How to Accelerate The Digital Transformation Process

Before the pandemic, 8 out of 10 organizations were pursuing large-scale digital transformation efforts. Yet, fewer than one-third reported success and were up against a 45% chance of delivering less profit than expected.

Now that COVID-19 has brought about 10 years’ worth of change in 14 months, the pressure on businesses to digitally transform has skyrocketed. In fact, 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate their digital initiatives.

So, how can you hasten your digital transformation process to meet the moment and ensure you meet or exceed expectations?

By focusing on a digital experience strategy above all. 

In this article, we unpack why an exceptional digital experience is crucial to success. We also explore the opportunities that digital transformation affords your business, the barriers to progress, and the solutions to overcome them. 

83% of millennials and 85% of business buyers now say the experience is just as important as the products or services a business provides. 

To keep up with demand, trends, and expectations, it’s critical to improve your digital experience before you fall behind the curve and lose out to digitally savvy competitors. 

As exceptional experiences win the day, it’s crucial to grasp what the digital experience truly entails. This will help you to:

The digital experience encompasses the entire digital ecosystem. This includes both the customer experience (which is external-facing) and the employee experience (which is internal-facing).

The digital customer experience, on the other hand, is anything that directly touches the customer, from advertising to web properties to communications, and the measurement of all those touchpoints.

Thus, the digital customer experience is a piece of the digital experience at large. 

When building a digital transformation process, you need to develop fundamental strategies and practices that empower your business to accomplish a purpose at every point in the customer journey.

This goes beyond simply adopting powerful new digital tools. You need c-suite buy-in and employee adoption to leverage your tools to reach their potential and ultimately produce the best results. 

In effect, to create an exceptional digital customer experience, you need to build a seamless external and internal digital experience from the top down. 

There are dozens of benefits to digital experience transformation. From providing personalized customer journeys that foster loyalty and retention to leveraging data to make smarter business decisions.  

Here are five benefits that stand out from the crowd:

Knowledge is power, and data packs a ton of it. Without data, it’s difficult to quantitatively and qualitatively understand:

With each day, the power and opportunity that you can leverage from data increases. 

For example, done right, leveraging machine learning capabilities can help you analyze and action your customer’s needs, pain points, and desires in real-time. You can also use it to automate communications and tasks, learn from intelligent recommendations, and more.   

But this means little without a detailed digital roadmap. Otherwise, you’re taking in data at record speed but don’t have benchmarks or goals to measure it against. Worse, you don’t have a long-term customer data storage strategy and lose crucial information over time. 

Related companies, a privately-owned real estate firm, had a similar problem. They launched a website, ran paid ad campaigns, and invested in Salesforce Marketing Cloud—but their digital strategies were faulty. 

In essence, they adopted the right digital tools but hadn’t uncovered how to use them to their fullest potential. And if you don’t know what to look for, data is as invaluable as foreign money with no place to spend it. 

We ran an audit to properly analyze performance and uncovered several weaknesses in The Related Companies’ digital user experience. After enforcing our recommendations, they saw:

To learn more about how we used data and analytics to help Related Companies make smarter digital decisions read the full case study. 

When systems work well together, they’re bound to provide a more seamless experience. This logic must be applied to digital experiences, too.

This is why it’s critical to consider organization-wide goals when shopping for digital solutions. If you buy one shiny new tool after another, but they don’t integrate with one another, you won’t achieve peak performance. In fact, you may end up creating more work for yourself.

Take MIT Sloan Executive Education (MITSEE) as an example. They recently completely moved to the Salesforce ecosystem to drive their business forward; from operations, marketing, and intelligence perspectives. And they did this all while harnessing the capabilities of robust technologies to fuel their digital experiences.

Prioritize adopting technologies that have multiple capabilities, are agile, and able to grow with your business. This will save you time and money in the long run, and importantly, create a seamless ecosystem that incentives adoption. 

As we mentioned at the outset, customers give significant weight to the experience. Today’s buying journey emphasizes unique, segmented, and targeted journeys.

