Effective Digital Transformation is Key to Delivering an Effective Digital Customer Experience

Asia Business Outlook recently got a chance to interact with Sharanya, wherein she shared her insights on the current digital transformation scenario and various aspects related to it. Below are the excerpts from the exclusive interview –

How is technology enabling businesses to improve their digital customer experience?

When you think of digital transformation, people are increasingly becoming more tech savvy in recent times. Since they were forced to work virtually for the last two years, people now understand the importance of staying updated with the latest technologies to improve their lives across all aspects. Today, technology can completely streamline your workflows and significantly cut-down manual intervention in a lot of processes. Also, people are now more connected with each other regardless of the physical distance between them due to rapid tech advancements in the technology. However, while designing a digital customer experience, every organization must ensure to implement it in such a way that it easily accessible to all.

What would be your advice for designing a wonderful digital customer experience?

I have over 12 years now in the user experience & design field, which primarily involves the entire customer journey when they interact with any digital product. At the core of building a delightful user experience is to have a clear understanding of the customers’ pain points and solving in them in the most efficient way possible, while simultaneously making sure that they enjoy their overall experience interacting with the brand. However, they must make sure that the enjoyment factor doesn’t become the primary focus factor.

What are some of the major challenges companies face in their digital transformation journeys?

The first aspect here is organizational maturity, wherein many a times, different companies are in different growth stages. This prohibits them from making system-wide changes overnight, and the larger the company size, the more sophisticated & complicated the transformation process becomes. The second aspect is hiring the right talent who possess the experience & mindset that is necessary to transform. These two aspects are two major hindrances that if overcome efficiently, will lead an organization to heightened success in its digital transformation journey.

How is design thinking the decision making process in organizations?

In simple terms, digital thinking is nothing but democratizing decision making within an organization. At the core of design thinking is building empathy with your customer and putting yourself in their shoes to clearly understand their key problems. Design thinking is bound to succeed only if everyone in the organization is familiarized with the idea of how they can collaborate with each other and have the right decision makers from various departments to help build solutions that effectively cater to customers’ problems. '

How can a business leader use emotional intelligence to build a positive company culture and promote diversity & inclusion in the workplace?

Most of the times, people do not talk about emotional intelligence when working in an organization as it is still a very understated soft skill that is needed especially in the C-Suite roles. Only then will the person be open to facing challenges in terms of not building inclusive teams, which is paramount while transforming your company into a complete innovation-focused organization. Also, every organization must ensure that the people involved in ideation and solution developing process represent the diversity of its customers as well. Thus, I strongly believe that only through emotional intelligence and a clear understanding of the importance of the diversity among your teams is the only way a leader can promote diversity and inclusion in a workplace.

"The global covid pandemic forced companies across the world to restructure the way businesses function and making remote working and virtual workspaces mainstream"

How important is change management to organizational culture? How are your strategies to build and maintain a diverse and inclusive workplace?

To me, change management means to be introspective, more self-aware and speak to people within the organization to understand the factors that are causing setbacks to the company from evolving to the next level and become a digital transformation leader. Change management is a major aspect that organizations across almost all industries are brainstorming extensively in recent times. The global covid pandemic forced companies across the world to restructure the way businesses function and making remote working and virtual workspaces mainstream. However, this resulted in a huge shift in mindset for a lot of organizations who were earlier very much hesitant of embracing remote working models. Thus, it is safe is now more needed than ever before.