We’re living in the age of the digital customer. In an unpredictable and fast-paced world, customers can quickly get online to select brands from around the world that provide them with a sense of security and stability. Customer demand and the ability for them to easily change brands at the touch of a button means organisations have needed a stronger focus on customer experience. A recent KPMG report shows this has resulted in the quality of customer experience improving by around three per cent globally, year on year.[1] Additional surveys show that customer experience remains the number one priority for organisations around the world.[2]
Organisations are now trying to find new ways to improve the customer experience in a hyper-connected world moulded by social and technological changes and the constant emergence of new players in the market. Every customer interaction must be personalised for businesses to stay competitive and meet their customers’ fast-changing needs. There is no room for complacency in the current hyper-competitive and hyper-accelerated market, so staying ahead requires a concentrated and strategic focus on the customer, often to the exclusion of other business initiatives.
Digital transformation can be a powerful enabler for organisations looking to improve the customer experience. However, when organisational resources are assigned to both the customer experience and digital transformation, they can often find their focus split, leaving both short-changed.
Digital transformation is the way of the future and the future is now
Digital transformation is the future and the future is already here. According to IDC, 85 per cent of enterprise decision-makers say they have a timeframe of two years to make significant inroads into digital transformation or they will fall behind their competitors and suffer financially.[3]
To get the full business performance advantages from digital transformation, IT leaders must adopt it as part of their daily process. Operating outdated processes in a digital-first world is likely to put you behind competitors when it comes to growth and competitive advantage.
A digital transformation partner can help you grow and transform at the same time
Clearly, the link between digital transformation and customer experience is unbreakable, especially in a digital-first world where most customer experiences now occur online. Organisations generally don’t have the resources to focus on transforming the IT environment to the extent required to have a measurable impact on customer outcomes. Trying to grow and transform at the same time rarely delivers strong results when you are trying to maintain business operations in a hyper-competitive landscape. Therefore, working with a trusted partner is essential for businesses looking to grow sustainably while driving a successful digital transformation strategy.
A specialist digital transformation partner takes the complexity out of managing your IT environment by delivering a reliable, business-ready IT infrastructure. It’s a cost-effective approach because it often costs less to work with a partner than it would to put the necessary in-house resources and skills in place to manage your own environment.
According to PwC, 70 per cent of digital transformations fail due to a lack of user adoption and behavioural change, so it’s important to work with a partner that can drive digital transformation projects, including employee adoption, while you focus on the customer experience.[4] Working with an experienced partner delivers four key benefits for businesses that seek to grow and transform:
- Guaranteed performance and scalability
Customer experience depends on performance. Systems need to run quickly and reliably, supporting transactions and interactions without interruption. Working with a partner helps ensure your systems will always be available, performing as expected, and the right size for your business needs.
Systems also need to be scalable to cope with demand spikes, evolving customer needs, and changing market conditions. An experienced partner will help identify capacity issues before they affect the service you provide, then monitor changes and optimise performance.
This gives you confidence that your IT systems can support fast adaptability so you can scale and achieve agility in an uncertain environment.
- Secure and cost-effective operations
For digital projects to be truly transformative, having both business and technology partners with a security strategy applied consistently across all networks and devices is a top priority. With ongoing security monitoring, automatic maintenance, and disaster recovery and testing, your business will operate much more securely. Detailed monitoring and performance data ensures systems are not scaled higher than required, which saves costs that can be reinvested into broader business objectives.
- Actionable insights
Operating with real-time data gives you proactive reporting with actionable insights at speed. You can access detailed statistics with full visibility to deliver efficiently on your SLA requirements. Data-driven insights deliver a faster resolution of any issues that may arise.
- Continuous evolution
The cloud-based model of an outsourced solution means the technology you rely on continuously evolves and improves to keep pace with market changes. This gives you access to the latest technology as it becomes available, rather than putting it into a roadmap for the future. Ongoing expert advice will allow you to innovate at speed, which helps to grow your business more rapidly.
When managing your IT is one less thing you need to worry about, you can purely focus on customer experience and business growth. Logicalis Australia has a proven track record as a trusted digital transformation partner to businesses of all sizes and is in the top one per cent of Microsoft Azure partners globally.
To find out how Logicalis Australia can help you solve the IT conundrum and improve competitiveness while digitally transforming, contact the team today.