Written by Dola Fashola
Digital has become such a buzzword over the last 3 years. It seems like every bank, shop, even your local chinese takeaway, is looking at how to go digital or ‘digitise’ their business and ‘ways of working.’ This permeates beyond the common social media presence and having ‘an app for that.’ It’s extending into internal back office as companies seek to digitise their own systems. So today we are seeing not only typical front office functions such as customer service, contact centre, web etc taking on digital change programmes, but also back office departments including HR, procurement and legal. Everyone is getting on the digital bandwagon in an attempt to digitise and keep up. The reasons most often cited are:
- There are a new wave of digital natives, who only want to engage using digital and who only know digital as a way of living. They’ve grown up with technology and they want to… wait for it… “engage” with us in the same way.
- We need to disrupt our business model to become the Uber of our industry and digital disruption is the means to do it.
- Consumers are digitally empowered and their always-on connectivity means that companies serving them must mirror this change in customers expectations and demands.
- Our competitors are doing it
- We need to create a frictionless experience across all our channels. Digital is a way to help us achieve that. If we can mirror existing physical channels onto a digital platform, we’ll also be able to streamline and reduce costs.
But let’s stop and backtrack a second. What is digital? If it’s becoming more agile, less process driven, more experimental and customer focused – then perfect! However a common definition of digital is: social, mobile, cloud, technology and analytics, which I’ve never truly gotten on board with. I think of those things as ways or components of ‘doing’ digital related stuff. The definition I go by when describing digital is the process of continuously improving a business to create valuable processes and deliver a vision of customer experience that uses new technological advances to make dealing with brands easier and faster. The reason I like to define digital as such is because the truth is that technology is a relentless force. New waves of innovation are occurring every year and at a fast pace. These innovations will continue to push businesses, industries and markets forward as they continually test existing business models and for this reason, “digital transformation” is actually just going to be continous improvement. I know it doesn’t sound as sexy as digital disruption, but to be honest if you’re still trying to digitally disrupt five to seven years from now, it’s likely to mean you’ve a hopped on a delayed train that you think is yours. It’ll be a bit like your Aunt finally getting high speed fibre optic broadband in 2017. She’s excited, you’re happy she’s finally got it, but it’s been around for so long, it’s a bit of an anti climax.
Let’s take an analogy of a microphone. Using the common description above, digital becomes the microphone (the way of doing something). But if digital is the microphone then where is the song? If an organisation has nothing to say or doesn’t know how to sing a tune, then “doing digital” and putting resources, time, effort and money into building better microphones won’t amount to very much. So it’s time we work on the song, work on the output and the melody we want people to hear and love. It then becomes a process of continuous improvement rather than ‘digital transformation’ – which is never a once and done activity. It’s a way of life now and should no longer be compartmentalised.
So yes, I think it’s time we dropped the ‘digital’ mic and maybe go a cappella.
Written by Dola Fashola
Stay Experiencing 
Agree with this article – good read.
I have been in group exercises at work where regardless of the scenario given, there’s always someone that will say “we should propose the development of an app in our answer / pitch”. Digitisation is seen as the answer and not the means to the achieving the answer.
Getting stuck in this mindset is dangerous for two reasons.
1) You will most likely deviate from addressing the actual issues / opportunities and end up developing something that is not consistent with your strategy but may look / feel ‘nice and modern’
2) Technology and platforms are forever changing / updating at an increasing rate so by the time you’ve developed a digital solution for the sake of ‘going digital’, it will become old pretty quickly.
Looking forward to reading more.
It would be great to read case studies of where a business has rushed to embrace digitisation and developed something that wasn’t what customers needed at all. For every Netflix, Apple, Spotify – there must be many to learn from for what not to do.
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I think so many organisations rush to “embrace’ digitisation and many for good reasons. Your last point is key though, are doing it for the customer or for the sake of being modern? To answer your question on who has rushed to develop something that wasn’t what customers needed… Well, the best example I can think of are organisations who have rushed to digitise or create a platform that is ill thought out, over budget and delivery pressures and costs mean features for the MVP are constantly stripped back, it’s almost like the house renovation that turns into giving the walls a lick of paint instead of the loft extension that was planned. One great example is a company called Mopp. They got the right proposition- an on demand gig economy cleaning service! You book your cleaner via an app, they (hopefully) turn up at your door, you rate them and voila. The issue? The staff weren’t that great… the focus was on the technology, but no customer centric organisation can exist without good staff. If you want to see how badly customers thought of their services, read these reviews on trustpilot > https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.mopp.com
On balance, many organisatons that didn’t rush to embrace digital and went bust include Kodak and HMV. In these cases, the opposite was true – they just did not develop in line with what the customer DID need and want.
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Hey Dola, good thoughts!
I agree, these days, digital is used for everything, anything and nothing…No one has the same definition for it!
To me, it’s both the “new” way of doing things so the how and the outcome you get as an organisation, as a citizen, a consumer etc…
If you think about the experience you get as a patient when booking a medical appointment online or by selecting click and collect for your John Lewis delivery, both are made up of technology, analytics, you name it and it is the combination of these factors that give you the patient and the consumer the outcome you are looking for. So I see digital as both the means and the end.
Speak soon!
Penelope
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Thank you Penelope – it is the means and the end, hence why we need to be careful of labelling everything ‘digital’.. It’s a continuous thing that is synonymous with the age that we are living in now.
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This is a keen observation. We see countless of companies from small to big whose only message is “Buy my product!” and they invest in building all kinds of digital platforms only to discover that consumers don’t want to “engage” at all with them, wondering why… Having an app for that.. is not in itself a strategy. They confuse the tool with the means.
The prime example of that is the restaurant which during Covid started to take orders online but dropped the platform as soon as people were allowed to go there physically claiming it doesn’t generate as much and it’s difficult to keep up. Many of these places have either gone out of business or struggle to keep afloat even after Covid because they don’t understand consumer behavour. It wasn’t the platform that caused the problem it was that they were not able to adapt to the new needs of the consumers in the changed environment.
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