Digitizing the core business
Gree tin gs and welcome back to yet another column of Digital Transformation with Tavonga. Last week we talked about the importance of aligning your business strategy with your digital transformation stage. We looked at the different types of strategic paradigms that are available in the market, depending on malleability and flexibility with the market. Afterward, we determined the kinds of strategies your organization needs to put up to survive within those different paradigms.
Once your organization has come up with the overall strategy, the next step involves the opportunities the business needs to go after. How do we digitize our core business ( what currently brings us money) while simultaneously finding new growth opportunities that can be used to propel the business to new heights? This week, we will look at the very first part of those components: digitizing the core business. How do we digitize the core business to ensure that we leverage it to maximize customer satisfaction, whilst improving efficiency? Once we answer those questions, we can then look at how your business can also leverage digital transformation to digitize your core processes.
To illustrate this phenomenon, I’m going to take you through an experience I had a couple of weeks ago. I decided I wanted to buy a new shoe. As per usual, I went to the mall, identified the shoe that I wanted, and asked for it in my shoe size. They started looking for it, and after 30 minutes, they still couldn’t find my size. So, they called the different branches across the city and country, and after another 10 minutes of waiting, I was informed they didn’t have the shoe available in stock anywhere across the country. That frustrated me as a customer, as I had expected much more from this organization. Why? Because we’re spoilt. These days as a customer, if I want to get something from the United States, what I must do is tap and click for an order from Amazon or eBay, and within a couple of days, I will receive my order. If I want to get an air ticket, all I have to do is go online, type a couple of characters and I have a ticket.
So as customers, we are now impatient. This is because everything around us has become so much easier to do, coupled with the fact that these tasks have been integrated across multiple sources. This has enabled businesses to service customers at levels that require the company to digitize, otherwise, they cannot satisfy their customers. Thus, the need to digitize the core business. Gearing up your business to satisfy customers in this ever- demanding world, requires two things under the digitizing of your core business. These are:
Improving the business efficiency
Improving the customer experience
The idea is to simultaneously improve the efficiency of the organization across all the different parts of the operation, and then ensure that the customer experience is good, solid, and seamless for the client. To do this, your business needs to understand all the different processes across the business and value chain, and then, using that understanding, establish how to use digitization to make those systems and processes seamless.
I will look at an example of one of our clients. This organization wanted to find a way to digitize its core business to improve operational efficiency. This organization is a school, and if you know anything about how the education system in Botswana works, especially tertiary education, the schools will receive governmentsponsored students. So that’s about four to five thousand students. These schools are required by the government to submit a list of registered students at certain intervals across the year. Once they received that list, they can then dispatch the funds to pay for their school fees and allowance.
For a very long time, this organization was struggling with this process. Initially, they had opened multiple centers across the school where students would queue for an hour or two so they could register. This manual process was daunting and tiring thus leading to a loss of revenue, as cashflows would come late due to the time it took to register students. Thus, this organization reached out to us and requested that we assist them to digitize the process to make it more efficient. We looked at the various processes across the business and realized that it doesn’t have to be a painful process for either the customer or the organization. So, we created a WhatsApp chatbot for them as an organization. This chatbot helped to automate the registration process by doing all the necessary validations in the backend and allowing for registration to happen in 35 seconds. A process that initially required the student to take three to four hours to do, from the commute to the registration process, now took about 30 seconds. Consequently, since students could register quickly, students could now submit their applications and registrations to the government on time, ensuring that they got paid faster. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a peak example of using digital transformation to improve processes across the business.
Another big example that we have seen over the last few years of working with clients around increasing and improving operational efficiency, has been with a large manufacturing firm in South Africa. This organization had a large production line spanning about two days, from beginning to end. This production line used both people and machinery to be able to create the end- product they would take to market. The organization realized that there was no growth within the market it operated in, and the best way it could improve was to reduce its costs.
They called us, and after numerous sessions, discussions, and research, we were then able to direct them on how to improve their operational efficiency by using different Artificial Intelligence aided solutions to automate some of the things that were being done by human beings and to make that happen much faster. Using a combination of robotic process automation and artificial intelligence, we were able to ensure