Here's why Benchmarking is important to digital transformation

In today’s world where information is democratized to a large extent, end consumers have become the most powerful body in determining brand presence, relevance and obsolescence for enterprises. They have become the starting and ending point of any digital transformation initiative and in a way, become brand enhancers and executioners. For companies embarking on digital transformation initiatives, often times, it is a daunting task to know where they stand currently in terms of their maturity levels and where they want to see themselves at the end of their digital transformation journey. Without a map, navigating through this journey leads to complexities with added twists and turns, making it less pleasant for both the drivers and the intended beneficiaries of digital transformation initiatives, mostly, the end consumers. Enterprises should therefore have a quick, repeatable and an easy way to benchmark their current digital transformation initiative to offer personalized, original, fun-filled, and helpful services.

Benchmarking helps enterprises identify gaps in their transformation strategy and execution. Enterprises can benchmark their digital transformation initiatives comparing with the best-of-breed capabilities within an industry (say a retail company benchmarking its initiatives against the best practices in the retail space), or across industry spectrums (for e.g., utility companies benchmarking capabilities against retail, hi-tech companies). Companies that have achieved higher maturity levels within an industry often, look for inspiration from a higher maturity player in a different but more mature industry. Benchmarking digital transformation initiatives start with understanding the desired capabilities and end outcomes and then assessing where they are in offering those in comparison with inter- or intra- industry best practices. Broadly, each of these capabilities support one of four different phases and can often be selectively meshed to offer highly distinct customer experiences:

· Listen: Capabilities that enable enterprises to analyze the voice of the customer, either to understand the effectiveness of a given experience, or to make targeted interventions where experiences go wrong (or right!)
· Observe: Capabilities that enable monitoring of customer behaviors to assess the effectiveness of customer experience designs, often in real-time so that appropriate actions (x-sell, up-sell etc.) can be initiated
· Deliver: Technologies – often, leading-edge – that provide personalized, entertaining, surprising (positive side!), or helpful customer experiences
· Manage: Operational applications that enable customer-facing employees to engage with customers in innovative ways and successfully manage the resulting interactions

The above capabilities deliver the desired digital transformation outcomes that are personalized (know me), original (surprise me), fun (entertain me), or helpful (make it easy for me). The below table summarizes this view.



Once the capabilities and outcomes are identified and mapped, the current state can be mapped on a progressive scale of maturity viz. “digital newbies”, “digital dabblers”, “digital experts”, and “digital masters”. Each of these stages represents a maturity gradation based on achieving a certain level of capability across a set of critical parameters.

To successfully navigate through the digital transformation journey, enterprises need to focus on building capabilities that address their strategic priorities across listen and respond, observe, deliver, and manage, and benchmark these capabilities on a periodic basis. To help prioritize capabilities and chart out a journey for developing them, Infosys has developed a digital transformation benchmark model. Enterprises across different benchmark stages adopt different progression strategies. For example, enterprises that are just beginning their digital transformation journey (‘Newbies’), adopt an iterative approach that works through the stages, rather than attempting to become ‘Masters’ in a single initiative. For enterprises that are higher on the maturity stage, the focus for progression is to radiate the success and high maturity levels across newer processes, business areas, and essentially, leverage the learnings to reflect a higher maturity across the entire enterprise.

(The article is authored by Shankar Krishnamurthy, Senior Industry Principal – Digital Marketing, Infosys)

Image credits: indiatimes