No longer a question of "if," but a question of "now": digital transformation has become a necessary change for any company that wants to succeed and stand out in the market. A presence in digital media has ceased to be a point of differentiation and has become a point of parity: the minimum for a company to survive.
For this transformation to be carried out in the best possible way, the company must acquire capabilities geared towards the digital world. Online markets differ from offline ones, and the company must excel in both. The question then becomes: what are these crucial capabilities that organizations must acquire?
Fortunately for us entrepreneurs, this question was one of the focuses of the book "What's Your Digital Business Model?", by Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner. The authors describe 8 organizational capabilities for the businesses of the future. Below is an analysis of each of them.
- Acquire optimal information about your consumers.Companies should use digital tools to obtain information from their consumers. What are their needs, and which of them can be met by your company? What are their interests? Is it their birthday? And, just as important as obtaining the information, is knowing how to use it to strengthen the relationship with the customer.
- Amplify the consumer's voice within the organization.Measuring customer satisfaction with a company has become fundamental. For organizations undergoing transformation, the idea is to place the customer at the center of the company: every meeting, decision, product, and action within the company should be accompanied by the question, "What would our customer think of this?" How to find out? Go back to the first capability.
- Creating a culture of evidence-based decision-making.Instinct and experience guide the decisions of many entrepreneurs, and eventually result in success. However, for a company to achieve more accurate results, it is extremely necessary to create an environment and culture based on evidence: data should be more important than opinions.
- To promote an integrated, multi-product, and multi-channel customer experience.To provide excellent customer service, companies must stop using the "push supply" concept and start working with "pull demand": creating communication channels, products, and services based on their customers' needs.
- Be distinctive, the first place your customer remembers.When a need is identified, your customer should think of your company first. Consider the following questions: What makes your company different from the competition? And how can this be leveraged to make it the first company that comes to mind when a need arises?
- Identify and develop great partnerships and acquisitions.Identifying and addressing consumer needs becomes easier when you have effective business partners. Therefore, it's crucial to identify market players, considering the customer journey with your company (purchase, shipping, payment, etc.) and aiming to resolve customer needs in an excellent manner.
- Transforming your differentiators into services (via APIs)Much of what makes digital transformation so great is the speed of information, which has enabled great openness to open innovation. Therefore, after defining how to serve your customers and what makes your company stand out, turn this digital knowledge into concrete form... APIsIn this way, it becomes easier to enhance the unique selling points found, thereby improving the customer experience.
- Develop skills related to efficiency, safety and compliance and confidentiality: Business leaders undergoing transformation need to recognize potential areas for efficiency, responsibilities, and threats. Privacy and data protection, cyber threats, and service disruptions are some of the problems that may arise over time, and a company must be able to address them in the best possible way.
None of these business capabilities are easily acquired, which has its good side: once acquired and applied in the company's daily operations, they become competitive differentiators in the market, bringing prominence to the organization.
In summary: data collection and analysis, customer focus, and skills related to digital transformation (such as efficiency and compliance and confidentialityThese factors are becoming increasingly decisive for the success and growth of companies in the fourth industrial revolution. It is up to leaders and entrepreneurs to understand and apply this knowledge as quickly as possible, before the digital tide engulfs their company.
