Digital disruption compelling companies to become digital enterprises

Digital transformation has created a rapidly changing business environment – disruptin value chains and compelling companies to rethink nearly everything they do

By Anil Chawla

Digital transformation has created a rapidly changing business environment – disrupting value chains and compelling companies to rethink nearly everything they do. Digital advancements are transforming work and organisations, Organisations that are not making the transition to digital enterprises are falling behind. According to a research conducted by the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, 40% of today’s leading companies globally will be displaced from their market position in the next five years. The research adds that 75% of these companies have yet to address this risk by prioritising their digital strategy.

The Indian Scenario

Internet penetration is expanding quickly in India. According to a report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the internet penetration in India will hit the mark of 462 million users by end of June 2016 and the mobile internet users in the country is estimated to be over 317 million by the same date(you can add smartphone shipments as an indicator as well). This is a clear indication of the fact that digital disruption is also a reality in India. As more devices capture more data, interact with more people and change the processes by which daily activities are carried out, digitisation will have a profound impact on organisations across industries.

The Two Fold Challenge

In this rapidly evolving environment, the challenges faced by organisations are two fold– not only the challenge faced due to constantly increasing customer expectations for a simple, virtually painless experience but also the equally intimidating challenge faced due to their employees and workforce. Today’s next-generation employees have become accustomed to unprecedented speed and information access, thus demanding the same in their work environments to enable their ability to meet these same demands from customers. Particularly with millennials, who make up the majority of contact center employees and want access to information and user interfaces similar to what they use personally. This digitally savvy workforce is more comfortable operating in a Omni Channel environment, thereby fostering the need for organisations to optimise and empower their next-generation employee workforce to be responsive to customer demands.

Digital Disruption – Impact on the Workforce

Organisations that enable an “engaged” workforce empower employees to do their best for continuous improvement and inspired customer engagements. This directly impacts greater customer loyalty and overall business performance. Culturally, it is important to let employees know they are customer champions and play a role driving great experiences that lead to brand satisfaction. More than ever, engaged employees are key to driving customer engagement and the customer experience. As such, organizations need to give employees access to the information and solutions they need to be champions for their customers, and help ensure that employees are comfortable leveraging technology to support customer engagement in order to drive better customer experiences.

Empowering the Employees

Successful organisations are empowering employees with contextual data and analytics to help increase customer retention and help support all aspects of customer engagement. This can include insights into customer journeys or perhaps access to analytics-driven data that can help employees ease customer effort and improve experiences in real time. In fact, access to analytics will continue to drive areas such as self-service, social and mobile customer engagement, as well as direct digital interactions across channels such as chat and video. Providing employees with tools to make interaction more personal and productive often involves taking the context of previous interactions and providing actionable recommendations to the agent. This context may exist in many places within the organization, but the information needs to be readily available, despite its location or age. After all, customers know the context of their interactions and expect the companies they engage with to know it too.

So it can be succinctly be said that, digital disruption is a phenomenon which is not only here to stay but will pick up momentum. While this goes against everything traditional and forces organisations to evolve in keeping with the phenomenon, it will also ensure that the customer journey is mapped effectively and employees are empowered to service customers efficiently.

The author is Managing Director, EIS, Verint Systems India