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The 4 Pillars of Successful Digital Transformations

• Nathan Furr,
• Andrew Shipilov,
• Didier Rouillard,
• Antoine Hemon-Laurens

A framework to help leaders decide where to invest.

Digital transformation can mean a lot of different things. For leaders, it can be hard to know where you should be focusing investment — and what kind of digital transformation you’re really after. The authors outline four pillars of digital transformation: IT uplift, digitizing operations, digital marketing, and new ventures. Which pillar is the right starting point for your company depends on your context, needs, but also your digital maturity.

Despite years of discussion, understanding what digital transformation means for established companies remains a daunting challenge. Leaders put in charge of a digital transformation feel pulled in many different directions, with competing demands from IT, marketing, sales, and operations. Without a clear understanding, the wrong people are often put in charge, with the wrong resources, and the wrong KPIs, setting the digital transformation project up for failure.

• Nathan Furr is a Professor of Strategy at INSEAD and a coauthor of five best-selling books, including The Upside of Uncertainty, The Innovator’s Method, Leading Transformation, Innovation Cap i tal , and Nail It then Scale It .
• Andrew Shipilov is a John H. Loudon Chaired Professor of International Management at INSEAD. He is a coauthor of Network Advantage: How to Unlock Value From Your Alliances and Partnerships .
• DR Didier Rouillard is the Corporate VP of Quadient, a customer experience software company operating globally.
• AH Antoine Hemon-Laurens is Senior DigitalNOW! partner at Quadient.

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Digitizing customer journeys and processes: Stories from the front lines

A compelling customer experience has evolved from a nice-to-have to a necessity in many industries. Winners use standout experiences to attract and retain business while reducing servicing costs and complaints. The rewards can be substantial, but execution is complex, requiring a complete reinvention of customer journeys and supporting processes.

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Radical though this may sound, “reinvention” is no exaggeration, because digitizing existing processes is seldom if ever the solution. Instead, successful transformations begin with a zero-based redesign of the customer experience of a given task, such as opening an account or renewing a service. That involves ignoring everything the company already has in place and asking, “What would be the best possible experience a customer could have when completing this task?”

Only when a business has defined what that experience should be can it figure out how to build the processes and technologies needed to support it. By digitizing these processes, the business can reduce costs, improve customer experience, capture value, and move to a next-generation operating model.

But what does this process of reinvention look like, and how do companies make it work? This article offers an inside view of key stages in a successful transformation. The examples are drawn mainly from financial services, but the lessons apply to any company seeking to reinvent its customer experience.

Designing a customer-centered solution

Most institutions understand the importance of a positive customer experience to the bottom line, but few excel at designing or delivering it. The transformations that bring the biggest benefit start by imagining what a world-class customer journey would look like, rather than settling for tactical evolution of the current state. This requires reimagining the entire journey, which many organizations find hard to achieve after years of incremental improvements.

One bank reduced the information required on its new-account-opening form from 45 fields to 35 and declared victory, yet it could have reduced the fields to 15 and pre-populated 10 of them from external data sources. Another bank found that the apparent requirement for a “wet signature” on a loan application quickly evaporated when the regulator was consulted.

To make this reinvention leap, leading companies employ a user-experience designer who can orchestrate the process, keep it focused on customer needs, inspire people, and ensure that the organization doesn’t allow its new vision to be limited by the way it does things today.

Another crucial aspect of reinvention is customer involvement, as the story of a Latin American bank illustrates. It was working to understand customer journeys and identify the most important processes to reimagine. Instead of doing what many organizations do at this point—try to put themselves in their customers’ shoes—the bank brought customers into the project room to get their reactions at first hand. Bankers, however empathetic, are not customers, and the only reliable way to find out what customers want is to go and ask them.

This was the first time the bank had ever spoken with its customers before redesigning a product or process. Previously it had run focus groups to gather feedback when piloting a new offering, but this had been largely a box-ticking exercise, since much of the solution had been developed and material changes would have been too costly to implement. Having direct rather than arm’s-length contact with customers was also critical. Many companies subcontract customer research to third parties and commission a report for the project team to study, but this can be a slow, remote, and inefficient process, depriving in-house teams of the regular ongoing customer exposure that can lead to great solutions.

