transparency by recording, automatically indexing, analyzing, and replaying each and every one of your customers’ digital sessions.
  • Automatically identify online customer experience or channel performance issues, and the reasons behind them to minimize operational costs.
  • Increase revenue by understanding why your customers are abandoning transactions and purchases.
  • Improve the website customer experience by giving your call center’s staff visual access to your customers’ online journey.
  • Deliver personalized content and offers to your online customers based on their real-time digital behaviors.
  • Enable quick and easy dispute resolution and ensure compliance through 100% source-proof and time stamped record keeping, easy free-text search and retrieval of specific sessions based on defined parameters, and data export for internal and external collaboration.

Let’s look at how Glassbox worked with a UK High Street Bank to use behavioral analytics to assist in a digital transformation:

The Problem:
The bank was experiencing low conversion rates in the opening process of online banking accounts. Sophisticated web analytics had failed to provide any insights.

The Glassbox Methodology:
To record, replay and analyze every online customer journey on the website and mobile banking app.

What Glassbox found:

  • A technical issue was found, preventing 4% of customers from logging in.
  • Problems with the form submission due to certain post codes and non-English characters.
  • An existing demand for small very short term loans.

Ongoing benefits to the bank:

  1. The bank is now able to rapidly analyze (without the need for any technical expertise) whether issues reported by customers are one-off occurrences, or the symptom of a much larger problem.
  2. Improvements in ROI of current account switching.
  3. The ability to identify new revenue streams.

The digital transformation beyond technology

The customer experience transformation is not just about the technology. The technology is the change agent for the human interaction. It’s about putting the customer experience at the center of an enterprise’s activities.

Digital transformation is also about responding to the changes that digital technologies have caused, and will continue to cause, in our personal lives, businesses, organizations and industries. Some businesses will need to rethink their business model to adapt to the changes in the eco-system. i-SCOOP forecasts that by the end of 2017, two thirds of the CEOs of G2000 will have digital transformation at the center of their corporate strategy.

Only the agile companies will survive by focusing on continuous online optimization, holistic improvement and a focus on what people need.

Look no further

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