The Great Digital Transformation: Reimagining the Future of Customer Interactions

INTRODUCTION

With today’s technology, the world is at our fingertips.

Do you agree with that opening statement? Do we really have access to just about anything, provided we have a device in our hands?

Perhaps to a certain extent, especially thanks to innovations in the last decade and advances that help connect businesses and consumers, we might state that many goods and services are universally and abundantly available today. If we dig deeper, however, and pan out the lens to view the wider context of areas like commerce, I think we’ll find a different answer. Allow me to provide an illustration to explain.

Let’s follow a traveler through a Chicago airport. She’s flying out of O’Hare after spending a weekend touring the Windy City. She returns a rental car she used during her visit at the car rental lot just outside of the airport. Then she hops on a shuttle that will take her to her terminal. During these first legs of her trip, she doesn’t hear or see anything on the shuttle bus that alerts her to all the stores and offers within the airport.

Once checked in and through security, she heads to her gate. She sees a convenience store and stops to pick up a few snacks. While the cashier behind the counter is ringing up her purchases, the traveler spots a display of T-shirts with the word Chicago and the skyline painted on them. In that moment, she realizes she hasn’t purchased souvenir attire yet and wants a shirt as a token memory of the city. Unfortunately, as she browses the options, she doesn’t see her size. When she asks the cashier for help to find a size medium T-shirt, the only reply she receives is, If you don’t see them here, we don’t have any. I don’t know if any of our other stores carry them.

The traveler leaves the store and heads to her flight, her snacks in hand. Notice that she carries only food, despite the fact that airports are turning into veritable shopping malls.

Did you catch the missed opportunity of a shirt sale? In that moment, is the world really at our Chicago tourist’s fingertips? And perhaps more importantly, what other losses can be found in this tale?

I would argue that the misses here go well beyond a disappointed customer. We don’t know what type of shopper she is, her past purchases at the store, what she might do if the item could have been shipped to her, what she would buy if the store had an online presence that was connected to the in-store experience … and on and on.

And yet I’m here to assure you that it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, technologies are readily available and accessible today that solve the problems and barriers that can easily separate customers from stores and result in failed transactions. The world is connected, and the right solutions can be put in place to better understand customers, improve their shopping journeys, and create a higher number of transactions.

At OSF Digital, we’ve had an inside seat, to a certain degree, to watch these changes in commerce unfold. As the world has grown more connected, we’ve adjusted too. When we first started in 2003, we built digital products for clients to help them better engage customers: think implementing websites and transferring pen-and-paper-driven tasks to the digital space.

Today, just as putting up a website alone won’t automatically save a sinking brick-and-mortar store, the work we carry out at OSF Digital is much different from what we did ten years ago. We’ve seen that merely putting previously nondigital processes into a digitized state isn’t enough. Retailers and brands today—commerce in general, if you will—need to adapt to a new shopping world that has many facets, including different types of buyers and shopping patterns, along with ever-changing ways to experience shopping.

It means rethinking how we do business and changing models to be more appropriate for certain technologies and customer expectations. Along those same lines, businesses that want to perform well in the future—even if they are doing well now—are ripe for taking some time to spot these new opportunities. It’s a chance to evaluate current methods and to evolve into a new way of being.

It’s not that we’ve thrown out our old ways. At OSF, we still very much focus on digital products and we’re still building digital platforms for clients around the world. We’ve been a trusted Salesforce partner for more than ten years and are certified on all clouds. We’ve helped both B2B and B2C companies and have provided technology, consulting, implementation, and online shop management services to both up-and-coming and premier brands as well as to merchants focused on building multicloud and unified commerce projects using Salesforce and other top-tier cloud technologies.

In our work today, though, we now focus much of our time on helping clients with digital transformation.

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on digital transformation. The term tends to be a buzzword, but its definition and its true impact aren’t always as readily clear. That’s why in the pages that follow, we’ll drill down and consider exactly what digital transformation consists of. We’ll see how companies are truly revamping the way they interact with their customers, how their employees work, what purpose their stores serve, and more. In doing so, we’ll explore new possibilities that can help organizations stay connected to customers and thrive.

In recent times, we’ve seen significant changes in the world around us, and rest assured, we’re not going back to how things were. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing or cause concern. Quite the opposite, in fact. This new world we live in, full of remote workers, mobile-minded customers, and many empty stores presents nearly endless opportunities for those who are willing to dream. Right before our eyes lies the opportunity to deliver services in a new way, to break into new markets, and to increase market share.

I invite you to sit back, close your eyes, and mentally wipe away what is considered to be standard today. As you read through the chapters in this book, allow yourself to be creative. Ask questions.

Another example can help demonstrate the potential before us. Let’s toss out the currently accepted healthcare system that exists in many locations throughout the United States. The traditional model consists of doctors working in offices from nine-to-five. Each day, patients who live in their area travel a few miles by car, bus, or foot to see the doctor in person and receive treatment and health services.

