What's changing?
Digital transformation has been a major focus for several years, with organisations looking to provide frictionless, personalised and secure customer experience via digital as a low cost-to-serve alternative to traditional commerce. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption through necessity, changing consumer preferences and bringing with it a number of new opportunities.
Customer willingness to engage digitally has increased significantly through forced adoption of online and call centre channels resulting from the pandemic.
With that, customer needs and expectations for what constitutes “basic” digital capabilities have shifted - in the current environment empathy is more important than ever, meaning that flexible and attentive servicing is becoming even more important.
It is likely that many customers that have navigated to digital services will continue to use them, even if businesses were to return to previous ways of working after the pandemic.
Digital interactions give organisations the opportunity to provide customers with the positive customer experience they expect with no physical interaction required.
Organisations that can transform their proposition into a more digital offering and provide exceptional customer experience have an opportunity to grow customer digital usage and maintain connections long after the pandemic.
How will this impact you?
Digital Transformation is the adoption of digital technology and data to transform services or businesses, through digitising and automating non-digital or manual processes or replacing older technology with newer digital capabilities.
Covid-19 has highlighted the need for digital transformation as a means to reaching customers while maintaining operational resilience. During this period, it is those agile organisations who were quick to offer new digital solutions to customers that benefited the most. This has been done through the acceleration of digital tool adoption such as AI and robotics, for example the use of chatbots to fill the gap left by call centres that couldn't work at full capacity.
Digital is also a solution to the disruption caused by the pandemic. As cost to serve becomes increasingly more important, organisations will need to reduce technical debt and modernise through digital transformation.
The next step is learning from this period and incorporating the good habits into a long term digital transformation strategy.