In this 5-part series, I discuss the importance of digital transformation, how to ensure you achieve your organizational goals, and the best ways to plan for success. You can read more about some of these topics and more in my books, The Center of Experience and Digital Delight, available in print and digital versions.

Great customer experience (CX) is more than something that is nice to have. It is now one of the chief points of competitive advantage for many brands across a growing number of industries. One of the biggest roadblocks to providing a more seamless experience to customers is the need for digital transformation within the organization. Whether the transformation helps the direct interactions customers have with your brand, the operational aspects behind the scenes, the measurement of CX, or all of the above, it sometimes takes large-scale organizational change to enable a better customer experience.

Now that we have a better understanding of what digital transformation is, and the different components that make it up, let’s talk about its importance to organizations. We’re going to look at four categories of benefits.

Increased productivity + cost reduction

The first category is likely the one that will get the attention of executives, shareholders, and other key stakeholders. While the next three are vital to the long-term success of an organization, it is likely financially-related factors that will get a digital transformation effort approved. That said, increasing productivity while reducing costs in the long term is a very good benefit to be able to attribute to your digital transformation initiative, and this needs to be a primary goal.

Digital transformation aims to streamline platforms and processes, and enable employees to communicate with one another (and customers), as well as do their jobs more efficiently. What’s more, a strong initiative should also give your employees access to more actionable information so that they can make informed decisions more effectively, and tie those choices to the bottom line.

Customer experience benefits

Your customers can feel when your internal systems, processes, platforms, and teams are disconnected. They may not always be able to articulate it, but it comes across in how effortless their challenges are solved, how long it takes to provide support, and how easy it is to make a sale.

One of digital transformation’s key aims is to streamline an organization in order to enhance the customer experience. Similar to the first point about increasing productivity and cost reduction, I don’t believe a digital transformation is successful unless it has a tangible, meaningful impact on the customer and their ability to do business with your organization.

Employee experience benefits

Similar to the improved interaction between your employees and customers, a successful digital transformation initiative enhances employees’ individual and team experience as well. Think about it. All that effort spent streamlining processes, platforms, and systems for your external audiences means that your employees, contractors, and partners also have simplified methods to communicate and do their work.

This streamlining of siloed and disparate platforms, data sources, and processes, helps your employees focus on what’s most important. It also reduces their frustration and the time it takes to do redundant tasks. This is a net benefit to the employee experience.

Enhances competitive advantage

Finally, but a critical long-term component, is a digital transformation’s ability to enhance how a company is able to not only keep up with the competition in the short-term, but pull ahead and stay ahead. Greater productivity, happier customers, and engaged employees go a long way towards long-term stability. Innovation, however, needs to be continuously applied, and systems, processes, and platforms need to be continuously improved.

This continuous improvement is the big reason why I stress the agile part of agile digital transformation. It’s not enough to simply undergo a digital transformation initiative, you need to make transformation and innovation part of your company culture.

In addition to these being key benefits of digital transformation, they are also important criteria to assess the strength of your strategy. In other words, if your transformation initiative doesn’t have positive impacts on the above items, you are missing out on some key benefits.

Conclusion

I hope you've gotten a good sense of just how beneficial a digital transformation initiative can be to your organization. While improving customer experience is a key benefit, there are many others well beyond that.

In the next article, I’m going to discuss why digital transformation initiatives fail to achieve their goals and how to avoid that fate.

You can read more about some of these topics and more in my books, The Center of Experience and Digital Delight, available in print and digital versions.