Digital isn’t a new concept, but the rapid evolution of technology has resulted in vastly different customer expectations.

They want ultra-quick responses and seamless interactions with businesses, but without digital transformation, it’s impossible for those expectations to be met.

The hidden digital gap

A recent global survey of IT professionals revealed that just 8% of enterprises believe they’ve digitally transformed.

This might be because the majority of effort so far has focused solely on the customer journey, thus overlooking the importance of also digitising internal office processes.

This is known as the ‘digital gap’, which refers to the disconnect between digital customer journeys and the manual paper-based processes by which they’re supported. The inability for internal systems to talk to one another often results in paper needlessly generated by the digital customer journey.

Research by AIIM suggests that on average, 45% of scanned documents are “100% born digital”. It’s therefore no wonder that digital gaps hamper business efficiency and impact the overall customer experience.

Learning the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of paper use

Understanding how and why paper is used is essential if you’re to become a digital organisation.

If you digitise a poor process, it might become slightly quicker, but you’ll miss the opportunity to make changes that have far-reaching benefits.

When starting a digital journey, it’s vitally important you make the best use of big data to make informed, strategic business decisions about the way in which paper processes can be improved and digitally converted.

This is how we define the common three stages of digital transformation:

1. Understand

How is paper used in your business currently?

Understanding the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paper will help you understand where it really needs to be used and where it can be swapped for a digital alternative in order to improve the customer experience.

To do this, you’ll need access to user, document and process analytics that reveal what printing is being carried out, when and where it happens, and the users to which it can be attributed.

2. Execute

This is where you use the data collected from step 1 to start putting actions into place.

Once you know what processes can be digitised, the whole company can be educated in order to gain management buy-in and ensure individual users are given all the support they need to adopt the new processes and deliver great customer experiences.

In order to encourage new behaviours around printing, you’ll need to appoint a ‘Change Champion’ whose job it is to build awareness and support for the digital transformation project and ensure it doesn’t only reside in the IT department.

3. Improve

You’re not finished once those paper-based processes have been digitised; digital transformation is a strategy that should evolve as your business grows.

You’ll need full visibility of the new processes, but with access to the correct data in dashboard form, strategic business decisions can be made to ensure you continue to meet customer expectation.

For instance, if you know where an order sits within its lifecycle, you can ensure customer expectation is managed by keeping them up-to-speed with the status. If you decide to change an element of that process, access to predictive data will enable you to analyse what impact that decision might have on the customer experience.

To meet customer expectations with digital transformation, you need to focus just as closely on internal processes as you do those with which customers directly interact.