If there is something philosophers could be of one mind about the question of life is—the reality of change. Be it our personal lives or can be a reality in business.

The disruption due to phenomenal changes in the technology, market, competition and customer expectations are urging companies to reinvent their business models, core capabilities and customer experience (CX). This scenario is especially true for well-established and larger organizations.

In this technological age, specifically in this app-centric economy, consumers have multiple channels of communication to reach the organizations. When it comes to the consumer, user experience and interface are crucial and majorly influence their purchasing decisions.

Consequently, businesses started realizing the importance of digital technologies to revolutionize their current legacy systems, steering business growth to really innovate for consumers and staying ahead of the curve. Digital transformation is nothing but transforming the business models from core legacy to digital business. This change is directed towards prioritization of future needs without losing focus on present needs.

The transformation process is exhaustive for larger companies, yet underrated endeavor, and can be categorized into three key factors:

• Operational transformation
• New ideas
• Cultural change

It’s easy to know about the technological updates within the market. However, the difficulty lies in embracing and implementing them. This is true in case of innovating ideas that are overshadowed by complex organizational structures.  By the time you embrace these changes, it is too late.

The research has revealed some surprising facts: Forbes 2016 report states that “only 1 out of 8 companies have become successful in driving their organizations towards digital transformation.”

The department store and retail industry are the most remarkable examples of digital transformation failures. While companies like Uber and AirBnB are using the disruptive nature of technology to provide superior customer experience. Well, how do you think you can embrace digital transformation? Here are some key success factors that could help you achieve a smooth digital transformation journey. 

5 Success Factors for Digital Transformation

1. Innovation
Innovation is the industry’s buzzword today. Many organizations say they embrace it, yet only a few of them could innovate successfully. To become truly innovative, business processes need to be agile and fast to incorporate an emerging market need. Also, truly embracing innovation as a central business practice is imperative.

2. Business Strategy & Culture
An organization’s culture is vital, yet fragile. If the organizational culture is reluctant to change, be it resistance to embrace new technologies or towards transforming consumer experience—it is a sign that the organization needs disruption.

3. Data & Analytics
To successfully surf the digital transformation wave, data and analytics are quite important. Data that evaluates engagement, consumer behavior and capability related to a service or product. It can help identify new revenue streams and business units.

4. Stakeholder Engagement
For any business, understanding workforce and consumers is vital. It is most commonly discussed and yet frequently ignored. Using digital and latest technologies especially with social platforms to initiate the engagement could be the solution and provides organizations with more reliable feedback on their business strategy.

5. Technological Implementation
There is no scope for digital transformation without the right technology to implement it. Though it demands some initial short-term investment, but staying updated with the technology trends and using that technology to fulfill customer expectations could be beneficial on long-run.
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So, what’s your plan for digital transformation? For any assistance in digitally transforming your company, click here to reach out to us. 

While you were browsing for something, suddenly an advert pops up with your favorite product.  As if it knew your purchase interests? If you didn’t know, let me tell you, these suggested adverts are displayed using the information obtained from ‘big data analytics.’  Since, consumers are getting these customized offerings from the retailers; the same is expected from the banks as well.

A proper balance must always be maintained between the expectations and reality, and it applies to financial services’ industry too. Many banks have failed to capitalize on the data collected over time. Consequently, ended up with limited knowledge of their customers which implies banks cannot custom-make product or messages according to the customer preferences.

Nowadays, small and large enterprises use ‘data analytics’ to make smart decisions. The enormous structured and unstructured data produced by multiple devices across platforms lead to great insights.  
In the coming section, let’s discuss how ‘big data analytics’ is being used by banks to achieve sustainable growth.

To Enhance Customer Relations
Recently, banks have embraced digitalization and were trying to expand their customer base by extensively advertising new banking facilities available.  Banks have a huge consumer base and with the wide range of financial products sold by them— the complexity increases further.  For example, home loans, mortgages, four-wheeler loans, personal loans etc. In traditional banking, a financial product is advertised to the entire customer base, ignoring the fact whether that product suits the customer needs or not. But in modern banking it is a different case, banks started giving importance to customer preferences and accordingly tailoring their promotional activities.

With the help of Big Data, banks create specific databases which could be of great value. The digital transformation helps banks to move from traditionally structured datasets with vague consumer data to more defined datasets. Big Data helps banks to understand the customer better: by knowing their habits, preferences, and lifestyle. By retrieving consumer data from different online and offline channels, banks can offer financial products according to their customer needs. Customer analytics combined with Big Data can make available customer data more valuable since it combines behavioral, transactional, and social data. So, customer satisfaction will be increased as they get more customized banking experience.

Better Risk Management
Banking has always risks attached to it, the more the bank grows the more will be the risks. Big Data and analytics can provide better insights to the banks regarding their customers, transactions, environments, and systems to help them mitigate risks. For example, a bank can use analytics to interpolate the weather data with the ‘reliability’ and ‘age’ of the buildings in the area. Based on the insights, banks can take a decision on approval of insurance. Historical sales-data merged with regional economic data helps to find out when the housing market is on the verge of revival; when to invest on renovation and helps in identifying potential markets to offer low-interest loans.

Also, banks assess the data and locate the factors leading to non-payment of loans and devise programs to avoid them. Analytics enable transparency in the entire system, thus banks can easily detect internal or external fraudulent activities and use the information of fraud patterns to mitigate future threats.  

Retention of High-Value Customers
The business intelligence and data analytics collectively help banks identify the high-value customers and get information on their banking preferences. It helps banks to retain profitable customers, present suitable financial products to them and understand which products bring maximum returns.

Let's consider a case wherein a customer has a habit of visiting a certain place for breakfast or for shopping. Retrieving the data and analyzing the data can provide a base for offering highly personalized offers which have a high propensity for acceptance. Taking a step further by embracing mobility, offer details can be sent by SMS at the right time to enable quick decisions.

Smart Dashboards for Data Visualization
Data analytics allows bank staff to visualize data using animations, graphs, charts and customized interfaces. The managerial team can pull customized reports by simply running queries. For example, the regional-wise profit and loss, monthly operational expenses or monthly volume of loans (in %) can help the decision makers to get a clear picture of the scenario.

Final Thoughts
The old way of doing things is risky these days. The businesses should evolve and adopt new technologies to succeed in the ever-changing market. Implementing the Big Data Analytics and instilling it into the existing workflows of banking sector helps banks to survive and succeed in the race of digitalization.

Banks have become more sophisticated today and have invested largely into modernizing infrastructure and providing mobile-based services. In the years to come, they will have to learn to enable operations with Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.

Are you ready to take a leap? Click here to download the brochure of our flagship data analytics software product “Cockpit Data Analytics.” 
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