It comes as no surprise that how your behind-the-scenes operations run will ultimately shape customer perception more than any other aspect of your business. Beyond that, it is also instrumental in increasing efficiencies and reducing costs throughout the buying cycle. Being able to have a clear view of where all your operations currently stand in order to meet future goals of improving order management, fulfillment, and customer care is the objective for the operations pillar in Echidna’s Digital Journey Maturity Model.
Common client concerns in the operations pillar include:
- ERP or other systems supporting order management and inventory need to be replaced or are at the beginning stages of replacement.
- A good foundation is in place, but needing to adapt and change to keep up with customer demands is difficult.
- Those with brick & mortar state their infrastructure and processes reflect solely that approach, which provides a base, but realize processes will need to change to transition to digital channels.
We discussed in last weeks post that the Digital Journey Maturity Model business pillar is directing and driving your company’s innovation. Consider the operations pillar as its counterpart. Without streamlined operations, your ability to innovate will eventually come to a halt. These two pillars must both be operating properly in order to digitally mature your enterprise ahead of competitors. Echidna’s principal leadership know from experience that you can not just walk away from your existing business operations, so the question our clients often ask is how can they continuously optimize and mature these processes to allow their business pillar to remain innovative and providing strategic direction?
Understanding your current foundation in each subset of the operations pillar is the first step in advancement and continually optimizing.
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- Order and Inventory Management: Modern commerce requires processing and managing orders from multiple channels, carriers, and delivery points. Having a full understanding of these will empower you to digital maturity as well as offer competitive shipping costs and the ability to offer customers more options to return.
- Fulfillment: Carrier capabilities, new delivery points, and competitive shipping costs require complete processes. Ensuring you have a fulfillment solution with all the critical capabilities and necessary processes in place to support requirements and growth is imperative.
- Customer Care: Digital customers generally prefer digital support options. Self-support and digital communications needs a mature approach to customer service in order to succeed. This requires a unification of both the online experience and offline interaction between sales, service and customers.
With a plan in place for each subset of your operational processes, you will be able to design your ideal future state and construct processes and systems to achieve company specific goals. In order to achieve continually digital maturity, being prepared as an organization to transition and perform new operations and processes is critical. Finally, evaluating your operational performance against the initial plans, while continuously innovating is the path to true digital maturity. Ultimately, this will allow you to have all the necessary capabilities and processes in place to support the business needs and allow your future strategy to be achieved.
