Digital Organization – Definition

What does it mean for an organization to become digital? What is a Digital Organization?

The term “digital” and “digitalization” are used very broadly to define the new ways of communication with customers, primarily using the modern internet technologies. It is useful though to define exactly what those terms mean.

Internet for all customer interactions

Whether this is sales or care, the organization should be able to accept and process any customer request via internet. This may take a form of a mobile/tablet app or a web-portal.

Removing paperwork, paper mail is a priority. Increasingly, companies using paper communication are viewed, and even frowned upon, as non-modern. Additionally, paper mail and paperwork introduce unnecessary delays and wait time for clients.

Removing a need for phone calls and call centers (both inbound and outbound) is absolutely essential. Although organizations will be able to remove call centers completely in observable future, their roles may reduce palpably and replaced with the digital means of communication. More on this below.

Below is our summary of the Digital Capabilities a modern organization should provide to their clients and partners:

Introducing new, internet-based channels:

Marketing portal

Marketing portal is your main website describing products & services of your business. It is, of course, imperative to make this tool as efficient as possible. Marketing portal should be mobile friendly, SEO-enabled, succinctly descriptive and feature the modern web-design. A good marketing portal is a powerful marketing & sales channel, improving the brand image, bringing more customers from search engines and improving conversion to sales.
Marketing portal also offers plentiful data for decision making, think A/B testing, statistics collected on site visitors, social ranking and user remarks.

Quote & order portal

(and, optionally, a mobile app)

For many businesses, an opportunity to lead potential customers to web-based order is a fantastic opportunity to increase revenue. Often, the marketing portal is seamlessly integrated with the quote & order capability. Think of a “add to basket” link on the product description that switches user to the “purchase” mode.
However the basket is only part of the ordering suite. Once product is chosen, an ordering portal may help with payment, signing a (digital) contract, tracking order delivery flow.

Sales & marketing tooling

Sales and marketing tooling covers the broad range of tools helping with online advertisement, SEO tools, tools for analytics, etc. It may also include your CRM system that helps track opportunities, contacts and prospect-to-sales conversion.

Support and troubleshooting capability

As you deliver your order or throughout the lifecycle, your customers may raise problems or questions. Since many customers now look at internet as primary communication channel, companies are encouraged to develop this channel for troubleshooting and support tickets. Mostly it includes ability for customer to raise tickets and track its closure, while handling the communication with customer as part of this process.

Product/service configuration capability

Many products and services require an ability to manage their configuration online. Think of your mobile connection, bank account, even utility services at your home or office are all good examples of such services. Customers may login, request changes, view their current usage balance. Such portal may become a powerful up- and cross- sales channel for existing customers.

Electronic bill presentment and payment

A primary function for the online channels for existing customers is to view and pay their bills. In its simplest form it may be downloading bills as pdf and a link to the payment provider. However, an advance billing portal may expose details of the bill, ability to drill down to details over time, or types of services or sub-accounts.