IoT 2 mins read

Customer Focus is at the Heart of Transformation       

Winning hearts and minds inside your organization is critical to achieving success in digital transformation. Read the Retail Insider’s Digital Champions Report, 2019.

Oliver Guy Oliver Guy

The “expectation economy” has put customers’ desires at the center of retailers’ digital transformation, but winning the hearts and minds inside your organization is also critical to achieving success.

These are two of the main conclusions from Retail Insider’s Digital Champions Report, 2019.

Glynn Davies, Founder of Retail Insider, asked senior leaders from a selection of retailers – which included a number of Software AG customers – how they defined digital transformation in their organizations. Their business models were very different, but their answers were amazingly similar.

The things all these leaders had in common was their laser-like focus on the overall customer experience, along with a desire to leverage new business and revenue models. From a challenge perspective, most of these champions said that people, process and technology are equally important when transforming. 

Challenges include:

  • Internally, winning hearts and minds at all levels of the organization is critical – including getting buy-in from everyone in C-level  
  • Dealing with legacy technology, not designed to support today’s customer journeys
  • Attaining a holistic view of the business
  • Managing silos of data.

On the opportunity side, the report uncovered a focus on personalization and addressing the end-to-end value chain. My favorite response came from Anthony Fletcher, CEO of Graze: “Technology is the most consistent source of potential change across all business sectors.”

This is particularly good to hear from a CEO – but, as a company that has created a completely new business model, this should not surprise us. The leaders’ recommendations for success were really insightful.

Here are some of the highlights:

    • Define an overall owner for digital transformation, but also ensure the CEO and other board members are educated completely and have bought in
    • Seek to be agile from a technology and process perspective while looking at how ecosystems can enhance your business
    • Seek value from data by investing in the data literacy of your teams. And seek to democratize your data – eliminating the silos.

The most critical point was to ensure that people processes and technology are considered together.

You can read the full report by clicking below.