Defining the scope of a transformation

The scope of a journey can be defined by the product (such as a mortgage or current account), the channel (such as online or branch), the customer segment (such as retail or commercial), and the phase of customer engagement (such as sales or servicing). Depending on how these elements are combined, the scope of a transformation can be narrow (a remortgage for existing customers via the online channel) or broad (all mortgage products in all channels).

Decisions about scope should be informed by a detailed assessment of the value at stake and the cost of capturing it. In our experience, companies achieve impact more quickly by focusing on a few large journeys rather than fragmenting their efforts across the enterprise. (For more on this, see “ Putting customer experience at the heart of next-generation operating models .”)

In its new approach, the bank consulted customers at every stage through weekly test-and-learn sessions. It showed customers first sketches of proposed solutions, then more detailed wire-frames, then prototypes, and finally a functioning solution. Having weekly feedback enabled the team to constantly refine the new customer experience and resolve any issues that might compromise its success at launch.

For instance, an early prototype of the bank’s new-account-opening journey sought to help customers choose an account by asking how, when, and why they would use it and recommending the most suitable product. But in tests, customers always selected “compare to other accounts” whenever a recommendation was offered; answering three or four questions hadn’t saved them the time or trouble of making comparisons for themselves. So the team took the questions out of the process, relegated recommendations to an option, and added brief summaries of account features to help customers make their own choice.

A zero-based design process can feel alien and risky at first, but handled well, it is a powerful tool for going beyond incremental change and making the kind of radical customer-centered shift needed to create the best possible experience. To turn the newly imagined solution into reality, the organization will also need to create a strong cross-functional team.

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Mobilizing a cross-functional team.

To gain multiple perspectives, best-practice companies take specialists from every function, bring them together in one place, and charge them with testing reimagined journeys and processes from every angle. Some organizations create a purpose-built “lab” or “pod” for a team working on a customer journey to insulate it from everyday business demands and free it to focus on delivery. To ensure speed to market, each team member must hold decision-making authority for his or her respective area. If the head of legal can’t attend every daily meeting, she needs to empower a member of her department to be in the lab full time and act on her behalf.

The power of this approach lies in the way it unites professionals from legal, compliance, operational risk, and other functions in working toward a common purpose. By engaging them from the start, organizations can sidestep responses that block change (“This can’t be done”) and foster more constructive dialogues (“Let’s work together to make it happen”).

One long-established bank developed its first-ever digital process for opening an account. Previously, prospective customers had to visit a branch and see a sales representative. The bank designed an account-opening process that required new customers to input just four data fields rather than the 25—already good by traditional banking standards—in the original process. Other fields were either pre-populated from public sources or deemed unnecessary.

When the bank’s cross-functional team met to review the new process, the compliance expert remarked that it couldn’t be implemented because regulation required new customers to provide at least 20 pieces of personal data. She was trying to minimize risk, as the bank had always taught her to do. The team subsequently brought in a new member who worked with colleagues from legal and operational risk to challenge the way things were done. On closer inspection of the regulations, the team found that some data fields could be filled in at any point during the customer’s relationship with the bank, not necessarily when the account was opened. This ability to question accepted wisdom is just as important as technical capabilities—and sometimes more so.

Governance is another area where long-standing structures and practices designed to minimize risk can impede the fast, well-informed decision making needed to bring digital innovations quickly to market. Agile delivery can’t be sustained if teams have to approach one governance body after another for approval. Instead, the organization should nominate a “product owner”—an executive who is accountable for delivering business value—and empower this individual to make day-to-day decisions for the team.

For strategic decisions that need to be made by a broader cross-section of leaders, leading institutions create a new governance body formed of senior representatives who can eliminate roadblocks and shield the team from parts of the organization that disagree with new developments. The governance body should meet at least every two weeks to provide guidance, ensure clarity on the way forward, and give the team the confidence and authority to move quickly.

To ensure this new structure works efficiently, team members and leaders need to adopt agile principles. That might mean leaders stop asking for detailed reports, for instance, while teams hold conversations in person rather than via long email chains. For many people, this will require a fundamental shift in mind-set and behaviors. Regular coaching from a trained agile coach can help to make the transformation as seamless as possible.

Finally, this governance body must be a real working group. One company abandoned PowerPoint presentations and heavy documentation. Instead, its steering committee moves around the meeting room to “stations” demonstrating new products and posters depicting issues that need to be resolved. Just as we change the way we drive technological innovation, so we need to change the way we consider, debate, and approve decisions.

