Intelligent Business: 2020 technology trends

Big thinking, small steps: redefining digital transformation

Digital transformation is now understood as being an ongoing way of working, not a linear progression towards a definite – and finite – strategic goal. Organizations are adopting an opportunistic mindset and an agile approach.

The definition and focus of digital transformation are shifting dramatically. Organizations recognize it’s not about extreme changes and restructuring the entire business through a once-off project. Instead, digital transformation is seen as a behaviour: a way of working that’s rooted in a culture where people are encouraged to think and act differently.

Start somewhere and keep moving

To get results, faster, abandon grand, sweeping plans that are holding back progress in favour of smaller projects that tackle burning issues around operational efficiency and customer experience. Pay attention to the employee experience. How can you better support cross-functional teams to be more agile?

Take incremental, tactical and repeatable steps. This way, digital transformation becomes an integrated, organization-wide way of doing business, and continuous learning becomes business as usual.

83% of organizations say digital transformation should focus on driving a change in culture and behaviour to operate as a more agile and responsive organization.

Lifetime relationships: the cloud-enabled customer journey

The buzz around omnichannel saw many businesses rushing to integrate various channels to improve the customer experience (CX) at every touchpoint of a transaction. But long-term customer loyalty isn’t built on a single successful transaction – it’s the sum of many individual interactions that an individual customer has with an organization.

Customer journey management, the next version of omnichannel, focuses on building and managing long-term customer relationships through relevant offers, exceptional service and a personalized experience from the very first engagement.

Optimize your multicloud environment

Data analytics, AI, machine learning and robotic process automation will play a key role in helping you manage these journeys and further augment CX through sentiment analysis, assisted-service and self-service capabilities.

As our physical and digital worlds converge, you’ll need a strong multicloud environment to support the infrastructure and workflows behind customer journey management.

24.3% of organizations say CX delivery is consistent across channels. Silo management is the main challenge in implementing an omnichannel strategy.

Data lakes and digital twins: enabling new analytics models

Data lakes can hold massive data sets from all sources in the enterprise – data that can be aggregated and configured in numerous ways to enable deep analysis that yields rich insights.

Organizations can tap into any number of data points to create a ‘digital twin’ of each customer that’s the sum of all their data parts: demographic data, browsing behaviour, purchasing patterns, interests and payment preferences. They can then build machine learning models that predict what the real customer wants, and when, so the business can respond with a relevant offer.

Get the right skills

The ability to measure qualitative data, such as customer sentiment, and combine it with ERP and CRM data to create richer insights and new analytics models will increase the demand for robust ERP systems and AI-driven automation.

Organizations will need skills to set up, manage and secure their data lakes, and build data models that will extract the insights they need for ongoing innovation.

42.9% of organizations say analytics systems aren’t meeting existing requirements.

Dimension Data 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report