Effects of the Digital Transformation on Businesses - Helpful Use Cases Next up the Retail industry- Frictionless Commerce

Today digital transformation is a well-known concept. The growing connectivity of people, machines and even businesses has changed the demands of the markets. In order to keep up and stay competitive, business have to adjust to these demands by digitizing their processes and business models. But the digital transformation also holds a lot of new opportunities to grow or even establish new branches of business. Therefore companies should embrace innovation, ensure effective customer engagement, bring in fresh ways of thinking, and empower a company to make well informed decisions as a collective whole.

Being able to pay your coffee with your smartphone is something only little people could have imagined just a few years back. But the trend of people paying without cash took the next step by eliminating the credit or debit card and using the thing everyone is always carrying around anyway. To answers to this and other trends, the retail industry is constantly improving customer buying experience and engagement by giving them the opportunity to order and pay for products through a mobile application. In order to achieve this, the company needs to develop mobile app which allows customers to find nearby stores based on their location, order drinks and food, get notifications on when the drinks and food can be picked up and make mobile payments. We call this frictionless commerce, as the customer can do everything without having any interruptions or disturbances, just a smooth process. Additionally, the company can collect customer purchasing information from the mobile app. And with this leverage Big Data and Analytics capabilities to analyze purchasing patterns, and integrate this information into the company's marketing strategy by providing customers with more personalized offers, e.g. digital coupons for their favorite beverage and discounts on items they buy the most.

Use Case Business Intentions

In order to leverage the benefits of the digital behavior of your customers, companies will even reimagine their products and services. In this example we will take a look at an organization which did just that and yielded benefits like an increase in revenue and customer satisfaction. The technology enablers which support companies in achieving this are a digital platform and cloud computing.

Global Payer customer example

To make this use case more relatable, we will illustrate it on an anonymized customer example with their before-and-after situation.

This company is a great example of digital transformation done right when it comes to creating a customer-centered business model. When they gave their consumers the opportunity to do "their business" digitally, they also created the possibility to collect enormous amounts of data and analyse them. This data then was used to further their productivity and increased revenue. With the change in their products and services towards the digital transformation, they were able to increase revenue by tackling „consumer recession" and customer decline, improve customer satisfaction and engagement, establish a brand loyalty, and answer to criticism of lack of innovative products and aging stores.

Before Digital Transformation

About ten years ago, this organizations' stock dropped over 40%. There was only a very low customer interaction and engagement, poor customer focus, and communication, which at the time still was done through pen and paper via a „suggestion box". Also there was growing completion on the market and therefore this company had to think of something new, outstanding, and distinguished in order to keep their market share. And as it turns out today, even increase the share enormously. What they decided to do was, create a completely new generation of new products, services and ideas. This was done internally by the Research and Development department.

After Digital Transformation

The launch of a platform, which encourages customers to submit ideas for better products, ways to improve the customer experience, and even allows customers to provide feedback on what they want, thus increasing value creation within the firm, was a complete success. It catapulted this company to one of the most known brands in the world when it comes to their industrial sector. Also incentivized participation of customers through a fully transparent platform, which generates consumer trust and human collaboration, as every user can comment, discuss and vote their favorite ideas, was one of the factors that increased their brand loyalty by this immense amount.

Another great invention, which by today you can find anywhere, was the integration of the 40 million customer cards into a mobile space. Now the company was able to collect the data that can be used for customer retention and acquisition strategies.

Tangible Results

Within only one year the new products and services generated by the community resulted in a revenue increase of almost 100%. When you take a look at the numbers, with more than 2 million votes cast on the crowdsourcing platform and approximately 300 new ideas implemented out of more than 190,000 submitted to the website, which the company fully owns as per their terms and conditions, you can see that this is nothing more than one of the greatest success stories of the digital transformation. The creation of a mobile order and pay app service, thanks to suggestions made by customers, which now drives nearly 20% of company's transactions, reducing waiting times, costs and increasing customer satisfaction, is driving this company forward even today. And with all the ideas coming in from their consumers, it is really hard to imagine, that this enterprise is not going to play a major role in the market in the next decades to come.

This is only one example of many more to come that don't leave a doubt that the digital transformation is the next step for businesses to stay competitive and take the right path towards the future. Stay tuned for even more digitization use cases with hands-on business examples.