Today’s consumers apply the same digital experience standard to both their personal and professional lives. This merging of experiences, which calls for digital adaptation, has changed business forever.
Even though each digital experience begins and ends with the customer driving the interaction, taking a customer experience (CX) only view short-changes digital adaptation’s potential to push business forward. Inside the whole of these transactions exists a multitude of opportunities to reengineer business operations from the inside out – in front office and back office, with partners and suppliers, and finally with our most important resource: our own people.
Digital adaptation requires us to focus on ALL our stakeholders, especially the internal teams thinking, developing, testing, and provisioning digital capabilities for all the other stakeholders’ use. Taking a broad, sweeping view of digital adaptation enables revolutionary customer experiences, and it also helps us create a forward thinking company culture. This culture not only delights our customers, it can make our digitally adapted companies into destination employers for the talented people we need to succeed.
The Back Office Experience
The digital adaptation of business does not solely live in the customer experience. While it’s the digitally adapted customer experience that gets all the headlines, digital impacts all parts of the business, not just revenue. While these results are less visible, they are equally important from a competitive standpoint.
Digital Adaptation serves two equally important constituencies: internal workforces and external customers. In the digitally adapted business, the term, “customers,” refers to everyone involved in the purchase – the people and businesses that buy our products and services as well as the internal workgroups, teams and staff that create, deliver and support those offerings. Empower internal customers and they will look after your customers, as Richard Branson reminds us. That empowerment centers on access to the latest technologies and tools as we reengineer the customer experience.
This consumerization of IT has an impactful spillover effect on our technological/digital experiences outside of “the office,” which shapes our thinking “inside the office.” Potential new hires assess an organization’s technological ambition and its current capabilities. Candidates don’t want to work in companies that are technologically inept – refusing to adapt or failing to invest in ways that put them in the best place to succeed. This candidate and employee dilemma becomes a huge issue that sits at the intersection of culture and technology. An organization’s ability to harness the power of technology quickly becomes, from a staff perspective, personally impactful from a career standpoint.
Technology moves so quickly that spending two or three years with a technologically backward company can damage an employee’s career – seriously. Not only can this time be “wasted” working on outdated technologies and methodologies, the time is lost in terms of acquiring new, more in-demand skills. In truth, this “double whammy” is more crippling to a career than the lost time itself. Digital adaptation is about more than saving money, improving operational efficiency and satisfying customer demand. It can also attract and retain the talent you need as you build your teams for the future.
We do ourselves a disservice and miss out on opportunities if we restrict our thinking around “experience” to relate to the customer at the expense of considering its very real impact on our current and future employees. Thinking more broadly across the organization, from back office through the customer’s journey and back, can create an experience that makes a “destination company” for employees as well as customers. Experience tells us that companies will discover unexpected benefits in unlikely parts of the back office’s digital adaptation. Check out this case study to see how one leading beverage distributor used a single, new application to correct an order processing problem and discover an unexpected staff retention benefit. And, to learn more about digital adaptation, download our white paper.
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