Enterprise digital transformation: A data-driven approach

Before it was the world’s largest franchise network and one of the largest real estate companies, McDonald’s had a humble beginning. Despite having a reputation for consistent menus and recipes, McDonald’s used to have an eclectic selection of locations.

Documented today in the @nonstandardmcd Twitter account, a shrinking number of McDonald’s have unique themes—from a train-themed restaurant in Springfield, Missouri to a turquoise logo used in Sedona, Arizona, nonstandard McDonald’s can still be found here and there, but the company has been hard at work converting these unique restaurants into a more consistent, standardized brand.

Is this transformation a good thing? For brick and mortar renovations as well as enterprise digital transformations, change can be disorienting and frustrating, which is why making data-driven innovations in service of your customer’s needs is so important. Don’t just change your business—change it into something better. 

Key Takeaways:

• Enterprise digital transformation affects every aspect of business

• Automation and AI boost productivity

• Digital transformations give customers a more positive experience

• Optimizely can help you take your digital experiences to the next level

What is enterprise digital transformation?

Digital transformation is the process of integrating digital tools into business processes. Enterprise digital transformation includes everything from the UI on your website, the function of business apps, internal procedures, document management and more.

Why transform?

The tendency to resist change is instinctive but dangerous. If a procedure worked in the past, why won’t it continue to work in the future? In recent years, the business world has been changing at an unprecedented pace, and many organizations are feeling the pressure of simply keeping up with the pace of change.

Business practices that were effective a decade or even a few years ago could be obsolete by tomorrow. Customers expect a digital experience that’s intuitive, effective and efficient, and your stakeholders expect complex, fast and accurate performance. Satisfying both of these goals requires transforming your digital experiences based on customer-focused data. 

Automation increases decision velocity

In the iconic I Love Lucy episode Job Switching, Lucy and Ethel struggle to keep up with a gradually accelerating conveyor belt of chocolate candies. In the end, they resort to stuffing chocolate in their hats, shirts, and mouths to cover up the fact that they just can’t keep up with the speed of the factory.

The business world is speeding up at an exponential rate. You must make customer-centric decisions quickly, accurately and consistently, and relying on human decision-making alone doesn’t scale. While automation requires human oversight, a desktop computer is capable of making hundreds of millions of decisions every second. Even though human brains are much faster at processing human senses, they just aren’t as fast at making tangible calculations.

To effectively serve your customers’ needs, you must make decisions at high velocity, and automation is the key to turning time and resource-consuming human labor into automated processes. Some notable opportunities for automation are in marketing, document management and business processes.

Customer experience monitoring

The two priorities of your organization should be delivering positive outcomes to your internal and external stakeholders. For your customers, positive outcomes occur when you meet their needs, including their formal need for the product or service you provide and their informal need to have a positive experience along the way.

For your internal stakeholders, positive outcomes include data-driven insights so that you can recognize and reproduce positive outcomes. Because of these twin needs for customer experience and data insights, your enterprise digital transformation should be both data-driven and customer-centric.

At the crossroads of these two priorities is customer experience monitoring.

Without this digital transformation, the first time you receive feedback from a customer, it’s usually not going to be positive. You will likely hear your customers’ complaints long after the opportunity to prevent the issue has come and gone. 

Customer experience monitoring allows you to measure both the positive and the negative digital interactions your customers have with your business. This creates data that you can use to inform further enterprise digital transformation and a gauge to identify your customers’ pain points.

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Outpacing the speed of business

Often, businesses get so caught up treading water that they neglect to make progress. Swimming against the current is hard enough, but for an enterprise digital transformation to succeed, businesses must keep up with trends and innovate faster.

As previously discussed, automation plays an important role in accelerating decision velocity, but there are other ways that digital transformations can help organizations outpace the speed of business.

Workflow mapping, for example, is the work of formalizing business processes. By using workflow mapping, businesses can identify bottlenecks in their process, find opportunities for digital transformation, and even communicate their processes via digital means.

Digital tools aren’t replacements for humans. Computers can’t make the kinds of subjective judgments that humans excel at. But computers are incredibly efficient at performing processes. Using a data-driven process focus, you can free up your human labor to focus on the things humans do best and use digital tools for the processes computers do best.

AI and risk mitigation

Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is a hot topic in the tech world. From fun toys like Dall-E Mini to powerful AI-based personalization, AI is a valuable tool for enterprise digital transformation.

The catch? AI is powerful, but it’s also complicated, which means that investing in AI is not a trivial matter. The upside, however, is that AI can radically transform the way you do business.

One of the prominent uses of AI in today’s business environment is risk mitigation. AI can identify customer trends, for example, that are far too nuanced and subtle for even the most trained human eye. Using this customer-centric data, AI can identify what kinds of customers are likely to be high-risk, what kinds of follow-up strategies are most effective, and what kinds of resources are most useful to a customer with questions.

Enterprise digital transformation with Optimizely

Your customers’ digital experience with your company is no longer an after-thought. Especially post-Covid, many customers are experiencing your business as digital-first. Your ability to harness modern technology to improve your performance and provide positive outcomes to your customers is the difference between falling behind and staying relevant.

Whether you’re interested in looking for new ways to implement AI, new ways to create and deliver digital content, or new ways to optimize your users’ digital experience, Optimizely is your source for expertise and results. See how Optimizely can help you today by taking your digital experiences to the next level.