As with most labels that we use liberally, “Digital Transformation” means many things to many people – and much of that depends on where an organization is to begin with when it comes to creating, capturing, and leveraging digital assets.

However, there is one way to look at this journey that applies to any organization serious about competing in the coming decade. The simplest way to describe this is with what I call the three touch-points of digital transformation: product, service, and experience. Each of these needs to be part of an overall integrated digital system that allows an organization to work with its customer across all three touch-points seamlessly.

An excellent example of this, one that I use in my book “Revealing the Invisible”, is how Tesla responded to customers who were trying to evacuate Florida during the devastation of hurricane Irma in 2017.

Tesla used to offer its Model S with seventy-five kWh batteries that were locked by software to limit battery access just sixty kWh. This limited the effective range of the car to two hundred miles, about a thirty-to-forty-mile lower range than the seventy-five kWh option. A Model S owner trying to evacuate called Tesla to ask if they would unlock his extra fifteen kWh to provide the added range for his evacuation. Tesla not only unlocked his battery’s capacity, but also did the same for every Tesla owner whose battery was similarly limited. This is only possible with a digital ecosystem that integrates the three touchpoints into one view of the customer’s digital self, as shown in the illustration.

Can you imagine how that same scenario would play out with a traditional automobile manufacturer where the product, service, and experience touch points are orchestrated by different disconnected players, the manufacturer, the dealer’s service, and sales? What about a used car where there’s no attachment whatsoever to any of those parties? A traditional automobile manufacturer’s digital ecosystem is not only fragmented and disconnected, but it insulates the company from the customer.

The bottom line is that digital transformation means that you have a digital business ecosystem in which each touchpoint is integrated with the other two.

By Thomas Koulopoulos

Keywords: Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Innovation

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