Understanding Digital Transformation Challenges for IT – Top Articles in May

Understanding Digital Transformation Challenges for IT – Top Articles in May

“Digital Transformation” is a vague term with a variety of meanings to different organizations and individuals. But as an initiative, digital transformation presents real challenges to IT teams. This month’s articles really reflected on major digital transformation challenges for IT, offered insights into the current state of digital transformations, and offered some different ways IT teams can begin to tackle some of those challenges. We hope you find these articles as comforting and useful as we did! Because it’s nice to know that many are still only beginning to determine what digital transformation really means and how they’re going to approach transformation on a path to success.

Can Agile Processes and DevOps Fuel Your Digital Transformation?

It’s no secret that digital experiences for government run entities lag far behind those privately managed, but Will Kelly writes a nice article on CMSWire about the lessons large enterprises can learn from the Federal Government’s shifting strategies to digitally transform. A look into how the government approaches the use of DevOps and the agile software framework to overcome digital transformation challenges and find success.

Utilizing APIs to Overcome Digital Transformation Challenges in Telecom

Weighed down by hefty legacy investments, Telecoms are just starting to feel the necessity of upgrading these systems to more cost effectively provide the means through which a rapidly changing customer experience can be created. APIs are one way Telecoms can quickly meet new demands while dealing with their legacy systems. Dan Nordale provides a nice piece on No Jitter on how APIs can empower businesses to deliver customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty by providing simpler and seamless customer experiences.

Data-Driven Customer Experience: The Challenge Of Openness

Hugo Moreno reviews the current state of data challenges for organizations developing their data-driven customer experience. Findings from a survey of 357 executives of large organizations reveal that data integration is still, currently, a challenge – though the pieces are in place to achieve integration. Open thought regarding knowledge sharing and transparency continues as well.

Businesses lack a streamlined approach to digital transformation

Sarah White for CIO Magazine reviews her key takeaways from a recent Gartner report on the state of digital business transformation. Key findings include an acknowledged shift in leadership (reflecting that the c-suite executive leading digital transformation is not always the CIO), executive belief that custom software is the future of digital transformation, and that digital transformation initiatives mean more than an increased usage of software and hardware – that business will be unrecognizable five years from now thanks to digital transformation.

Ryanair’s profits surge as it enters Year 3 of customer experience plan

What’s most interesting about Ryanair is not just the drastic turnaround in customer perceptions and profit – but that to achieve this success, Ryanair fully embraced digital transformation. This article reflects on the success of Ryanair’s plans, but what really stands out here is that Ryanair will be launching “more flexible ticketing, travel extras bookable in the mobile app, a new payment system on the mobile app, new rating systems online with real-time customer feedback, a digital gift voucher service and an increased focus on personalisation” – all highly digital customer experience offerings. If these items are launching this year, that means that Ryanair mapped out how to overcome their digital transformation challenges a few years ago and is already on a clear path to success! Quite a bit to be learned from this airline.

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Sorriso Announces Sponsorship of CEM in Telecoms European Summit

Sorriso Announces Sponsorship of CEM in Telecoms European Summit

CEM in Telecoms Summit

Prague 27th-29th June 2016

We are excited to announce our sponsorship of the CEM in Telecoms European Summit in June! This event gathers together over 150 telecommunications and customer experience masters providing a unique opportunity to collaborate and problem solve on some of today’s top telco challenges.

 

Whether you’re just beginning to map out your digital transformation, looking for a neat customer experience innovation, or cultivating integration efforts across your IT, marketing, and customer experience teams – we hope you’ll join us in Prague June 27th-30th to learn and explore!

If you’re interested in receiving a free pass to the summit or would just like to schedule some time to speak 1-1 on road mapping your digital transformation, drop us a line and let us know! We still have a handful of free passes we’d be happy to share with you – and we’d love to learn more about your digital transformation challenges.

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How to Tackle Digital Transformation – Top Articles in March

How to Tackle Digital Transformation – Top Articles in March

Last month, we found a number of excellent articles and blog posts covering how some of the world’s largest companies are tackling digital transformation. After reading about a number of exemplary digitally transforming companies, one thing is clear – strategy and a committed team are key to digital transformation success! In the past year, “digital transformation” has become a clear necessity for companies even though the phrase itself can mean different things to different organizations and teams.  We thought these articles were helpful and thought provoking for anyone in the midst of a digital transformation impacting the customer experience and IT and we hope you find them helpful too.

1. McDonalds goes for a complete overhaul to stay digitally relevant.

McDonalds’ CMO, Deborah Wahl, reflects on the company’s ongoing digital transformation at the Adobe Summit 2016. From the early adoption of mobile payments to partnering with Ford to evolve the drive through experience, McDonalds’ stays focused on solving real customer needs while advancing digitally. We really enjoyed this article on Marketing Interactive because it covered past, present, and future realities of the digital customer experience while reminding us not to get distracted in the buzz of digital transformation, but to remember the original intent behind these initiatives – to make your customers happy!

2. How GE handles digital transformation – anticipating the necessities of the future

While not all of us may have crystal balls lying around to predict the future, GE has strategized and executed on its transformations by “looking out 15 years or more and asking simple questions to gauge what their core business must look like to remain competitive.” After witnessing the rapid transformation of media at NBC, GE learned to look beyond the immediate future and agree on what the long term future would look like, then working backwards to understand what the priorities and projects should be now. From industrial revolutions to digital transformations, GE is an excellent example to take inspiration from and Maxwell Wessel’s post to Medium is a thoughtful read.