Developing the new solution

Once a new customer experience has been designed, tested, and refined, the next step is to develop the technology infrastructure to support it. To prevent unnecessary complexity, the new build should be as architecturally flexible as possible—incorporating reusable components and services or deploying the same functionality across multiple channels—while taking care not to jeopardize the performance of existing systems.

Integrating new processes with legacy systems in a cost-efficient way is a challenge most companies face when they digitize their customer journeys. One bank adopted a systematic approach that involved first asking whether a new interface was really needed and then determining the most efficient integration approach. It found it could make trade-offs in design—such as reducing data requirements to enable existing interfaces to be used—that would cut costs and improve the speed of delivery. Where new interfaces were required, the bank used a range of techniques from screen-scraping and robotics to agile building methods.

Many banks’ IT development is overseen by architecture and infrastructure review boards that require extensive documentation and long lead times. Moreover, standards for deployment often call for multiple testing groups and management bodies to sign off on code. These processes were originally designed to protect banks against rework, security issues, and systems failures at a time when releases were infrequent. Paradoxically, however, such safeguards can now have the opposite effect, increasing the time it takes to fix problems when things go wrong. For agile delivery, banks need to move toward fully automated testing and deployment, using DevOps tools to allow for frequent smaller releases. Properly implemented, this approach should mitigate risk.

At another bank, IT projects routinely took four to six months to go from concept to development, and three to four months to go from development to production. To speed up delivery, the CTO embedded an enterprise architect in the lab on a full-time basis. Not only did this reduce the four-month concept-to-development phase to four weeks, it also improved the quality of the results, delivering a customer-onboarding workflow based on service-oriented architecture and with multiple reused and reusable components. For instance, when the team proposed developing a new service to bring customer details from source systems to the website, the enterprise architect suggested reusing a similar service that was already bringing customer data to tellers.

Time was also saved from the development-to-production phase by conducting quality-assurance and user-acceptance testing during program-development cycles, or sprints, rather than after development. In another innovation, the team used an automated deployment tool to eliminate the need to align release dates across multiple changes. This made the bank nimbler at IT development and helped it move closer to continuous deployment, where code is deployed in production as soon as it has been tested and approved by the business owner.

‘Rolling in’ the solution

In a conventional rollout, companies make detailed plans, communicate the changes, start small, replicate efforts, train teams, and let the business deal with implementation. Roll-in is a radically different approach and often a useful option for building scale.

You begin by determining the rough shape and size of your new digitized business through early cycles of test-and-learn, then gradually add more people until the team has the capacity to do all the work you require. Rather than getting your original team to train other teams and export capabilities to the rest of the organization, you effectively import volumes for your team to work on, growing its capacity while shrinking your old process and team at the same time. This ability to evolve the new business as work volumes rise enables you to create a best-practice operation from the ground up.

One major life insurer kicked off its roll-in phase by taking a small portion of its current demand—10 percent—and working out what kind of operation would be needed to handle it. To calculate optimal load balancing, it started with a small team and gradually increased the workload. Much to everyone’s surprise, the team was able to increase its output by 40 percent. Bearing this team size and work mix in mind, the insurer gradually expanded the team until it could handle the entire workload. The new team not only had higher productivity but was much quicker to build than with a conventional approach.

Driving customer adoption

However good a digitized solution may be, it means nothing if customers don’t use it. The trick is to minimize the effort needed to move to the new model and launch digital-adoption campaigns to make customers aware. Too often, these campaigns are overlooked or neglected, leading to lackluster adoption and lost value.

Successful digital-adoption campaigns start by understanding customers’ pain points and exploring the barriers that prevent digital adoption. These efforts require senior leadership involvement, a clear and comprehensive action plan, and a guaranteed budget. In our experience, successful customer adoption of new products or services rests on five pillars:

• Customer experience: ensuring that customers have a delightful experience that directly addresses their challenges and needs.
• Marketing and communications: using timely targeted messages to make customers, partners, and employees aware of the new value proposition.
• Incentives and promotions: offering appealing bonuses, perks, or discounts to encourage customers to shift by sharing the value captured.
• Legacy channels: phasing out or reducing competing and expensive legacy channels to encourage slow adopters to migrate and demonstrate commitment to the new digital solution.
• Policy: ensuring seamless internal alignment across channels and business units to avoid disruptive conflicts between leaders on strategy, targets, compensation, or mind-sets.

