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The digitalization imperative in Operational Strategy.


About The Speaker:-

Mr. Angelo is a Go-Digital Evangelist at QuickReach, a leading No-Code platform based out of Singapore where he works with companies across industries and sectors helping digitally transform their operations. Angelo has a decade-long experience of helping companies digitalize various aspects of their operations, ensuring that the organizations have a strategic advantage over other players in the marketplace.

Mr. Angelo holds a bachelor’s from Ateneo de Manila University and an MBA from the Asian Institute of Management and has been associated with CBRE, Voyager Innovations and BlastAsia before his present engagement.

Digitalization:-

Digitalization is the generic term for the Digital Transformation of society and the economy. It describes the transition from an industrial age characterized by analogue technologies to an age of knowledge and creativity characterized by digital technologies and digital business innovation 

Alongside business innovation, digitalization – the development of digital innovations – is one of the most important business trends for the future of the economy. Companies need to develop digital strategies and focus on what are the key success factors of digital transformation.

  • Digitalization will drastically change the future of the automotive industry through new mobility concepts. From autonomous driving to existing sharing models and completely new concepts such as the rental of electric scooters, digitalization will allow new models of usage in the future.
  • Digitalization influences the future of the financial industry. Technologies such as the blockchain enable new forms of corporate financing and participation in addition to the applications frequently discussed in the press such as the virtual currency Bitcoin. Today, for example, company investments are made possible via so-called ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) or STOs (Security Token Offerings). These forms are only possible through digital technologies, which will continue to spread in the future.

Operations Digitalization:-

Operations Digitalization A solution dedicated to Operational Departments to secure the execution and management of multi-team transversal processes in an easy-to-use work environment. There are two phases in operations digitalization.

  • Design Experience - This includes mapping out the customer journey and the internal processes that contribute to the overall experience.
  • Build Experience - This involves automating and integrating people, workflows and core systems using an agile low/no-code platform

Operations Digitalization Framework:-

This is a proven design thinking led framework to help plan and implement a digital transformation initiative. This is a 6-Step Process.

1. Develop a customer persona - A customer persona, allows brands to better understand these homogenous groups, and to recognize key traits within them.

2. Map out the customer journey - Determine how the customers feels/thinks at stage or integration point with your company.

3. List the priorities stages for improvement - Rank the most challenging Customer journey Stages from least to most problematic.

4. Create a service blueprint per stage - List the different internal activities involved in each customer journey stage.

5. Optimize for automation - Translate the Service blueprint into a fully digital experience.

6. Create a digital solution - Implement the optimal service blueprint into a solution.

Customer Persona:-

To create a representative sample of an audience, personas are based on the analysis and research of real customers. This helps to build a much more detailed picture of the (hypothetical) customer, including far more emotive information such as personal motivations, what they value in a brand, what kind of communication they prefer, etc.

Brands are then able to take this insight and use it to deliver a much more relevant and less one-dimensional experience.Enter customer personas. As it sounds, a customer persona is an important part of finding out what makes your customer tick.

Customer personas are not just for marketers, they are equally applicable to any team member that can benefit from better knowing their customer. Product engineers, UX designers, or product leadership teams that want to create a persona will benefit from the connection.

What do you get out of customer persona? Data. Data about your customer and your future.

  • Quantitative data: information you can calculate, measure, and count about your customers.
  • Qualitative data: subjective data on how customers really feel using customer interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic research.

Customer personas also help you provide segments, and profiles about each data point, which gives product use cases the information they need to truly implement growth into your company. Three customer Pain-Points to investigate are:

  • Long response time
  • Unclear process
  • Manual tracking of invoices and no payment reminder.

Types of Customer Personas:-

There is not one single customer persona. Several different customer types exist within the same audience, all with moderately different interests. Typically, there are three main personas to consider for the different types of people engaging with your business.

  • Buyer persona: represents your ideal target customer to purchase your product or service. Because they have the highest relation to your revenue, they play a significant role in your marketing strategies and sales funnel.
  • User persona: represents the users, or the customers using your product or service. You use these personas to guide product features and design.
  • Website persona: represents all the visitors your website is intended to serve. They help guide design and include present customers, clients, investors, leads, and partners.

These three types of customer personas will allow you to visualize a solid marketing funnel. With these profiles, you can start to reap the benefits of creating your own buyer persons.

Here’s how to create a customer persona profile, step by step:

  • Create a basic persona profile: This includes basic demographic information and can be done in your sales CRM, as a spreadsheet, or in a persona template tool. Information to include is name, background, profession, hobbies, social networks, and lifestyle.
  • Build out your persona’s details: Add additional information to each persona, including what motivates them, what they share, and what problems they are trying to solve.
  • Include your team: Ask them to add additional profile information to your customer persona. Having different perspectives from your team members can help amplify your persona profiles. Have them include any information that may enhance the profile.
  • Craft a message outline: Based on the information collected, create a message for your persona built around their likes, lifestyle, and problems. It should be specific and personal.

After you’ve crafted your customer persona profile, you are now ready to begin messaging them. It’s important to include their likes, interests and personalize the message based on what you’ve learned

Service Blueprint:-

First introduced in 1984 by G. Lynn Shostack in the Harvard Business Review, service blueprint diagrams visually map out the steps in a service process, making it easier to design a new process or to document and improve an existing one.A customer journey map focus on what customers experience when they interact with a service or business, from specific actions or touchpoints to pain points. Service blueprints go several steps deeper and combine the customer’s experience with all employee actions and support processes that may or may not be visible to the customer.

Elements of a service blueprint

Service blueprints typically contain five categories that illustrate the main components of the service being mapped out.

  • Physical evidence -  What customers (and even employees) meet. Though first in line, it’s usually the last element added.Example: This category includes locations, like a physical store or the company website, but also any signage, receipts, notification, or confirmation emails, etc.
  • Customer actions - What customers do during the service experience.Example: Customers might visit the website, talk to an employee (in person or online), make a purchase, place an order, accept an order, or receive something.
  • Frontstage or visible employee actions - What customers see and who they interact with. For tech-heavy businesses, add in or replace this category with the technology that interacts with the customer.Example: Employees might greet a customer visiting a physical location, respond to questions through chat, send emails, take an order, or provide status information.
  • Backstage or invisible contact employee actions - All other employee actions, preparations, or responsibilities customers don’t see but that make the service possible.Example: Employees might write content for the website/email/etc., provide approval, complete a review process, prepare, package an order, etc.
  • Support processes - Internal/additional activities that support the employees providing the service.Example: Third-party vendors who deliver supplies, a carrier service, equipment, or software used, delivery or payment systems, etc.
  • Lines - Service blueprints also include lines to separate each category, clarifying how components in a service process interact with each other. This allows employees and managers to better understand their role and, most importantly, possible sources of customer dissatisfaction within a service experience.
  • Optional categories - If you need more detail, you could also add a timeline to show how long each step takes, success metric to measure goals, or the customer’s emotions throughout the process.

Fundamentally, service blueprints center on the customer. They allow for a clear vision of the service design, which in turn helps organizations refine their processes and deliver pleasing, memorable customer experiences.

Report By:-

Above report is written by Mr. Jenish Patel the first-year student of Operations & Supply Chain Management department of ITM Business School, Kharghar, Navi Mumbai