WHY MOST DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS FAIL AND HOW TO FIX THEM 1:30 min

B2B leaders must address the biggest barriers to digital transformation by fostering customer centricity, enabling employees and making more effective use of customer data.

 

This thinking is based on a growing body of research that indicates customer centricity, employee enablement and using customer data are the keys to successful digital transformation. In this Harvard Business Review study for example, C-suite leaders report that the greatest barriers to successful digital customer engagement are the lack of customer focus, insufficient employee enablement, and ineffective use of customer data[i]

Enabling employees is a major challenge that requires building a customer-centric culture, gaining management and leadership buy-in to customer-centric transformation, and empowering employees to be more autonomous in delivering and innovating around customer experiences. Using customer data more effectively is an equally complicated challenge that calls for measuring customer value and the ROI of customer experience investments, integrating systems and data across channels and products, and making data more accessible and visible to functional areas.

It takes considerable attention on the part of senior leaders and middle managers to address these challenges because they are so multifaceted and extend so deeply within organizations. Large, game-changing investments, such as acquiring another company or investing in new technologies, are not the answer. Quite the opposite: they often exacerbate the challenges because people and data are so central to success. Fundamentally, leaders must help their organizations embrace change—change in the increasingly digital nature of work and change in how your employees see the customer and collect and use customer data.[ii]

Embracing change, becoming more customer-centric, and using big data are vast topics that are written about so extensively that it’s beyond the scope of this post to deal with them. Each involves a journey with many steps along the way, and no two journeys are alike.

[i] Closing the Customer Experience Gap, Harvard Business Review Analytic Service (August 28, 2017), https://hbr.org/sponsored/2017/08/closing-the-customer-experience-gap.

[ii] Joerg Niessing and James Walker, “The Demand Analytics Premium,” INSEAD Faculty & Research Working Paper (October 2014), https://www.consultancy.uk/news/878/strategy-demand-analytics-boosts-commercial-performance.