by Thomas Clarke –
If there’s been one constant over the last few years, it is the ongoing evolution of the digital playing field. In just a few years, the use of self-service kiosks, digital-only banking, chatbots, and video conferencing software has become second nature1 for both personal and professional tasks. At the same time, customers expect the brands they interact with to deliver personalized, secure, and responsive digital experiences.
These rapid digital evolutions not only bring challenges to organizations but also a wealth of new opportunities to streamline workflows, lower costs, and tap into new information sources to fuel data-driven decisions. However, only organizations with a digital strategy for the future can maximize the potential of all the changes.
5 Steps to a Digital Strategy That Sets Your Organization Apart
Here’s how your organization can start shaping its digital strategy—and why this task should be at the top of your to-do list.
1. Enable “decision-ready” information.
Your organization runs on data. From fueling insights on customer preferences to guiding investments in new products and services, information truly is king. However, having the necessary mechanisms in place to collect, consolidate, and process the right data from across your enterprise can be a challenge.
A digital strategy breaks down the hurdles to actionable data by identifying key data sources, synthesizing and analyzing them into information that directly feeds business processes. Armed with this data—and the insights it provides—your organization can make more informed decisions about investments that lead to real growth and digital strategy services that will resonate with customers.
2. Provide frictionless user experiences.
Whether it’s increasing employee collaboration and breaking down silos between teams or delivering more seamless experiences to customers and clients, a digital strategy can help your organization prioritize the investments in initiatives that make measurable positive impacts on your users.
In every part of their personal and professional lives, your customers are looking for brands to deliver integrated, holistic experiences that transfer across platforms and services. Similarly, removing manual, time-intensive processes can amplify the impact of your employees’ contribution to your customers.
A digital strategy can be informed by all user touchpoints, enabling your team to remove areas of friction, introduce new tools, and streamline processes to enhance value.
3. Promote proactive engagement.
Every user and customer defines value differently. The key is not only to discover that definition and deliver services, products, and processes that match your user preferences but also to anticipate and enable this evolution. This is how you maintain a competitive advantage.
A digital strategy enables your organization to do this by:
- Introducing the tools and mechanisms to collect—actively and passively—usage patterns to shape a picture of user behaviors
- Giving employees the ability to choose industry-leading tools that adapt to meet their needs and seamlessly integrate within your existing technology ecosystem
- Aligning investment decisions with data-backed recommendations that tie directly to user actions and needs
4. Enable operational agility.
Organizations no longer have the luxury of scoping technical change over multi-year time horizons. In addition, technology no longer thrives within its own container, isolated from other internal and external systems.
A digital strategy helps organizations to step back and take a 30,000-foot view of their enterprise technology to:
- Identify legacy systems that need to be replaced with modern, agile applications and zero in on the precise requirements for new investments
- View technology through the lens of a customer’s or user’s experience to ensure seamless integration across your suite
- Provide the foundation to align products and services with your overall brand strategy
- Identify partner products and services that add value to both brands and customers
5. Drive secure, precise, and responsive services.
A digital strategy also helps your organization maximize its industry-leading technology to deliver secure, precise, and responsive services to meet customer needs no matter when, where, and how they choose to consume them.
Whether through apps and web-enabled dashboards that provide real-time data or adaptable interfaces that flex to meet the devices your customers prefer, a digital strategy opens up the aperture to new means of communicating with your users.
Take the Next Step on Your Digital Journey
Defining a digital strategy isn’t just about opening new doors for efficiency, engagement, and collaboration within your organization. It’s also about mapping a vision for how your team can remain nimble, responsive, and agile in a rapidly changing market. A digital strategy orchestrates your organization’s various teams, capabilities, and activities to deliver the key information required to understand and react to market changes.
Want to learn even more about how developing a digital strategy can be a game-changer for your organization? Then take a moment and set up your own personalized discussion with an RCG Global Services expert now!
Works Cited
1. Medium (2019, July 17) "How Self-Service Kiosks Are Changing Customer Behavior?" Retrieved from https://medium.com/kibis/how-self-service-kiosks-are-changing-customer-behavior-ef62cfe6bef6