The New Year is gone, and many of us made promises to do something better this year. Have you noticed that there are surprisingly many commonalities between New Year promises, like losing weight, and digital customer experience transformations? Despite the comparison being somewhat tongue in cheek, it is deadly dangerous for all involved.
It looks like there are no good odds for those who made a promise to be successful either in losing weight or transforming digital experiences. According to IBM and Oracle Consulting, 84% of companies fail at Digital Transformation. That is actually pretty decent result compared to 95% of people failing at their attempts to lose weight and keep it off for five years. And it does not come without significant risk. Those with obesity are betting against high odds of getting coronary heart disease, stroke, asthma, and metabolic syndrome. But it is even worse for those businesses who fail at digital customer experience transformation. They are getting terminally ill as the customers will take their revenues elsewhere.
You need to move fast to get ahead of such odds! And yet, how long is your digital transformation project expected to last? According to Openet’s study, 2% of companies say one year, while 21% say two years and whopping 60% report 3-5 years! Worst is that they expect to do this while performing open heart surgery on their legacy IT systems. This is pretty much opposite to people who want to lose weight and start with unrealistic expectations. They think they can do it in a couple of weeks while eating what they used to. No wonder so many fail. According to Forrester, in 2018, 30% of companies will see further declines in CX quality and lose a point of growth.
Interestingly, 85% of companies say their key aim of digital transformation is to improve customer experiences. At the same time, 21% says it’s the hardest thing to achieve for their business. And why is it so hard? Because 40% of respondents say, the most significant challenge in accomplishing digital transformation is due to project being too big and complicated. This applies to losing weight for most of us also. It is tough to change your diet completely and start doing fitness exercises that you just don’t enjoy.
Both companies conducting substantial digital transformation projects and people looking to meet their promise of losing weight are guilty of attempting to boil the ocean and fix everything in one go, but ultimately dramatically hamper innovation and speed to market for years. To enable success, service providers can harness the power of digital to improve customer experience and realise business benefit in much faster timeframes. Instead, service providers need the flexibility to develop solutions alongside existing technology, focusing on areas which will make a tangible difference.
No more five years, hundred million transformation programmes with unguaranteed results. No more complete overhauls of diet and unexciting fitness programmes. Say hi to agile approaches that change those little habits that multiplied will yield unprecedented results in much shorter time. By changing small things fast, you will see results that colossal transformation project won’t be able to deliver. See you at the scales with a smile!
