Digital transformation: How CTOs and CIOs can drive value through innovation

Simply put, digital transformation fundamentally changes how a business operates and the value it delivers to its customers by integrating digital technology into every aspect of the enterprise. But let me be clear. Digital transformation is not just about “digitizing” an organization.

In my opinion, digital transformation empowers CTOs and CIOs to guide their organizations in rediscovering and differentiating themselves by taking an “outside/in” perspective. The most successful companies have used it for just such rediscovery.

The companies that succeed in transforming digitally can develop a much greater understanding of modern-day customers, engage with them more deeply and personally, and deliver on their expectations for highly contextual experiences across all relevant channels.

However, digital transformation goes beyond engagement. It has a direct impact on the organization’s ability to create value. Here’s why.

Highly engaged customers are:

• Six times more likely to try a new product or service from their preferred brand
• Four times more likely to have referred their preferred brand to their friends, family, and connections
• Two times more likely to purchase from their preferred brand, even when a competitor has a better product or price

Furthermore, highly engaged customers buy 90 percent more frequently, spend 60 percent more per purchase, and have three times the annual value compared to the average customer.

Four Keys to Enabling Digital Transformation

So, what is essential to successful digital transformation? Here are four key foundational elements that support it:

1. An agile and flexible IT environment (CTO mandate) To support the nimble, unpredictable, or uneven consumption of resources, an organization should have a flexible and simple IT environment delivered via a cloud or hybrid environment. The ability to shift workloads between these environments is important as is the ability to divide the workload at a granular API services level to enable the business to choreograph or orchestrate business process and outcomes. This also fosters a culture of innovation for products and services as the ecosystem of business, IT, and partnerships has a clear understanding of each other’s capabilities and boundaries.

1. Key outcomes and ROI (CIO mandate) A clearly defined value framework and return on key investment will be paramount for the CIO and executive management. The ability to achieve balance between the total cost of ownership and business value could tremendously improve the success of engagement and thereby conversion. This can include an increase in engagement and conversion, reduction in non-contextual communication, and most importantly, communicating to customers only through their preferred channels. A value—not just cost—equation will be important to realizing this.

1. Personalized customer experiences (innovation) Understanding customers based on the rich audience data that an organization harvests is key to innovating personalized customer experiences that differentiate the organization. Personalization is far more than delivering a communication with the customer’s name on it. Rather, personalization—or more rightly, individualization—requires the demonstration of deep, contextual relevance to the individual based on their activities and interests across all the digital channels. That means:

a. Delivering relevant content
 b. Delivering it on the relevant channel
 c. Adopting a non-sales communication approach

4. Seamless omnichannel experiences (innovation delivered) The ability to tie all the intelligence about a customer together allows an organization to tap into and enrich a single digital profile every time a customer interacts with the brand. It also enables the brand to continue the conversation from one channel to another, for example, by starting an interaction with a text and completing it on a desktop browser or a mobile app seamlessly.

In the age of omnichannel marketing, the CTO plays a key role in making the technology architecture simple and easy to integrate and in providing secure access both to the data/application and infrastructure at a scalable level. A CIO, on the other hand, will be the custodian of business outcomes delivered by the seamless customer experience enabled by the underlying architecture, thus creating the face of the business. Success in digital is all about customer adoption, and both the CTO and CIO have pivotal roles in making that happen.

Mani Gopalaratnam

Guest Author CEO and CTO (Customer Success) Resulticks