This is key, as 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs. And 52% of customers expect offers to be personalized 100% of the time.

Given that personalization demand is trending upwards, companies that don’t tailor their offerings to unique needs will fall behind. 

To create a one-of-a-kind experience, you need to speak directly to your audience with targeted messaging.

We did just that for UF Health Cancer Center when they asked for our help to increase awareness for a specific procedure. Because they didn’t know how to reach their target audience to bring awareness to this unique offering, they weren’t seeing many new patient sign-ups.

Through our personalized and targeted approach to lead acquisition, we saw 1,500 clicks and 217 conversions (forms completed) in the first three weeks. And over an eight-month period, we generated: 

Not only was this great for their ROI, but they were able to finally reach and engage the people who truly needed this treatment. 

To learn more about how we carried out this multi-channel approach to lead acquisition, read the full UF Health Cancer Center case study.

Inefficiency is the fastest way to burn investments. The good news is, done right, investing in digital transformation can generate valuable rewards, such as:

A notable case in point is our case study with Related’s Los Angeles property. After implementing a more efficient PPC strategy, during the first full month, they saw:

That’s fast. And it proves that with a well-executed strategy, you can see an increase in ROI almost immediately.

Year over year, they saw:

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, arguably the most important benefit is the ability to adapt to unpredictable change. 

Digital experience transformation affords you the opportunity to make organizational and experiential changes at speed. But again, just because societal demand calls for rapid innovation doesn’t mean you should rush the process.

Curbside pickup, telecommunications, telehealth, virtual events, and more digital experiences like these helped to ease the burden of the recent global health crisis. 

As the prioritizations of convenience and value are here to stay, it’s even more critical to demonstrate the same level of agility as we enter a new normal. 

Importantly, once you do begin your digital transformation process, you must consistently keep pace with customer expectations and market trends. Momentary agility will only lead to short-term gains.  

Top Tip: To learn more about how to curate a digital transformation strategy to build processes that align with organization-wide goals, read our guide on a stress-free process for adopting new digital tools.

The best way to realize success is to get ahead of potential barriers. This way, you’ll be ready to deal with any challenges that come your way and save time and money otherwise spent putting out fires.

Here are some of the main barriers to successful digital transformation, with solutions in short order in the following section.   

The digital economy is shifting at a breakneck pace. We’d be lying if we said keeping up with these changes was easy.

In fact, this means that you’ll need to revisit your strategies, processes, tools, procedures, and experiences quite often.

According to McKinsey, the top economic performers set, execute, and adjust their digital strategies at a faster pace than the competition. Specifically, they assess their digital ecosystem on a weekly and quarterly basis, depending on the specific use case. 

Conversely, weaker performers evaluated their digital systems and performance annually. If you don’t keep up with analysis, evaluation, optimization, and iteration, you’ll quickly fall behind. 

The main types of digital security threats include:

Failing to consider all of the above could put your entire company at risk, alienate customers, damage your reputation, and eat into your profits.

Without a motivated team ready to dive into change, your digital investments will suffer.

That said, change is hard, and it’s difficult to incentivize employees to embrace it—especially if they’re comfortable with the current systems. 

This is why it’s so important to get leadership buy-in. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to foster resentment due to a lack of accountability and effort at the highest level.  

If you improperly set expectations, move too quickly, skip comprehensive training, launch changes without guidelines, reallocate employees without much thought, and don’t lead by example, you will likely struggle.  

An interesting result of digital adoption is ensuing social disconnect. As brands and people rely more on technology than ever before, we’ve sacrificed some key human needs: connecting in person.

Of course, this has been difficult during the pandemic. But especially as lockdowns end, people are yearning for a return to face-to-face experiences.

This can throw a spanner in the works, as just as you embrace a digital experience transformation, your customers may seek a digital disconnect. 

Getting digital adoption right may be an expensive upfront investment. If your business has tried and failed in the past, leadership may be wary of setting aside a big budget for round two.

