Key objective of digital enterprise - Experience

This is the third one of the series of nine articles on Digital Enterprise. In the first article, we talked about digital enterprise extending its boundaries outwards into channel suppliers, partners and customers, and other eco-system players through an open architecture.

In the second article, we covered the importance of building trust actively amongst ecosystem partners, reassuring them of your Win-Win-Win (Enterprise-Channel-Customer) intent; and providing the policy support to reinforce the digital collaboration mindset.

In this article, we’ll talk about experience. Once trust is established, the challenge of executing at scale follows. A Digital Enterprise expanding its footprint beyond its own boundaries will face the challenge of effective utilization of digital tools with greater scale and complexity of its ecosystem.

How do you train the large number of ecosystem participants, many of them not so tech-savvy? The opportunity to solve this comes with experience-led design of systems. It should be so intuitive, so delightful, that you don’t have to train the users.

Experience centricity obviates the need for training

Experience:

Experience is an inside out cascade

• If your employees don’t have efficient and effective processes, how can they serve your channel well.
• If your channel isn’t connected efficiently, how will you give a great experience to your customers.

The focus of your efficiency of your digital initiatives has to be on experience; which will also help you overcome the trust issues. Is experience only about how your screens are designed and how good the visual elements of your UI are? No. Experience starts from understanding the needs of your stakeholders.

Experience should start with design – use Design Thinking process to gather expressed, as well as latent needs of your stakeholder.

You can start with Design Thinking process to reverse engineer your stakeholders needs inside out, understand their visible as well as latent needs, and design your systems and workflows around it.

For example, in food delivery or e-commerce, there’s a constant competition in terms of the experience they provide to the customer. It’s not just the app experience, but the holistic experience- the cancellation and returns experience, the support experience, the delivery person experience.

Silos : The enemy of Experience

But why struggle with the obvious - experience? Its the silos, stupid!

Traditional organisation design was process oriented, not customer oriented. E.g. in automotive, you have huge departments of Sales, Service and Spare Parts. All serving the same customer and sometimes at odds with each other.

To create great experience, we need to break the organization silos, and connect all the departments that collectively contribute to the customer experience. We have to become integrators in connecting these silos to bring them together. For example, forming small crossfunctional councils and enforcing a common agenda or sometimes including a dealer in your discussions about how you are going to design your CRM systems, and that sort of gives you a sanity check.

One of the most challenging experience designs across various silos is the Employee onboarding process. Admin, HR, Function, IT, etc. - many functions have to come together to deliver a great joinee experience to the new employees. It requires not only systems orchestration, but also physical elements - assigning the seat, providing laptop, etc. As well as experiential elements like a bouquet, pre joining call from manager, post joining introductions and assimilation.

If you want to first hand experience the challenge of delivering a great experience, look no farther than new employee joining experience or a new customer onboarding experience. It has all elements of human interaction, physical dimensions and digital enablement.

Designing for experience is all about adding value to every single person in the chain, and communicating effectively and proactively about why we are doing it rather than following.

Please leave your comments here, or engage in a discussion on the post in author’s Linkedin Posts. Coming next - we’ll cover technical debt. It’s primarily about the challenge of building a skyscraper on the foundation of a four-story building. It's, I would say, the least focused aspect of digital transformation.

The article has been written by Jagdish Belwal, Founder and CEO, Jagdish Belwal Advisory