Companies are undergoing digital transformation to enhance customer engagement, focusing on personalization and seamless experiences. Central to this change is the need for a cultural shift that fosters agility and responsiveness to market demands while integrating digital technologies throughout the organization. Successful transformation involves rethinking customer journeys, aligning governance structures, and restructuring at a foundational level to prioritize customer satisfaction and innovation.

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Successful Companies are
Rebooting & Transforming
By Anthony DeLima
Managing Director
Cartenia Group Inc.
Inspired by the "Me Generation", companies are rapidly rebooting to
deliver the digital capabilities that customers want: more personalization,
greater transparency, convenience and a seamless Omni-channel
experience. The ultimate goal is to deepen relationships with customers so
they buy more products and services and become powerful fans. Too,
digital capabilities represent a significant opportunity to grow and drive
earnings.
Leading technology organizations are building modular architectures that
rely almost extensively on cloud-based solutions and delivery models. New
tools and processes are being built to analyze vast amounts data on a real-
time basis enabling products and services to be continuously engineered
and re-engineered. A new digital supply-chain that relies to a large extent
on fast moving and evolving content is setting pace for how companies

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engage with customers and partners on a global scale, driving production
forecasts and schedules and ensuring the right mix of products or services
are available when and where needed.
As the rise of digital products and services set the pace for how a business
is perceived, it has become increasingly clear that digital window dressing
alone in the form of cool Apps, responsive websites or other short-term
tactics fall short of transforming the business to one that is agile enough to
compete with traditional peers or more nimble startups.
Consequently, companies regardless of their industry in most cases are
reinventing critical internal and customer engagement processes and
methods. The goal; become fast, furious, creative and agile market
innovators.
But will these new processes and tools work if organizational culture and
behavior remain unchanged? This article examines 4 key topics: Changing
Culture, Rethinking the Customer Journey, New Governance structures, and
Transforming capabilities.
Moving away from Business As Usual.
Successful companies grow. As they grow, they become more complex
and eventually complexity undermines what made the company successful
in the first place. Bureaucracy increases, centralized control breaks
innovation, progress slows and the entrepreneurial spirit upon which the
company was founded disappears. Eventually the company loses touch
with their customers.
Whether culture drives technology adoption or whether technology
changes culture is still an open question. What is certain is that digital
strategies at maturing companies go far beyond pursuing short-term
technology tactics. They target improvements in innovation, decision-
making and ultimately, transform how the business operates and responds
to market dynamics. However, improvements in innovation including
digitization of critical processes and the technology that underpins new
operating models are most successful when a company's culture shifts
from "business-as-usual" to one that becomes increasingly impatient
about change recognizing that new customer connections are the only

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way to go. In fact digital strategies and underlying technology enablers
don't drive change, people and culture do.
Although business leaders don’t need to be digital transformation experts,
they must understand what can be accomplished at the intersection of
business and a new era of technology enabled digital capabilities. They
should also be prepared to lead the way in creating new, dramatically
different business aspirations driven by how a new dynamic culture and
innovative technology can transform the business.
Understanding Customer Engagement
When it comes to rethinking how a company engages in a new digital
era, mapping out customer journeys—the specific interactions and
progression of touch points of how various personas engage with
the business across all channels, becomes a critical first step in identifying
critical change drivers.
Focusing on these interactions ensures customer engagement
expectations are front and center to any change. Too, understanding
customer journeys forces the business to not only rethink critical outdated
processes but also how to deliver an exceptional experience (digital or
otherwise). The end result is a fundamental rethinking of culture and
attitude and in many cases means getting back to a customer centric
product/service model, which often is what made the company successful
in the first place.
Companies subsequently focus on how digital capabilities can make each
touch point better, faster, and more efficient, while integrating these into
one coherent experience that ensures customer excitement rather than
brand disillusionment. New customer attitude metrics and performance
incentives will need to be defined to track and reward improvements
across various customer journeys instead of typical financial product
indices.

