Digitalisation is not Digital

We have long passed the time when companies thought of “going digital” as getting on social media, going mobile as building a one-off app, or building an online store as an individual IT project. Or have we?

What if we change our mindset from thinking about digital marketing and digital sales on their own to just one company plan for modern growth? How will digitalisation efforts become an integral part of everyday actions instead of an IT cost?

This decade will most certainly be known as the tipping point in history when digitalisation really changed the world. Physical companies stumbled and digital ones soared. We will look at this decade as the time when innovation started being not just about creating new products and services, but changing the way companies and their customers operate every single day.

Take a look at a company’s customer touchpoints and add a dozen more. That’s when you can really start seeing the possibilities for growth. Some touchpoints are digital and some physical. Some are operated by your sales department, some by marketing and some by the IT department. Some touchpoints are outsourced to a delivery company or a plug-in digital service component. To the customer, all of these points of contact represent the company brand and influence their future purchasing decisions. It is easy to see that a badly behaving sales person can kill a deal, but a bug in your e-commerce registration form may turn away even more customers.

How many mystery shoppers test all of your channels instead of just the most obvious one?

The problems most companies face are caused by what was mentioned above: separate departments with their own goals and measured targets. The past decade’s big transition is that the customer journey has become longer and more complicated than ever before. Many of the journey’s touchpoints are digital or digitally enhanced. Creating a well-planned mesh of digital tools for the customer and for internal use will be what separates successful companies from those who stumble.