In an era dominated by superior customer experiences and organizations taking steps to be more customer-focused, digital transformation is a priority for top-notch business leaders. About 75% of transformations take a spot in the CEO’s agenda, with executives viewing digital adoption as a means of growing revenue and delivering the value promised to customers.
Although digital transformation is necessary, not all efforts yield successful outcomes. Research by Mckinsey indicates that for most companies, the success of their digital transformation efforts is around the 30% mark and dip to 11% or lesser for conventional industries, such as pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, and more.
Companies often don’t get the expected results and fail to witness the sustained impact of digital transformation. Occasionally, these digital adoption projects come to an end owing to specific challenges along the way.
In this blog post, we’ll delve into these digital transformation challenges and find out what organizations can do to navigate these unprecedented challenges. But before we go deeper, let us understand what digital transformation means and how disruption has changed digital adoption.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is a journey that companies take to rethink their business models and incorporate modern data-driven technologies to meet the emerging customers’ expectations and demographics and drive value. It could mean embracing reimagined data integration technologies, improved usage of data, or shifting to more online selling channels.
Businesses embark on a digital transformation journey to innovate faster and accelerate operational efficiency, ultimately improving their ease of doing business and creating new revenue streams. However, market disruption, shifting regulations, changing customer demographics, etc., have filled this journey with hiccups.
Here are the top three digital transformation challenges that organizations may encounter:
Lack of A Clear Strategy
When companies do not have enough clarity on the strategy they are implementing, the road to digital transformation gets bumpy. On the other hand, those that have a clear vision, well-defined goals, and attainable targets can successfully drive their digital transformation initiatives. They need to get into more details and understand whether they will integrate technology, create engaging podcasts for marketing purposes, use automation tools, etc.
So, organizations need to be cognizant of their goals and customers’ behaviors and needs and then build a strategy before embarking on the transformation journey.
Poor Data Integration Technology
In the absence of a modern data integration technology, companies trying to drive digital transformation efforts are not able to connect with business customers and deliver the promised value. Why? Because if a company fails to connect with customers, delivering on their needs and requirements becomes almost impossible and so all the digital transformation efforts go into vain.
With modern data integration technology in place, companies can connect with customers as quickly as possible. Self-service-powered data integration platforms enable even non-technical business users to implement data connections with customers in minutes instead of weeks or months. With features such as pre-built application connectors, shared templates, dashboards and intuitive screens, and AI-data mapping, non-technical business users can leverage customer data and deliver accordingly. Meanwhile, IT can focus on governance and more high-productivity tasks.
Customer Expectations Are Changing
Fundamentally, customers value how they experience brands above everything else. To create delightful digital experiences, companies need to anticipate customer needs and transform the way they do business with those customers. The current times have altered how customers engage with brands. Customers expect personalized experiences, quicker responses from businesses, and wish to interact with companies across multiple channels.
In order to understand customer expectations and deliver on them, companies need to leverage modern data integration solutions. These solutions enable all business users to implement customer data connections in minutes, which, in turn, proves beneficial in addressing the changing needs and delivering the value promised to customers.