Digital transformation can be a daunting term. How will you manage the task of upgrading or replacing all of your technology? And further, how will you retrain your staff to adapt to this new approach? Before you begin this process, it’s important to make a plan that has the best chance of achieving success in both the short and long term.
Here are four tips to help streamline the digital transformation process and set your organization up for future success.
1. Make a plan
One of the most important pitfalls to avoid in your digital transformation journey is trying to do everything at once. Make a plan to get to your end goal in logical steps, with your current capabilities in mind. Here are some questions to ask as you build your roadmap for success:
- What does our end goal look like?
- What specific metrics are we looking to improve?
- What outdated systems are causing the most customer or employee frustration?
- What disconnected systems can be combined into a single platform?
- Where can we future-proof systems to account for future innovations?
- Are the new systems integrated to easily share data and avoid silos?
- What migration processes and tools are available?
2. Embrace automation
The best thing about automation is that its benefits affect your whole organization. Automated processes save your organization money, provide a better customer experience, and help ensure compliance. Since digital transformation enables your organization to embrace automation, you should seek out opportunities to automate wherever you can.
As you look for these opportunities, be sure to address both employee processes as well as the customer journey. Where are your employees currently spending time doing repetitive, manual tasks? Are agents or back-office workers having to copy and paste information in multiple places? Do customers have to repeat themselves as they move through their journey?
One example of embracing automation is transforming your quality evaluation process. If you are currently manually evaluating agent interactions, automating this process results in a tremendous increase in the number of evaluations with less overall effort. By adding automation, you can achieve a more complete picture of agent performance and drive higher interaction quality for an improved customer experience, all with less effort.
3. Simplify
As you begin transforming your systems and processes, it’s essential to take a step back and analyze your current processes and workflows. If your processes are outdated, overly complex, or confusing, digital transformation won’t change that. Use this opportunity to evaluate your current processes and find opportunities to simplify them. If you aren’t sure how to find these complex processes, here are some tips:
- What call types are the longest?
- What call types result in the most callbacks?
- What are your top customer complaints?
- What call types receive the most negative feedback
Take a look at the processes associated with these interaction types to find places where you might be able to simplify.
4. Involve your workforce
While digital transformation is largely a technology change, your chances of success are much higher if you include people, process, and technology in your project. There are several opportunities to involve your workforce in the process to ensure a smooth transition:
- Ask your front-line employees what systems cause the most frustration. This can give you a view into what applications to tackle first.
- Involve your employees in the interface of the new applications, and train them on the new systems when they are rolled out. User adoption is a common challenge in digital transformation, so involving your employees in the process can help ensure their buy-in.
- Look to upskill or reskill employees as needed. For instance, if you migrate from manual to automated quality evaluations, you can shift your quality assurance employees to more strategic tasks like employee coaching.
Digital transformation doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Following some key best practices will equip you to be complete this process seamlessly and improve the experience for your customers, employees, and organization.
- How to Streamline the Digital Transformation Process - July 14, 2022
