What Is Digital Transformation Consulting In 2022?

In 2022, many companies are facing digital transformation challenges. Digital transformation consulting helps solve problems like resistance to change by existing employees, a general lack of strategy, insufficient expertise on how to create a digital transformation roadmap, and limited budgets. It is the job of digital transformation consultants to guide companies to success in deploying their digital transformation strategy.

In this article we will explore what digital business transformation is, transformation trends that have benefited existing businesses, and how to leverage a digital transformation agency to help you meet your business objectives.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the process of using digital assets to improve upon business procedures, culture, and customer experience. Simply, it’s streamlining your back end (or b2b) to make it easier for your employees to do their jobs, and streamlining your customer experience (b2c) to provide a more satisfying experience with your business, impacting retention and sales. Digital transformation can also impact acquiring new customers and developing leads. Likewise, it can help you court business partners or sponsors.

There are four main types of digital transformation services that you should consider implementing in 2022.

The 4 Types of Digital Transformation Trends

1. Business process – How your organization runs internally and externally
2. Business model – How you can restructure your business to leverage the digital workspace and expand your features for both employees and customers
3. Domain – Understanding five domains which will make your digital transformation successful: Customers, competition, data, innovation, and value
4. Cultural/Organizational – building a digital platform to enable your employees to work more effectively

Let’s look at all these digital business transformation trend processes a little closer to see how they impact your business.

Business Processes

The practice of digitally transforming business processes involves leveraging innovation and novel solutions to solve problems that have in the past been solved person-to-person. It streamlines your business practice to make it easier for you to have successful and consistent interactions with your partners.

Take Anheuser-Busch, they have built an algorithm and mobile app that helps their ~4 million retail locations and bar partners order products in a much easier, automated manner. This frees up their sales reps to spend time talking with retail partners and bar partners about new products, brands, promotions, and other customer centric efforts.

This is an excellent example of how digital transformation consultants have helped a major brand leverage trendy technologies such as mobile apps to improve upon a company’s business practices.

Business Model

It’s important to know that implementing digital transformation to your business model isn’t just about moving your business online. It has to provide value to your end-point users. But, it also involves a big organizational overhaul and needs to be adopted by both employees and stakeholders. The end goal of transforming your business model is to improve revenue streams and increase stock prices.

This is not an overnight process. Enterprise digital transformation (for example, digital transformation in banking) can take anywhere from 2-10 years to become effective, meaning that there will be a lot of push back from those people invested in the process to see the ROI of the transformation more quickly. It requires managing expectations (a place where leveraging a digital transformation agency can be a huge help,) and a steady hand on the helm to ensure that those invested in the success of your strategy don’t get twitchy.

The good news is that some of the biggest brands in the world have successfully overhauled their business model and transformed their already strong brand names into a digitally enhanced and driven ecosphere. Companies like Target, Best Buy, Hasbro, and Home Depot have used digital transformation strategy to overhaul their customer experience and become competitive in the digital age where Amazon dominates sales.

CASE STUDY: Target was one of the first retail chains to remodel their stores to incorporate digital experiences for customers that blur the line between in-store and ecommerce purchases. The introduction of apps like Target Circle (the ability to get coupon offers, earn cash back, plus a discounted shopping day each year) and Target Online both enhance customer experience in-store and online.

In addition to these efforts, Target has developed specific technology to aid their employees in providing customer satisfaction – allowing the employee to see, in real time, where stock is located in their store, and if an item isn’t available they can track where the customer can pick up that item from a Target near them.

Target was also one of the first retail chains to leverage online shopping, in-store pickup, and contactless pickup (which has only enhanced their brand reputation during the current global health crisis.) Target also streamlined their employee processes by providing self-checkout, so more employees could be dedicated to manning the floor and restocking products.

In short, they are a huge success story in enterprise digital transformation. But, it did take 8 years for them to complete this overhaul to how they do business, so employee and stakeholder adoption was surely one of the challenges they faced. Fortunately, they were able to hold steady, since transforming 400 stores, and enhancing their ecommerce space, revenue has hit a new high at $76 billion per year, and their stock price is now trading at $88/share.

Domain

Addressing the transformation of your domain is a place where digital transformation companies can really impact your success. Understanding your domain is complex. It involves understanding your company hierarchy, your workplace ecosphere, and how that combines into a pipeline to your customers.

It also involves a deep understanding of your customer behavior. In order to do this, you must participate in a cycle of behaviors that will then illustrate what exactly your customer wants. You then can tool your domain restructure into a satisfying experience for both your customers and employees. You are looking to add value to your business, and using deep data about your customers is the place to start to understand what innovations might be right for you.

How do I understand customer behavior?

Understanding customer behavior is a Marketing 101 topic. Anyone involved in digital transformation consulting will tell you that this is a circular process that starts with listening.

In order to successfully understand your customer and how you can improve your digital workspace to benefit them you must:

• Listen – Go to your customers and listen to what their pain points are with your product and processes. This involves social listening, review analysis, direct feedback, and looking at your business cycle to see when customer involvement ebbs and flows.
• Engage – The next step is to engage your customers and employees in providing solutions to address these pain points.
• Customize – In 2022 one of the most important things to strive for is a customized customer experience. Using a CRM solution or building one into your backend can help your business achieve that customization everyone is looking for.
• Collaborate – You also want your employees to have customized ways of tracking information coming in from your customers. The best way to drive employees and stakeholders adopting your digital transformation services is to collaborate solutions with them. Listen to their feedback and try to implement some of the most important components that would make their lives and jobs easier. Providing a process that your employees endorse and use nimbly will ensure your project is a success.
• Connect – Let your employees know about your new systems, and evangelize to your existing and potential customer base about how these new offerings will enhance their experience with your brand.
• Deploy – Execute your new processes and efforts.
• Collect data – Hit as many data points as possible to determine success and ROI of your digitally transformed workspace and customer experiences. Then go back to the beginning of your cycle and adjust as your market and employees demand.

By doing these activities it will greatly help you to create the key points of a new domain model: Economic and non-economic incentives, control points, and overall network effectiveness.

Cultural/Organizational

According to Larry Larameu, a leading Enterprise Transformation leader, the key to transforming digitally starts with buy-in from your own organization.

“The top things that need to be done are having a vision for what is possible, aligning your culture to be able to move quickly and take advantage of those opportunities, and providing adequate training to allow your people to be able to implement solutions while also identifying additional opportunities,” he said. “These are all hard things to do because for years the core competencies for IT have been to reduce risk and reduce cost, much of which comes from the traditional top-down management style that is not conducive to moving quickly, empowering people, or being inclusive.” [via CIO]

Starting with the IT team at your company and building out, allows for training and understanding of the digital transformation trends you will be deploying. Remember to remind the members of your IT team to emphasise to other teams the benefits of these new techniques and products will make on their own workdays. This will make the process far less painful and employees less stubborn to implement the changes.

Conclusion

Whether you’re looking at how to implement IoT (Internet of Things) into products to allow your gadgets to talk to each other, to automate processes in factory settings to shift your employee’s time spend from tactical to strategic, or building out striving to improve your customer’s experience with your products – digital transformation is an area that all companies wanting to compete in their business vertical should be taking a close look at in 2022.

If you want to get started on the pathway to digitally transforming your company, let ComboApp know – we’d love to partner with you to bring the best value to your enterprise!