Why every board of directors should lose sleep over Digital Excellence
Digital Transformation and Digital Disruption: these are the buzzwords in corporate Holland at the moment. Boards or directors should worry about and lose sleep over the digital revolution and its implications for their business. At WUA! we’re already a step ahead, and would like to talk about Digital Excellence from the core objective of our company.
Making great digital strokes in small steps to eventually become the best to beat the competition, that is the foundation of Digital Excellence. The digital customer experience for both sales and service journeys should not be good, but excellent. In order to help our customers strive for Digital Excellence, we’ve developed a program and ideology that is used as an umbrella and common thread for all research solutions at WUA!. You can read more about this on this page, now on to five reasons why every board of directors should lose sleep over Digital Excellence.
1. 98% of all customer journeys begins online
Who doesn’t invest in excellent digital customer experiences in apps and online, loses potential buyers to the competition. Whoever still thinks that digital is a hype that will blow over, should remember that digital is now seamlessly interwoven into the communication and shopping habits of billions of people, the mobile phone that’s around us 24/7 is an example and a driver of this.
Why lose sleep?
Digital is now an essential part of the orientation and service process, and it has become a very crucial and even deciding channel in sectors such as retail, telecom, and insurance. Customers are becoming less brand loyal, instead becoming more “convenience loyal”; the best digital (service) experience and the most pleasant customer experience generates the most preference and therefore the largest revenue or customer loyalty, see the example of Coolblue below. The battle for the customer is digital, and has erupted in full force.
2. Service is the new sales
Companies like Coolblue and previously Zappos are probably known by boards of directors and management teams as examples of companies that are striving for extreme customer satisfaction. At Coolblue, they really do anything for a smile and they started to deliver white goods themselves, and if you bought shoes at Zappos.com, you used to be able to ask a call centre employee to order you a pizza for delivery to your address. Now there are experts who say that Coolblue is taking a big risk by taking charge of the delivery, the response of director Pieter Zwart of Coolblue was clear and in our opinion completely on target: “An obsessive focus on customer satisfaction is never a big risk.” Whoever keeps an eye on the Dutch e-commerce market knows that Coolblue isn’t doing badly in terms of sales…
Why lose sleep?
The extreme satisfaction that Coolblue strives for is also worth pursuing in all digital domains where you as a business are selling stuff or where service and customer journeys take place. The digital experience in these domains should be excellent; it really is worthwhile to invest in this because this is why consumers will often come back to you to buy things, and they will stay longer. At Coolblue they have known this for a while, and for now they are in a unique position: they use extreme service and excellent customer satisfaction to increase sales. In doing this, Coolblue is setting the tone for the competition and etches a standard for service quality in the minds of your potential customers. That’s something to… start working with and lose sleep over.
3. Learning from the best-in-class: accelerating growth
At WUA! we believe in ambitious goals and manageable incremental steps towards that ambitious goal. You determine those steps by measuring continuously where you stand. You also measure continuously whether you are taking the right steps. The WUA! Benchmark and the het Digital Excellence Program are perfectly suited to provide you with insight and direction – not only in relation to your direct competitors, but also compared to the best outside your industry and even the best worldwide.
The best-in-class inspire you to define ambitious goals – the best digital experience you can think of. We are further convinced that learning from the best in the industry and the best worldwide can accelerate the growth of your business.
Why lose sleep?
If you’re only looking at your own figures and not at how your competitors are doing online, you’ll lose out on the digital battle for the customer. Staring blindly at your own conversion rates and trying to increase them is an option, but it is not the best and only way to quickly get ahead online. Time for action: time for digital experience benchmarking!
4. Digital Excellence is becoming a KPI for every organisation
Now the battle for customers is increasingly taking place in the digital arena, Digital Excellence is becoming a KPI for more and more organisations. The CEO of one of our major customers in the telecom sector has already introduced this Digital Excellence KPI: all European countries that are his responsibility must be number 1 and must beat the competition. Enforcing Digital Excellence from the C-suite affects the entire organisation and gives multidisciplinary teams direction.
Why lose sleep?
Imagine what happens if Digital Excellence really comes to life in an organisation, bringing about a change in mentality, placing a dot on the horizon that everyone focuses? How cool would it be if Digital Excellence became part of assessment interviews and was linked to bonus structures? By the way: Who was the second best golfer in the world in recent years? And who was the second best Formula 1 driver? You see, you only know Tiger Woods and Michael Schumacher. They are/were winners. In online digital experience benchmarking it works like this: the number 1 in a market picks up 52 percent more preference than the number 2: The Winner Takes All.
5. Putting the customer first: Listen to (potential) customers
Many companies are always on about being “customer-centric”, saying that “they already do that”. But often it isn’t the case that the customer really is at the heart of all processes, it’s just publicity. In order to win digitally and to generate the most preference, listening to potential customers has become an absolute necessity.
Why lose sleep?
If you’re secretly aware that you’re not listening to your customers enough, you have every reason to worry. Listening to your customers and an extreme focus on customer satisfaction is not an easy route: a lot of adjustments need to be made to existing processes, you need a change of attitude, perhaps many of your staff will have to look for another job. That brings unrest, and putting the customer first takes courage, leadership and perseverance. Transparency, accountability, and knowing what moves customers: these are increasingly becoming part of the list of requirements of the modern consumer.
Read more: Digital Excellence & WUA!
We’ve outlined a few scenarios and reasons why about how Digital Excellence is worth pursuing, and how the ideology can find its way into companies, how it can lead to accelerated growth, business success, and a change of mentality in order to put the customer first. Digital Excellence is in WUA!’s DNA: for years we have been publishing rankings of the best in digital in various sectors. Want to know more about Digital Excellence? Do not hesitate to contact us. Want to read more? Please take a look at “Digital Excellence programme WUA! launches with monthly tracker” and “Digital Excellence & Scrum: 3 reasons for a perfect marriage”, or “Towards Digital Excellence, one step at a time”.