One European telecom company took this to heart by using every call from a customer purchasing a new product as an opportunity to educate them about its digital services via recorded messages and conversations with sales agents. Another company communicated the convenience of digital touchpoints through “send to a friend” social campaigns that took advantage of satisfied digital-care users.

While the five pillars provide a firm foundation for any customer-adoption campaign, specific tactics will vary by company and context. Sophisticated players tailor their approach by customer segment, channel, and relationship or brand. Customers’ reactions will also vary, of course. Early adopters react well to encouragement, fast followers expect rewards, and laggards may need deadlines or a gentle nudge. But regardless of category, the best way to secure a shift in behavior is to minimize the effort customers have to make to move to the new digital solution.

Leading institutions are becoming increasingly adept at using digital innovation to reshape customer journeys. Their experience in designing customer-centered solutions, building teams, getting the solutions to market, and driving scaling and adoption should point the way for other organizations to create value from this rapidly developing field.

Chandana Asif is a manager in McKinsey’s London office, where Tomas Jones is a partner; Jiro Hiraoka is a manager in the Lima office; and Prerak Vohra is an associate partner in the New York office.

The authors would like to thank Joao Dias, Christina Hawley, Yran Bartolomeu Dias, Marta Rohr, Pierce Groover, Kristine Simonsen, and Belkis Vasquez-McCall for their gracious support and expertise in creating this article.

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What is a digital journey

Digital customer service..

What is digital journey?

A customer journey is the aggregate of experiences that a customer has when interacting with your organization. Rather than looking at each touchpoint separately -- like their experience in your store, their experience on your website, or their experiencing chatting with a customer support agent -- a customer journey  details the end-to-end experience from the customer’s perspective.

So what is digital journey? A digital journey is focused exclusively on the digital channels  available and used by your customer during their buying journey. These include your company’s website, social media channels, mobile apps, SMS messaging tools, and live chat .

Designing a digital journey

To design a digital journey that will delight your customers and keep them coming back for more, put yourself in their shoes. Define and understand each category of customer that interacts with your company. What are they trying to accomplish by purchasing from your organization? With a deep understanding of your buyers, now consider what content and offers appeal most to the customer. When, where and how should you deliver this information to them?

Additionally, you’ll want to design a digital journey that encompasses all stages of the buying cycle. Typically, these stages are awareness or browsing, filling an online shopping cart, and making a purchase. It’s also important to consider the buyer’s post-purchase needs and wants, whether that involves interacting with customer support or encouraging them to make another purchase from your company.

Benefits of creating an outstanding digital journey.

Focusing on your customer’s journey through a digital lens and ensuring it’s best-in-class can create value in several ways.

Grow revenue

By leveraging the rich at-your-fingertips data available through the technologies that fuel a buyer’s digital journey, you’re able to intelligently offer additional products to the customer. If 80% of the other customers who purchased decorative pillows also purchased a new table lamp, ensure that your digital journey displays your top-selling, in-stock offerings.

Improve customer experiences

As customers continue to embrace digital channels, companies have an opportunity to improve interactions and deliver improved customer experiences. Digital experiences are typically simpler and faster to use. Would you rather stroll aisle after aisle of a home goods superstore searching for a seasonal throw pillow? Or would you rather enter a few words into a search box and find the perfect item for your living room couch at home in your recliner?

Reduce costs

Lastly, a well-designed digital journey can help your company lower costs. By maintaining an easy-to-use help center on your website and leveraging chatbots in your contact center, you’re able to easily answer some of the most common questions a customer has without engaging live agents.

NICE CXone is the leading call center software  used by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world. As a cloud-native, unified suite of applications, CXone helps companies productively interact with customers through digital channels. Watch our webinar to find out more about the role contact centers play in shaping digital journeys .

Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect.

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CXone empowers all your agents to deliver a true digital-first omnichannel customer experience by simultaneously combining all customer interactions in one intelligent inbox across multiple digital channels and voice for agents to select ("pull"), while dynamically prioritizing the most time-sensitive or real-time interactions according to service levels ("push"). All delivered in a single application – complete with full customer context, journey history, and sentiment.

