With this urgency and context in mind, it also helps to take a phased approach to digital transformation. While you certainly don’t want a collection of disjointed projects, there should be incremental improvements that build momentum and show payback. 

Think in terms of more specific outcomes you can phase in as part of a more ambitious digital transformation vision. The journey becomes more manageable in bite-size chunks—and less prone to being just a slogan.

Perhaps the biggest piece of advice is to make the transformation objective customer-focused, not company-focused. 

We have a lot of data about customers, which we can slice and dice to understand their buying patterns and recommend purchases and target them with promotions. But to succeed at CX-focused digital transformation, interactions need to be analyzed from the customer perspective. Think in terms of the lifestyle interests or business needs customers are trying to solve when they turn to you and make sure the various touchpoints you have (or create) help meet these needs.

Is that new chatbot just saving your company on staffing costs, or does it actually give good answers to customers while escalating to a human (when needed) seamlessly and intelligently? Digital transformation deliverables like these should be judged by how they’ll be perceived—and used—by your customers. 

To their credit, many organizations already conduct extensive customer surveys and research as part of their Voice of the Customer or VoC programs. It makes sense to blend VoC feedback and direction with any transformation efforts that intersect with CX.

Single source of truth

There are many technologies that can be part of digital transformation programs, and many of these can help CX. Chatbots driven by artificial intelligence and IoT and connected devices can make CX more effective or present a new way of interacting with a company.

Digital technology and smart connected products result in additional points of interaction for customers. This can be great if you want to grow through new channels, though product-as-a-service offerings or simply by making customer interactions more efficient.

But interacting with customers across multiple channels and devices also is a challenge in that you want to present consistent information that is nonetheless tailored to each channel or device. To meet this challenge, companies need a software foundation that allows them to create a single source of truth to feed content through all channels. Once in place, this foundation can serve multiple digital transformation and CX programs, rather than being a one-off system.

The single source of truth doesn’t have to be one big database, but rather can be more of a central foundation for gathering and authoring content. Think of this foundation as a knowledge ecosystem which can turn data into information and deliver effective content via the touchpoints. Each channel of your knowledge ecosystem will require a different version of the same answer. These slight variations will be the difference in winning customers’ loyalty or having them look elsewhere.