Some businesses don’t feel the need to digitally transformation. They may be right! Not every business has to digitally transform and the level of urgency to do so is often exaggerated. However, businesses that are growing fast find that a lack of agility can often end their run of good fortune as industry innovators change customer behaviours.
Take for example the Hotel sector. Few foretold that middle-men like booking.com would be capable of taking 15%+ of their booking revenue back in the early 2000s. Could they have done something about it? Yes, they could have. If they deployed massively simplified booking engines and followed customer data. The data shows that most people seek out the hotels website before booking on the 3rd party middle-men. The hotel website must be the same price as the third party aggregator however the hotel website wants to ‘upsell you’ breakfast, champagne or rose petals. 95% of customer purchase the cheapest room and assume that breakfast and champagne are for sale when they get there. The hotel pays 15% because they didn’t look at the data and experiment.
Using a digital transformation framework and methodology would likely have lead the hotel to this conclusion long before it was too late. Digital transformation frameworks are a great way of exploring the changing customer trends, adding context to data and making innovation choices that are strategically aligned.
Below is a digital transformation tool created by Ionology that lets us very rapidly ask a few questions and let the customer self-select if they need to digitally transform or not.
Tool to Rapidly Test if a Commercial Organisation Needs to Digitally Transform