Five tips to make digital transformation work

A lot of time and money goes into digital projects, the vast majority of which is often wasted. Many digital transformation projects fail altogether.

It is impossible to have any interaction with a supplier or a vendor without having your satisfaction as a customer assessed. Just think about the volume of survey emails you received the last time you booked a hotel room.

Very rarely do companies measure employee satisfaction in the same ongoing, continuous way. I am not a digital native, but in 2018 when I started in my current role to digitize Shell’s customer backbone, I did so with a fresh pair of eyes. I realized that many companies struggle with digital initiatives because they don’t listen to what users think about the digital tools they’ve been given.

What tends to happen is the company sees an opportunity to increase the customer experience and/or lower the cost through a digitization project. A team is put to work. After launch, the team disbands and the users are left to their own devices. In many cases, users are not that satisfied with the digital tool they have been given and their usual response is to simply circumvent the new system and go back to email, PowerPoint, Excel, or whatever was used before.

Here is what I have learned about how to implement a digital transformation successfully.

1. Software is more flexible than capex projects

I was asked to start with a pricing tool for Shell’s lubricants business. I was tasked with replacing the old pricing tool with a new one we called Aureus. Our work started the same way that digitization projects always had. We listed the customers’ requirements. We spoke to the IT team and the IT architects, then we sketched out a design and launched the product. The problem? Everyone disliked the result.

Our staff are the main users of this tool – the customers only get the quotation, so it’s an inward-facing tool. The big difference between physical capex projects and software capex projects is that physical projects are unforgiving. Once you’ve built a house, if you don’t like the way that the kitchen opens onto the garden it’s too late to change anything. Software is not like that. If you are not happy with the login screen or if elements are too hard to find, then it doesn’t take that much to change them.

So, we came up with the idea of “launch and listen”. This involved holding back a bit of the budget and some people from the team for after launch so that we could listen to what the users had to say so they could make the changes needed. Because you’re only done when your user is happy.

2. Ask the users of the software about their experience

The world of measuring customer experience is a large one – at Shell, we use an experience management platform called Medallia. After every interaction with one of our contact centers, customers are given the opportunity to tell us how good or bad it was, and why they gave us that score.

However, during the Aureus project, I realized our approach was uneven. Although we continuously survey our customers, we don’t do the same with our employees. I decided to use Medallia with staff – essentially, our internal customers – using the new Aureus pricing tool. The initial results were a shock to the system. The score we received was five out of 10.

As a leader, one way you can hold your team to account is by having direct access to what users think about what the team has given them. It makes the process fully transparent and there’s no place to hide anymore.

3. Act on the responses of users

The only thing worse than asking for feedback is asking for feedback and then doing nothing with it. Whenever my team makes a new product – and we have now launched around eight – users are given a “launch and listen” button where they can score the product out of 10. If the product gets anything below an eight, someone from the team will call them that same day.