• Single Interface:  one inbox for all digital messaging  and real-time (voice/chat) channels – retaining native experience of each messaging platform.
• Agents in Control: ‘pulling’ work in natural flow, while dynamic prioritization maintains SLAs – and prevents ‘cherry picking’.
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A 10-Point Framework for the Digital Journey

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In the near future, it may be difficult to imagine a company not involved in some way in digitisation. While Uber, Amazon and Netflix grab headlines for their growth in the platform economy, traditional companies are also digitising. UPS uses smart routing devices to trim millions of miles on their delivery routes. Caterpillar now equips its tractors and diggers with internet-enabled sensors that provide data to customers and itself for smarter maintenance and performance.

The new evolving ecosystem of mobile computing, interactivity and data gathering presents an opportunity to craft new value propositions. This is just as well since the era of “easy” global growth becomes less likely to continue. While population increase and mass consumer markets gave traditional businesses opportunities to grow in the 20th century, the wave of the future is more likely to centre on creative recombinations of technology and people, something digitisation encapsulates.

Management waves and new technologies have come and gone before, from cassette tapes and fax machines to business process reengineering and Six Sigma, which makes it easy to dismiss digitisation as a fad. But executives we recently interviewed for a research article share a belief that despite the growing access to computers and data over previous decades, digitisation is just starting. The managers and leaders we interviewed were actively involved in shaping the digital future of media companies (books, music and television). We also spoke to managers in banking, ship building, retail and consulting to understand more from companies where the product is less likely to be digitised.

While this work is ongoing, below is the first of several instalments explaining the framework we see emerging: 10 checkpoints on the digital journey that companies face. In later articles, we will expand on these points, which include skills and roles, structures and processes, and cultural aspects. We will start and end with cultural aspects, specifically checkpoint one, the mindset shift.

While companies need to respond to this new reality seriously, there is no recipe for transformation. “Going digital” or “digitisation” is often characterised as a transformation, suggesting that organisations embark on a caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis with a clear start and finish and emerge ready to take flight as digital leaders.

The lessons from companies well down the road of digitisation show that framing it as a journey is a better starting point. Our study revealed the issue of mindset as the first of 10 dimensions companies would do well to consider throughout this journey. Interviewees for our study were willing to experiment and start early, iterate and grow in capabilities and know-how, which are important ingredients for any organisation looking to adapt to a fast-moving environment.

According to a theory of organisational behaviour called “absorptive capacity”, companies who amass foundational knowledge, skills and ideas build the capacity to absorb new ideas faster. Absorptive capacity is defined as a company’s ability to recognise the value of new information, assimilate it and apply it to commercial ends. Absorptive capacity depends on prior knowledge, because knowledge is cumulative. In the same way a student doesn’t go from learning simple algebra to doing advanced calculus overnight, organisations can’t run before they can walk. In short, they don’t just become digital by buying or creating a new technology; they build ongoing capabilities and knowledge over time.

It’s not too late, or too early

An interviewee from the book industry told us that “we’ve been producing e-books since 2000, although we didn’t sell many of them. But it was a mini example of the whole value chain which we looked at in more depth later. Getting the rights from authors and agents, technically producing the e-books from today’s perspective through many aggregators and vendors…was like a preparation phase for the business which kicked off in about 2009.”

The good news from this example is that it’s not too late, or indeed too early, to get involved. For the company above, its earliest foray into e-books was not a commercial success, but it was an invaluable learning process and set it up for the e-book wave.

It’s not about technology

It’s also important to frame digitisation as being less about computing-based efficiencies than about organisational effectiveness. Companies are fairly confident that the software infrastructure will exist for them to create platforms and gather data. What is most important is understanding the potential of technological developments to shape consumer experiences.

One participant told us that, “you have to digital define the way we interact, probably the way we live in many areas. So it’s much further reaching than it was in the past. Now it’s starting to change…business models. It might change the overall user experience…I’m thinking a lot about how will people interact, or how will they consume information.”

The processes organisations should adopt to become digital are not necessarily themselves “digital”. Technology is important but it’s not the essential component.

Our interviewees gave us the sense that they were overwhelmed with data, not least because data have become so fine-grained and instant. Acting on constant feedback and insights, but without jumping at every data point, will be crucial to leveraging data effectively. In my next article, I will expand on how organisations can leverage these bigger analytics to derive larger meaning and what skillsets organisations will need to use such tools effectively. As we learnt from those who see digitisation as a journey, the focus today is less on data and storage than on analysis and ideas.

