Creating attractive Digital offerings for Customers

Impact of Digital offerings on Customer experience

Digital offerings have compelled enterprises to reimagine their customer value proposition. New emerging technologies like Blockchain, Artificial intelligence, Machine learning and Cloud computing can help enterprises deliver unique customer experiences which wasn’t possible before.
The real benefit of Digital technology lies in its ubiquitous data, unlimited connectivity and massive processing power.These advantages can be converted into Digital offerings which can provide enriched solutions with seamless personalized customer experiences.

Creating successful Digital offerings

• Let us take the case of Uber which uses mobile and cloud computing to connect riders with drivers in order to travel to a particular destination. Uber provides seamless customer experience by providing riders useful information on drivers rating, cab location, duration of the trip, payment amount and options available.
• Successful digital offerings are created when the emerging digital technologies can deliver what customers want and will pay for.To find the exact sweet spot, successful companies repeatedly experiment, co-create with customers and assemble cross functional development teams to develop compelling service offerings.

Creating digital offerings strategy 1 – Building an experimental mindset

• Most legacy companies do not have an agile mindset designed to deliver an iterative and innovative digital services.This is because their internal processes are not designed to experiment with, learn from, enhance or discard and scale up new ideas to provide compelling value propositions.
• Successful digital offerings require continuous iteration because they are software based. Software developers build a minimum viable product and release it to their customers.Based on the feedback, they either enhance the product or discard the same.
• Companies developing successful digital offerings experiment through hackathons and building innovation centers dedicated for digital experiments.Many companies partner junior technology staff with senior leadership in a kind of reverse mentoring engagements for sharing new technological developments.

Creating digital offerings strategy 2 – Co-creating with Customers

• Companies need to identify new business possibilities to furnish refine and develop their service offerings. Many of these business possibilities identified can go wrong if these offerings do not add value to customer proposition.To eliminate such problems, companies must co-innovate with its customers to build customer insights and identify the correct value proposition.
• In the B2C business, customer co-creation involves launching minimum viable product online and then analyzing how customers react to their product online. In the case of B2B businesses, enterprises can engage with their most valuable customers to identify their pain points and then assess the potential value of their solution.
• In customer co-creation process, customers most often don’t know what they want.Hence workshops involving customers and enterprises will help brainstorm together to identify the right solutions.

Creating digital offerings strategy 3 – Building Cross Functional Development teams

• The reason why firms find it difficult to create digital offerings is because their product development teams still follow traditional processes and continue to work on silos creating their own version of best products.They expect their sales team to sell these products to the customers and customer support executives to support their products.
• Digital offerings require continuous engagement with customers in identifying new ideas and then testing their viability.In order to do this effectively and successfully, companies must build cross functional development teams consisting of designers, product managers, developers, sales and service experts.Cross functional teams can anticipate customer issues to deliver targeted solutions when compared to single function teams.

Conclusion

• Digital innovations are smaller bets where few of these small bets could become bigger deals but a majority of them would be discarded.
• Co-creating digital offerings with customers and taking an iterative test and learn approach to develop digital offerings is critical so that customers are willing to pay for the digital offerings.