However, if the right culture isn’t in place, the entire project will fail. The bottleneck in digital transformation isn’t always the technology. Without the right culture and behavior, the project is doomed to fail.
Customers will leave if you can’t address their issues. For your digital transformation initiatives to be successful, you need your employees’ full cooperation and collaboration, not just new technology.
However, Forrester claims that culture and talent are major factors in the failure of digital transformation. While your initiatives may appear to be successful, the impact of culture will eventually disrupt your efforts.
A non-digital, non-innovative culture cannot consider customer satisfaction and will fail.
So, how do you foster a digital and innovative culture that enhances customer experience?
1. Describe your digital transformation goal
Focusing on the end goal is essential for any digital transformation project. And you must solicit customer feedback. Asking for feedback from customers can help.
Monitoring the competition is also possible using product review data from eCommerce sites like Amazon. Strange occurrences like the Y2K crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic show how quickly cultures can change.
In a pandemic, people must adjust to a new normal. Rethinking traditional ideas/cultures about teams and departments, brands thought of digital transformation initiatives that add value to customer interactions, tore down siloes, and rapidly adopted collaboration tools to conduct business.
According to McKinsey & Company, the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated global digital transformation by seven years. The culture is rapidly changing to focus on customer satisfaction.
Most importantly, any brand must establish a roadmap and get all employees on board.
2. Changing employees’ mindset
When an employee is hired, the brand should first explain the dos and don’ts. This set of rules is the company’s culture, or the way things are done. Now you must consider the quality of your skills; do you need to retrain? Do you need to hire?
If you lack funds, consider outsourcing some tasks. Employees may resist change, but if they understand why certain cultures must change and new ones adopted for the good of the organization, they will embrace it.
Realizing the brand must change its culture to remain relevant, satisfy customers, and better equip employees, they must make a choice. Time to either stay put and learn new skills internally or online, or “throw in the towel.”
For digital transformation, you need data scientists and AI experts, but that’s not all. It takes more than a few professionals to ensure that the strategy is focused on a new digital culture.
It’s a shift in attitude and beliefs. If you don’t change your culture, you can forget about digital transformation.
3. Digital strategy
According to a Constellation Research survey of 100 Fortune 500 CIOs, digital transformation will be their top priority in 2021. While this is admirable, digital transformation is impossible without a solid strategy.
What’s your plan? Exactly how will that help your company? How does it affect your clients? Is it aiming to change the brand’s culture?
Operating and business models must change to take advantage of new technologies. It must be possible to align your new business model with the existing one.
Overall, you want to improve your company’s efficiency and create new value for your customers.
4. Using KPIs to measure and improve digital culture adoption
After launching your digital transformation project, you must assess how employees are adapting to the new digital cultures. This is where KPIs as a management tool come in handy.
This will help you focus on specific tasks and outcomes. Employees who know their achievements are being tracked will strive to stay on track. You should track external and internal success metrics, operational improvement, and customer experience.
Your digital transformation success is heavily reliant on how you use KPIs to manage and direct daily or weekly activities. If your digital transformation ROI isn’t encouraging, it’s probably due to a lack of digital culture, which you didn’t address early enough.
Conclusion
The success of your digital culture adoption depends on the team you build, but management behavior must change. When building your team, you must include staff with diverse expertise from across the organization.
Because employees must take some risks, leadership becomes critical in developing a risk-tolerant culture. Employees will be more willing to take risks under good leadership.