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"Tackling the end-to-end customer experience."
Digitizing select stages of the customer experience may increase efficiency
in specific areas of the process as well as some burning customer issues,
but it is not a recipe for delivering a truly seamless Omni-channel
experience, which often leaves customers disappointed. To tackle end-to-
end processes such as Order-to-Cash, process-digitization teams need
involvement of key domain leaders. The end customer should be heavily
involved too. The biggest mistake businesses make is to assume they know
what the customer wants. To do this, some firms are creating start-up-
style, cross-functional teams consisting of functional domain owners and
technology leaders involved in the end-to-end customer experience. These
teams have the mandate to challenge the status quo and create new
meaningful experiences.
"Digitizing Customer Engagement impacts Culture."
Customer journeys drive businesses to organize themselves around the
customer and mobilize employees to deliver value and a consistent
experience in line with the customer's expectations across critical touch-
points. Companies are finding out that traditional organizational hierarchies
often become inhibitors in providing new digital era customers with a
unified view and experience across every domain of the business. Whether
a customer interacts through an on-line chat, social media, a web site, a
mobile APP, in-store cashier, or a customer service call center, they expect
Rethinking the
Customer
Journey
Mapping
Review goals
for the
product or
service
Gather
Research
List Customer
Touch points
across channels
Conduct
Empathy
map
Brainstorm
Through
Various lenses
Create
Affinity
Diagrams
Sketch the
Journey
Refine &
DigiFze

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a consistent experience. Channel strategy (your view of customer
engagement) and touch points (the customer's view on engagement) must
be synchronized.
However, breaking traditional organizational boundaries and behavioral
habits can be especially hard when a system of incentives exists that
rewards performance within specific silos. In fact most incentive programs
are built around performance metrics that have little to do with the
successful engagement with customers across channels and touch-points.
In some cases these incentives actually go counter to achieving cross-
organizational integration of the customer's experience.
In an attempt to address the gap, businesses most often create centers of
excellence with creative staff to digitize processes quickly. However, this
solves only part of the problem, leaving many companies still wondering
how to reorient traditional silo-based cultures with new behaviors around
enabling a cohesive end-to-end customer experience.
New Governance Structures
Initiating a customer-centric governance makeover is the foundation for
change. Appointing a chief customer officer who jointly with the
company's executive team overseas all cross-functional customer
journeys is a first step. Channel focused customer engagement teams
dynamically restructure engagement processes based on real-time
customer feedback and analytics. A new incentive system that rewards
customer experience and customer journey satisfaction becomes key.

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The next step is establishing a distributed but coordinated organizational
structure represented by division stakeholders and market leaders that
becomes the hub for measuring and reshaping how the company
continually measures customer satisfaction and in turn provides both
process and technology tuning recommendations.
While the above are just the first steps in restructuring a business around
customer experience and customer journeys, they create the foundation
upon which to drive collaboration among departments and establish
responsibility and accountability to govern the customer experience at
different levels of management.
How Nimble is your IT function?
Businesses are increasingly faced with having to also transform their IT
functions, architectures, infrastructures and core systems. Many businesses
have embarked on a journey to transform their core IT capabilities from
transaction oriented systems and traditional governance structures that are
focused on delivering predictable, reliable performance, to creating IT
organizations that are tuned for speed to market and capable of rapidly
delivering solutions that enable superior customer experience. Various
key alignment priorities distinguish laggards from leaders.

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New Apps and databases need to be developed and layered around existing
transactional systems without disrupting the business. This new generation
of systems are based on agile development and prototyping methods, with
weekly or even daily releases to enable an almost continuous re-
engineering of products and services based on streaming market analytics.
Aside from a new layer of customer facing systems, first quartile
performers also focus on delivering the analytics and intelligence needed to
provide near-real-time insights into customer needs and behaviors, which
in turn help tune customer journeys and various touch point characteristics.
______________________
Conclusions
It is becoming increasingly clear that transforming traditional companies in
to fast and furious delivery machines takes more than implementing short-
term digital tactics. A boil the ocean approach to rethinking the company's
brand, operational model, products, services and customer engagement
models can be a daunting task. Nevertheless a blank-sheet approach to
rethinking the company will allow the business to prioritize ruthlessly,
forcing a rethink of those critical aspects of the business that create
meaningful customer experiences while automating traditional processes
to achieve greater operational speed and efficiency. Too, the process will
help retire legacy practices and processes that over time have come to
weigh the company down. It is not just an approach to create greater
customer intimacy but also a way to get back to the basics that made the
company successful in the first place.
Ultimately change in cultural attitude and the acknowledgement that
change is pivotal to transforming the business is a critical first step in the
process.