Even if this is your first attempt at digital transformation and you follow the best practices, you may lose money. Any number of things could go wrong, like investing in the wrong tools, under leveraging platforms, using tools incorrectly, getting the customer experience wrong, and so on.

It’s a risk that we feel is worth it, but there’s no shortcut to success. 

If you don’t have leadership with technical expertise, it may be difficult to get it right. That said, a digital experience consultancy can fill that gap, at least temporarily.

But in the long run, the most successful companies benefit from hiring digital talent, such as a chief digital officer (CDO) or chief analytics officer (CAO). 

Investing in talent costs money, takes time, and may require leadership restructuring. 

Everything we just outlined has a solution. Here’s how to get it right: 

If you make tech decisions based on what you think will make you digitally savvy, rather than your customer’s needs, you’ll be left behind when trends shift. 

As you begin your digital transformation journey, make sure your decisions are based on the customer experience above all. To do this, it’s key to switch your mindset from product-focused to customer-focused. 

Once you’ve built these foundational digital processes, it will be much easier to ensure that your subsequent digital decisions follow a similar path. The subsequent solutions explain how to do just that.

Choosing to center the customer experience is a good start, but it won’t get you far without organization-wide-goal alignment.

This is where leadership buy-in comes into play. Digital initiatives must come from the top-down so that everybody is embracing change, on the same page, and excited to invest in the right tools to drive the organization forward. 

Before you begin, it’s critical to lay out clear priorities that are tied to measurable outcomes. Of course, getting boardroom buy-in and agreeing on business-wide goals isn’t easy.

The best way to tackle this hurdle is to collect supporting data that paints a picture of the opportunities your business will reap from a digital experience transformation. This includes data on your current industry, trends, customer needs, competitor analysis, etc. 

Then, use those findings to:

When you present data in this fashion, it helps you to tell a compelling story that’s hard to ignore. Plus, it makes it far easier to adopt the right marketing technology because you’ve built a strategic digital roadmap that fits with foundational goals. 

Happy employees are more productive and do more quality work. Because employees are the heartbeat of your organization, their buy-in is key if you want your digital systems to run as intended.

To get your employees excited about these changes, you need to create a dynamic business environment that (again) is led from the top-down, centers accountability, and takes their ideas into account. 

Digital transformations are more likely to be exceptionally effective when:

This makes sense, as clear processes, procedures, and shared responsibilities are table stakes for most business endeavors. Digital experience transformation should be no different.

Whether it’s leveraging an existing tool in a different way, or strategically choosing a new one, your tech should integrate so that everything works together. This point goes to the importance of a seamless digital ecosystem.

This will help to streamline adoption and use, make data collection and analysis easier, and lead to better employee and customer journeys alike. 

A digital experience roadmap is your best asset here. Similar to a business plan, a roadmap will help you to:

But before you can build a comprehensive roadmap, you need to understand how mature your digital experience is at present. A digital experience maturity quiz is a great jumping-off point. 

We outlined many potential digital risks that are serious in nature.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to manage them and remain secure and compliant:

Along that same vein, digital transformation is not a one-and-done experience. Rather, it’s a continuous process that requires nurturing in order to thrive. 

This is why leadership buy-in, organization-wide goals, employee engagement, and the customer experience matter so much. If everybody is working together in a seamless ecosystem built on a strong foundation, it will be much easier to evaluate what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change.

If your digital experience transformation is piecemeal, half-hearted, and full of sticking points, you’ll lose money and your effort won’t meet expectations and goals.

The answer? Consistently evaluate and update your strategies and processes through data gathering, insights, and experimentation. This will help to drive iteration, learning, and growing—all tenets to a successful digital experience. 

Deciding to embark on a digital experience transformation presents endless opportunities. At the same time, it’s full of challenges that you must understand and strategically overcome in order to realize success.

If you develop a clearly defined plan that centers the customer experience and journey and prioritizes a seamless digital ecosystem, you’ll be well on your way to untold benefits.