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Effects of the Digital Transformation on Businesses - Helpful Use Cases Another Retail industry example (3b) - Instant Digital Feedback

In today's ever changing and smarter world consumers want to be able to influence the products they consistently buy with their ideas. Taking the fashion industry as an example: new trends are only one factor that determine the newest collections. Customer satisfaction has always been and will always be a crucial factor for businesses to stay competitive in their respective markets.

Today digital transformation is a widely 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.

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In today's ever changing and smarter world consumers want to be able to influence the products they consistently buy with their ideas. Taking the fashion industry as an example: new trends are only one factor that determine the newest collections. Customer satisfaction has always been and will always be a crucial factor for businesses to stay competitive in their respective markets. In the fashion industry customer experiences, preferences and feedback directly influences the future clothing or accessory lines to what the end user really wants and will eventually buy. In order to do this effectively it is really important to reduce the time to market dramatically and share the received knowledge along the supply chain. In order to realize these requirements, implementing cutting edge technologies for establishing smart cloud platform that allows collecting customer feedback instantly is a necessity. This is also an easy way to share customer feedback instantly with designers and manufacturers. Not only is this change in processes and services supported by the technology enabler cloud computing and hyper-connectivity, but will also lead to clear benefits for businesses such as increased customer satisfaction, therefore increased revenue and even higher sustainability.

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Use Case Business Intentions

Customer satisfaction is a major indicator of how well a business is doing and shows a company which innovations and improvements will take them to the next level. In this use case we will learn how the digital transformation has changed the approach for collecting customer preferences and experiences. Implementing smart cloud platforms for instant customer feedback collection for one and then being able to create new designs based on instant feedback collected in real time. To achieve this, a company needs to integrate cloud into their daily operations. With this the integrated supply chain feedback is enabled. Therefore the feedback will be visible to all participants, from designers to manufacturers. This will enable instant feedback sharing and significantly reduce feedback reaction time.

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.

The example company we look at today, which is part of the fashion industry, made big steps towards improving their products by including customer feedback. Not only are they using the cloud as technology enabler in order to learn fast about their customer's experience, but also sped up the time to market for the innovations. That gives this company a great advantage over their competition

Before Digital Transformation

We all know how customer feedback usually is being collected. Surely every one of us has been asked to fill out a feedback form either on paper or online, which can be seen as an old-fashioned method in comparison to what is possible today. That was also the preferred method with the business we take a look at today. Of course one of the issues with that was the low customer involvement, which made it hard to generate new ideas to the product better. Another one was the absence of easy-to-use and modern internal feedback sharing platforms and a low turnover increase rates.

After Digital Transformation

One of the first steps to change this was the implementation of a cloud platform, which is connected to all of the company's stores. This made is very simple to collect the provided feedback instantly throughout the world. Another channel for the collection of feedback is the company's own staff, as they are in constant contact with the customers and can easily assess their preferences. Therefore managers and employees were trained to talk to the customer, and discover their preferences for the different collections and designs available at the store. Using collaborative social business applications running on cloud-based infrastructure, this data is sent on a same-day basis to its headquarters, where the designers go back to incorporating these customer preferences and suggestions.

Tangible Results

As mentioned before, a major improvement for this enterprise was the fast delivery of new unique products and designs to the market. As the designers update the products, and send them, via cloud-based apps, to the different manufacturers, they in turn were able to have them on the shelves of the stores within 3 weeks. Increase of turnover of its product design collections to once every 3 weeks compared to 9-10 months of its closest competitor in the industry. No need to say, that when taking the customer's feedback into account, the customer satisfaction has improved dramatically, as they can see the results in the market. With this customers feel like they shape the fashion industry by themselves and the increase in customer satisfaction leads to a direct increase in the company's revenues.

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.

Keep following for more examples here at ÜberTech and @SDenecken

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