Achieving growth in the digitalised economy

I recently have been in discussion with a technology company offering end-to-end digitalisation to large companies. We made some cogent points about achieving growth in the digitalised economy:

  • Customer experience will be more important than operations efficiency in delivering sustainable growth (digitalised operations will become commoditised)
  • The ability to shape experiences with digitalisation will create value – and we can argue that this applies across the value chain – experiences shape behaviours and patterning of collective behaviours
  • The compelling proposition will come from understanding this and it is an area in which it is still possible to genuinely compete

Having acquired a leading applied design business, they see the ” … benefits of end-to-end innovation offerings that integrate applied design thinking in the fuzzy customer-facing front end, as well as middle office business processes and back office IT applications …”.

In the following chart I offered a dynamic view that can illustrate this:

The focus point is on how ‘Experience’ drives economic value creation:

  • Enabling customer outcomes – how we help customers achieve experiences and outcomes that are important to them and for which services, brands and products are foundational to achieving these
  • Building relationship, values and trust: emotional and intellectual commitment to the outcomes and the relationship – seems paradoxical in digitalised economy but think Apple Support …
  • Establishing value over time including customer value through loyalty and repeat business in an age where switching and choice is made easy (vs revenue)
  • Providing end-to-end process quality and benefits becomes part of creating the experience
  • Creating employee commitment to create positive experiences for customers whether directly (behaviours + knowledge), on line or fulfilling everything in full and on time at the right price

The chart illustrates the power of creating experiences people want and are prepared to pay that bit more for. Digitalisation of operations and supply chain will drive down costs and improve efficiency – but will it also eventually commoditise basic operations platforms?

If you would like to discuss how we can design and facilitate workshops for your creative and technology teams to explore these ideas and how to apply them to end-to-end innovation please contact [email protected]