Digital change can and will encompass all areas of the business. You are more than likely to already be on a digital journey and will have achieved more or less success depending on the company’s industry, size, maturity and many other factors. Regardless of where you are on this journey, there will be areas where virtually every company can benefit from improvements almost instantly. What follows is not a blanket list applicable to all but we have heard these reoccurring themes in virtually every company that we have spoken to.

Marketing

The field of marketing has changed dramatically over the last decade. According to eMarketer, share of digital marketing spend has increased by 10 percentage points in the last 3 years alone and will exceed 50% globally by 2021. This is not really anything new for anyone who have been online recently and for companies in some industries and geographies the marketing spend is likely to be fully digital by now. But due to its high impact on revenue stream and still high levels of inefficiencies, any company is likely to benefit even from small improvements in their digital marketing efforts, regardless of their current maturity. Whether you are looking to improve your attribution models, find a CRM system to better understand your customers or simply are taking first steps in digital advertising, this is an area where actions can be seen almost instantly in the results.

Data

Over the last two years 90% of the data in the world has been been generated and that pace is only likely to increase. Majority of the companies are already collecting, storing and analyzing data in one way or another, sometimes without even realizing it themselves. Depending on your company’s digital maturity the ways to utilize data can differ tremendously – perhaps you are taking the first steps in finding ways to collect data that matters and brings you insights, or maybe you are looking to deploy a high performance data lake to deal with heterogeneous data sources and drive your AI initiatives. In any case the focus should be not only the data for its own sake but on the ways to generate real value for the company.

For example, one of our clients in transportation industry have spent a year to develop and deploy a unified data warehouse for all business units. However, it was only being used for a few management reports which did little to influence daily business decisions and drive results forward. By working closely with business development team we have developed a model and a tool to utilize this data in their annual tendering process. This allowed the company to significantly speed up the response time and focus more on informed decision making which led to increased win rate and hence yield and profit growth.

User experience

As tech giants have perfected their user experience, today’s customers are expecting the same level of flawless and seamless interactions from any company. This applies to virtually all segments and industries, whether it is B2B or B2C, goods or services, mass or custom production. If the customers are relatively acceptant of old ways of working, it is more than likely to only be temporary until a disruptor enters the market. Great examples include banking where a new breed of app-first challengers threaten legacy banks and mobility services, such as Uber, Lyft or Didi, which are bringing new customer expectations into taxi industry.

Therefore, we strongly advise to proactively look into ways that digital can enhance experience for your customers before someone else does it instead. This does not necessarily mean going app-first or fully online. Take a fresh look at the full customer journey, identify any frictions that they face at any point and see how technology can reduce or eliminate pain points. This could be as simple as equipping your teams with tablet devices that would enable them to fill in sales – or any other – form on the go instead of sending lots of emails. The areas will differ by company but the focus should be on the points that cause the most pain from the customers’ point of view.

Operational excellence

One of the original promises of technology was ability to do things much faster, better and accurately. By now, you are already benefiting from ways to increase your operational efficiency – emails are used instead of physical mail to speed up communication, barcode scanners eliminate the need to physically record goods sold, navigation systems allow us reach our destinations faster. All of these and many more technologies enable operations to work faster and more efficiently. However, lots of inefficiencies still remain and new digital tools will be enabling companies to do things better and faster for years to come. The focus of your operational excellence efforts – similarly to user experience ones – should be on areas that currently cause the most pain and can yield the most value, preferably in monetary terms.

As an example, one of our clients was working on a company app for internal use, which was supposed to include contact database, location information and news feed. However, when we looked at the organization we identified a number of areas that employees identified as more immediate pain points. One of those was slow request process for IT assets: when a new employee started, they would on average receive their laptop and computer on the third day of their work which means lost productivity in the first days. In addition, managers were frustrated by ancient approval process which involved printing and scanning hard copies. By identifying this early in the process the company embedded approval process into the app which allowed to significantly speed up IT assets allocation and increased adoption of the app since the start.

Repetitive processes

Despite technological advancements many employees still spend large amounts of time on repetitive, dull tasks that add little value but are nonetheless needed, such as data entry, invoice reconciliation or data cleaning. This leads to potential errors, staff turnover and potentially increased costs. However, as McKinsey estimates, 85% of a typical firm’s 900+ processes can be automated and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a perfect way to get on this journey. In very simple terms RPA is a set of software that sits on computers or servers and performs repetitive tasks that normally would be done by people. The technology can be implemented in relatively short timeframes – weeks rather than months – and can immediately free up resources to focus on more value adding activities.

Which of these areas are most relevant to your business will depend on many factors and you need to make business decisions on where most value can be added. We can help you evaluate these and start on the journey on selected ones – let’s have a talk and see how to unlock digital value.