3. Adapting the use of BI to elevate the security customer experience

A nice article by Jennifer Lonoff Schiff that takes a look at Protection 1, a residential and business security company, as an example of an organization that used digital transformation initiatives to improve their customer experience. By developing an in-house, business intelligence solution that called upon all of Protection 1’s databases, Protection 1 strengthened their customer service team by getting actionable data into their hands more quickly. We particularly enjoyed this example of success because we can relate to developing business intelligence solutions that provide a unified view of customer data. We’ve actually specialized in exactly this for a number of telcos and have, developed our own SmartView module that accomplishes exactly this. But enough about us, Schiff’s article also touches on how Protection 1 empowers customers with transparency and new self service portals while also optimizing the call center.

4. How Aviva is transforming the digital customer experience in insurance

Beyond shifting its marketing strategy from product-based—insurance for your car, your home, your life—to propositions tailored to life stages and life events, Aviva is tackling a global digital transformation to stay relevant with their customers and ready for the future. For the entire company, Aviva is building a common digital platform from the API layer up. Down the road, the different countries of Aviva offices can choose to add on innovations to this platform as they’ll best suit the customers in their region. In addition to these major technology efforts, Aviva is also focused on adapting the company culture to coincide with its digital transformation.

5. McKinsey says Telcos focused on these 5 areas of IT boast a profit margin of 43% vs 21% for those that don’t

And what are those 5 areas?

  1. Establishing robust customer analytics capabilities
  2. Digitizing the order management process
  3. Digitizing the customer relationship management process
  4. Streamlining the application landscape
  5. Standardizing and automating the IT infrastructure

McKinsey recently benchmarked 80 telecommunications companies and found a correlation between the companies that all focused on the 5 IT areas listed above and an increased profit margin as compared to companies that had not accomplished the 5 IT initiatives. A great read because it covers the why and how to execute on these core projects.

Are you working on a digital transformation?

We’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us on Twitter or drop us a line some time if you’d like to have a creative discussion on overcoming any of your digital transformation challenges.

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January 26th & 27th • Customer Experience Management in Telcos – Global Summit

We’re proud to sponsor IQPC’s Customer Experience Management in Telecoms Global Summit in London on January 26th & 27th, 2016! This summit brings together a number of customer experience leaders, providing a valuable opportunity to share knowledge, experiences, and ideas for the future.

Stop by to discuss Customer Experience Management strategies

Look for us in the Beatrice Suite of the Park Plaza Victoria! Eric and Glenn will be at our sponsor stand to discuss digital transformations, managing omnichannel customer interactions, personalized customer service in the digital sphere, innovative customer touch points with personalized explainer videos, and more!

Ask us about Simplifying the Digital Customer Experience

Eric & Glenn will also be leading an interactive Breakfast Briefing on the morning of January 27th to 15 Global Communications Service Providers. The Breakfast Briefing will focus on how to simplify the digital customer experience in telcos.

Eric & Glenn posted up at our sponsor stand at the CEM in Telcos Global Summit event

In their interactive session, Eric and Glenn will guide delegates through ready-to-implement strategies that leverage the customer bill in order to improve digital customer self-care and the user experience.  With more simplified tariffs and bundled services, the concept of the “bill” is changing.  Coupled with the drive to digitalization, the challenge is to differentiate in both customer service and customer experience. This interactive problem-based session will address this key customer touch-point through the digital channels.

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The Persona Scripting Language

The Persona Scripting Language

Where high level business objectives and your coding backbone meet.

Have you ever found that your project managers and business-minded team members struggle to get on the same page with your IT department and developers? Have you ever felt that these teams were using the same words but the definitions of those words didn’t line up?

With the complex task of building a modern, intuitive, easy to use customer portal, a wealth of challenges already exist. Adding on the challenge of miscommunication leaves room for inefficiencies such as exceeding budget, wasting time, and building frustration. That’s where Sorriso’s Persona Scripting Language comes in.

Make the most of your use cases

In order to develop software or build a customer billing portal, your project managers and IT department must already work together to develop use cases and outline a vision for the future. Use case language is the inspiration for Sorriso’s new Persona Scripting Language. This means you can ensure your teams stay on the same page as you create, adapt, and grow your customer billing portal.

What is the new Persona Scripting Language?

Sorriso’s Persona Scripting Language makes Sorriso Self Care applications flexible and easy to change. Inspired by the UML descriptions made popular by Alistair Cockburn, the Persona Scripting Language is fast and easy to use. Translate your use case into the Persona Scripting Language with ease because they’ve been designed to align. Whether you’re a business minded or technically savvy professional, you can write in the Persona Scripting Language to modify and design your customer billing portal.

How do you use it?

The Sorriso Self Care platform implements a Model/View/Controller (MVC) architecture that utilizes the Persona Scripting Language in two ways:

1. To control the front end user experience (UX)

Design an individual page module, a full page, or a multi-web page interaction and flow.

UX use cases describe:

  • screen composition
  • field and form validation
  • data transformations
  • user identity, and
  • back end connectivity

2. To create back end business objects

Take control of your information architecture. With the Persona Scripting Language you can create back end business objects that access customer and account information. This means you can transform raw system data into secure, application specific transactions and responses for your customers to self serve.

Why you’ll love the new Persona Scripting Language

Generate, edit, and validate code that your project managers can read. Empower the members of your team to push forward with progress and effectively communicate around your data-backed customer experience projects.

The Persona Scripting Language is embedded in Eclipse as a plug-in, you can create and test customer portal modules right inside Eclipse.

Want to learn more about developing your customer portals with use case methodologies?

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