Why does that office exist? Why do those doctors and nurses work the hours they do? Taking it a step further, why are these professionals only serving patients in their community?

As we’ve seen, especially with the onset of the pandemic, we have the means to virtually meet with anyone from anywhere in the world, provided we each have the necessary equipment and connection to do so. Taking this point and plugging it into the healthcare system can create a whole new vision of how doctors and patients interact. I challenge you to answer this question: Why would someone living in Montana, a highly rural western state, not be able to receive the same level of service as someone living in Manhattan, one of New York City’s finest and most upscale boroughs? If we truly can use technology in the ways we know exist, we can open gateways to build all-encompassing, better-reaching healthcare systems.

Or consider the watches we wear, and connect that commodity to the concept of healthcare and the power of prevention. If you wear a watch today, it’s likely it can do many things beyond telling time. It might monitor your heart rate and calculate how many steps you walk during a twenty-four-hour time span, for instance. So why is that same watch not monitoring your blood sugar levels and other crucial health components, like digestive functions? That system could be connected to someone on the other side of the world, where it is monitored, and if something out of sync is noticed, a person could call you and say, Okay, let’s sit down and have a conversation. Let’s talk about what’s happening here.

Even if you’re nodding your head or agreeing with this idea, don’t expect to wake up tomorrow and see a brand-new healthcare system. You probably are not planning to Zoom in with a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, one of the world’s top medical centers, from your residence in South Africa for a routine checkup (unless you have already established a connection through an in-person visit). And there may not be anyone monitoring your heart rate and other vital signs through your watch (at least, not that you know of!). No, today’s healthcare system is strongly rooted in the way it currently operates. It’s much easier to go along with what’s always been done before or to look for ways to improve efficiencies within the systems we already have in place.

And yet we need to account for timing. There is a sense of urgency surrounding these changes, and rightly so. Technological advancements during the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early millennia provided a turning point for growth. The advent of the internet brought great opportunities and disruptions, and the adoption of mobile use has created a new way of living and interacting. Moreover, the combining of technologies and their ongoing evolvement has increased the pace of change. For companies that resist adjusting (and it’s so easy to do), there is great risk of becoming obsolete in the next years—if not months. When competitors start offering these new ways of delivering services and branching into new marketplaces, those who are left scrambling to develop similar offerings will be starting the race from behind. Moreover, companies that are performing well need to pivot and adapt now to ensure leadership in the years to come. They’ll want to set the pace for others to follow rather than encounter obstacles that could deem them irrelevant.

But that’s not all. The fast track of change is not going to slow down. Transformation is still happening in a big way, and it will continue to do so in the coming years. How can you tell we’re still in the middle of the transformation? Just walk into a store, and you’re likely to see that all the people in the shop are either at the cash register or putting inventory on the shelves. If they are not interacting with the customer, something is not right.

They haven’t thought through what the problem is. Did you notice it? The issue is that they have humans performing repetitive tasks that machines can carry out. You don’t need a line of cashiers when you have self-checkout. Why, then, is the customer like our Chicago traveler left alone to guide themselves through the store? We need to shift from a transactional mindset to one that is focused on interaction with the customer. In the case of our Chicago tourist, it could mean that she leaves the airport with more than just snacks; she could have a new T-shirt in a shopping bag, thanks to the shopping clerk’s ability to check the inventory of other store locations within the airport to find the size medium souvenir. The traveler might even have learned, while on the shuttle bus after returning her rental car, that two of her favorite brands have small pop-up locations inside the airport and that she can reach them if she makes a very slight detour while on her way to the gate. If she looks online at those stores and sees a few items she wants, she can ask about them at the pop-ups. Perhaps one of the locations has her requests; the other doesn’t but agrees to ship the merchandise to her home address at no cost and notifies her that it will arrive within five days. At every stop in the airport, the places gather a few details about the traveler, which she readily shares because she feels confident that they’ll send her promotions that fit her current interests and style. They also offer to send her a few additional items from time to time, giving her the choice of trying them out and deciding whether she’d like to purchase them or send them back.

To make these changes, we don’t need earth-shattering new technology. We don’t need to build systems from the ground up and code our way to a massively disruptive system. There’s no R&D department required to study this new trend. Quite the opposite. These technologies are there and ready to be implemented. We just need to know how to best use them for our purposes. It starts by sitting down, clearing our minds, and thinking of different ways to help customers find what they need. What you need are dreamers—people who can reimagine your experiences.

So let’s dream. And then let’s make it happen.

CHAPTER 1

The Difference between Digitization and Digital Transformation

True transformation begins with a step back and an invitation to rethink how we live and work.

I recently walked into a retail store to get a new pair of shoes. Not only did the shop not have my size but also there was no one around who was