Whether you are changing your business to disrupt or avoid being disrupted, slamming a bunch of SMACT (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Internet of Things) on top of your enterprise will not make you a digital enterprise, despite what some industry consultants and experts  say. You need to become “digital by design,” committed to digitally uniting your customers, the employees that support them, and the back office systems to create journeys that are low in customer effort and profitable.

I will be discussing how your bank can get there at the  American Banker: Digital Banking 2016,  conference, June 20-22 in New Orleans, with Jason Kammer, Vice President of Strategic Digital Initiatives at Fifth Third Bank, who will show the practical, in-the-trenches view of a digital transformation.

Disruptor or Disrupted

It’s easy to identify companies that are born disruptive—Apple, Amazon, AirBnB, Paypal, and Uber, for example. And it’s just as easy to recognize those that have failed to transform, like Blockbuster and Borders. MIT Sloan and Cap Gemini reports that digital enterprises are:

  • experiencing 9% higher revenue growth,
  • achieving 26% more profit, and
  • attaining 12% higher market valuations as compared to their peers.

And the event horizon for the transformation is shortening all the time. During the past 50 years the lifespan of a company sitting on the Fortune 500 has decreased from 35 to 15 years.  Companies have less time to assimilate to the level of change and the customer demands required to maintain leadership status. I believe that no industry is experiencing this pace of change faster than financial services.

Tremendous market forces are driving digital transformation. We now see every generation demanding that companies address our individual, specific needs, and engage with us how we want, when we want, and where we want.

Consumer willingness to interact via increasingly miniaturized digital technologies, such as machines through the Internet of Things (IoT) or wearables, has also produced a vast trove of data that enables greater customer insight. In turn, this translates into more effectively targeted offers and interactions. All of this nanosecond customer engagement and feedback, combined with constantly changing data and faster competitive responses by “born digital” businesses, means today’s companies must embrace dramatically accelerated rates of change. These forces make becoming a digital enterprise imperative.

Where to Begin

Here are 10 business reasons for becoming “digital by design,” including role, process, and technology best practices to help you understand how your organization can make the transformation:

  1. Build a sense of urgency about the digital imperative—Make sure everyone understands that becoming a digital enterprise is now a “do or die.”
  2. Communicate a sound strategy across the company—Create a business strategy that has executive and employee buy-in. Research shows that we are still working in silos and that most executives cannot explain their own strategy.
  3. Build the right team and define roles clearly—Identify the new skills required and recruit the individuals who will champion the vision of the digital enterprise. Empower them to lead the organization forward with well-defined priorities, a roadmap, and definition of roles.
  4. Engage your customers with a mobile and personalized customer journey—Select the customer-facing tasks that are the biggest opportunities to improve the customer journey, and use them to implement a digital service that becomes your competitive advantage. Exceed expectations during “moments of truth.” Make the rest of the customer journey personalized and easy. Utilize all of the channels optimally, but make switching channels invisible to the customer.
  5. Deliver the right work and training to the right person at exactly the right time—Across all channels, get your customer’s request to exactly the right person at exactly the right time.
  6. Be agile by optimizing the back office to automate work—Automate as much of the work as possible so employees can focus on the exceptions.
  7. Continuously anticipate customers’ needs and use omnichannel analytics to deliver feedback—Create a “learning machine” within the company by continuously getting feedback from your customers, analyzing the feedback, and delivering it to operations to drive improvements.
  8. Modernize your communications and CRM platform to create an adaptive architecture—Design, orchestrate, and optimize customer journeys by implementing a six-part, unified architecture that includes: omnichannel customer engagement, employee engagement, back office business optimization, journey management, analytics, and case management technology. This architecture will  help you sense change and respond quicker than the competition.
  9. Govern for change—Implement executive governance and a center of excellence to radiate the business improvements while implementing scorecards for continuous improvement.
  10. Be resilient—Recognize that it’s not all going to be perfect from the word “go.” Continuously employ these best practices to identify areas for improvement, then act on those insights.

For more on evolving to an omnichannel and digital by design enterprise, download our eBook: The Banker’s Guide to a Seamless Omnichannel Customer Experience.