A significant driver for needing to change platforms is when your business undergoes a significant digital transformation effort. Typically, a company chooses to undertake a digital transformation because they need to change the experiences their customers have with their brand. Usually, that means some amount of change in systems in order.
Reason #5: Your Business is undertaking a Digital Transformation
The first common type of digital transformation is to provide direct-to-customer (DTC) ordering of goods and services, which bypasses physical stores as the point of shopping and delivery. For a company wanting to undertake this type of transformation, you may have to replace several systems or augment them with additional systems and platforms.
For example, the physical store might rely on an inventory model of what a customer sees is available on the shelf. But when as you transition to a digital world, you need to tell the customer whether they can or cannot purchase an item. To do this, you need to have a system that can accurately track inventory as it sells, arrives, and even locate where it may be in the supply chain. This may involve evaluating and selecting several systems as part of our digital transformation effort.
The Second Type of Digital Transformation
In this situation, you can personalize the customer experience every time they interact with your company. This can be a very complex transformation, as each customer can have many different types of interactions and experiences. During this transformation effort, you must simplify this complexity by defining consumer personas and journeys.
A persona describes a typical type or category of customer, think of a senior citizen, for example, and they can be very detailed. A journey describes typical interactions that these personas have with your brand. The combination of personas and journeys helps you identify the types of experiences you need, and the messaging and personalization you need at every touch point. This type of information inevitably exposes gaps in your current systems. You will need a new system that will let you deliver the personalized customer experiences your digital transformation desires.
The Third Type of Digital Transformation
You may be thinking of moving to cloud-based technology. In the past few years, it has become more feasible and more economical to move IT work to shared data centers managed by companies such as Amazon, Google, RedHat, Microsoft, IBM, and others. Additionally, many software companies find it better to offer cloud-based systems rather than systems you have to install yourself. Salesforce is a great example of a cloud-based system that your business can use where you don’t have to install it on your servers. Microsoft Office has been moving to this cloud-based software model as well.
Since the cloud software model is so successful, other businesses are looking to move internal hardware and software to the cloud as well. To make this transformation happen successfully, businesses will need to select new systems and platforms that are cloud-enabled or cloud-ready.
How We Can Help
To help you find the right platform, learn more about our Platform Selection Jumpstart, which helps your business by evaluating your technology needs and key requirements to help you find and choose the right platform to alleviate your current issues and provide successful business outcomes in six weeks. Feel free to read through our reasons to replatform blog series to revisit certain information.
For any questions, contact our customer experience experts today.