Charles Galunic is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour and the Aviva Chaired Professor of Leadership and Responsibility at INSEAD.

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About the author(s)

Charles galunic.

is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour and the Aviva Chaired Professor of Leadership and Responsibility at INSEAD.

About the series

The digital journey.

Managers and leaders actively involved in shaping the digital future of a variety of companies across different sectors were interviewed for this series. It will consist of six parts.

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Patrick Giry-Deloison

23/10/2017, 07.24 pm

Excellent food-for-thought and even more for-action. Thanks. Nevertheless I would have expected more emphasis on how current (and future) customers play a major role in framing the purpose of the digital transformation since ultimately it is them who pay the bills! And I got struck by this sentence in the 3rd paragraph "We also spoke to managers in banking, ship building, retail and consulting to understand more from companies where the product is less likely to be digitised." Banking is clearly turned upside down by the digitale revolution and consulting - my current turf - is undergoing a massive disruption through platforms and AI, just to name two drivers. Is this a typo or do you disagree with this assessment?

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Anonymous User

19/11/2017, 09.46 pm

Fair point Patrick, especially related to Finance and Consulting services. Clearly the final product consumed in ship building and retail is not as "digital" as say for music, but it is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, and of course digitization can happen in some form to all of these industries (which was the main point we were making).

04/08/2017, 05.15 pm

Technology is just a commodity, well perhaps. But then it is the commodity that defines our communication, our culture and our values. Quite an important 'commodity' I would say.

03/08/2017, 06.03 pm

Ideation Routine? Tracking Hurricanes?

Apart from that, it is, of course, all about technology. It is interesting to see how often management theorists claim 'it is not about technology'. Well then my friend, how did you type the article? How did you share it? How do you receive comments?

The key issue I think is that most organisations that I have worked in and worked with have built large walls between 'the IT department' and 'the business'. Outsourcing IT made that wall higher. This led to allineation between 'the business' and 'IT' and the wish at the business side to downplay the role technology plays in the transformation to becoming a digital company and therefore becoming a tech company.

A small example is a very successful bank which CEO admitted that 40% of all staff now where IT guys (and a couple of girls, but that is a different topic), and it was growing fast. He also admitted that he had fought the idea of hiring more and more IT staff until 2010. Then he wondered, 'why do I resist IT staff so much?' and started following the profit. His IT staff increased significantly and so did the profit of the bank. Suppose he would have tried to 'track hurricanes' and had focussed on 'idea routine', would profits have soared too?

The real academic focus should not be on whether or not it is a matter of technology, the real focus should be: why is it that in so many organisations the internal IT department has alienated itself so much with the rest of the business / organisation?

Bogdan Canda

04/08/2017, 03.43 pm

of course is technology important but technology is just a commodity. It is about the relationship between humans and technology. If you address the relationship and not only the technology or the humans, then you ask different questions => different solutions

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City of Los Angeles: Digital Transformation Done Right

The City of Los Angeles’ CIO Ted Ross joins a conversation with Workday President of Americas Sales Patrick Blair to discuss the changing role of CIOs and the urgency of people-first digital transformation in the public sector.

The public sector has evolved rapidly during the last few years. To meet residents’ expectations, governments have had to rethink how they deliver public services—and that can mean reassessing how digital technology adds value. This is no different for the City of Los Angeles.

Patrick Blair, president of American sales at Workday, recently chatted with Ted Ross, CIO at the City of Los Angeles, to learn about Los Angeles’ digital transformation journey, workforce management during the “Great Resignation—which Ross calls the “Great Reflection”—and how the role of CIO has evolved. Below are some highlights from their #WDAYChats conversation .

What Digital Transformation Means to the City of Los Angeles

If the City of Los Angeles were a company, it would be on the Fortune 100 list. With a nearly $12 billion annual operating budget, the country’s second-largest city serves more than 4 million residents. Its IT department, which delivers enterprise services to 48,000 city employees, has 19 different divisions spanning everything from a 311 call center to an Emmy Award-winning TV station. 

For Ross, that scale naturally demands viewing his role of CIO through a wide lens. “In a nutshell, I’d say I deliver digital services to over 500,000 businesses and over 48 million people who visit LA,” says Ross, who was appointed CIO by former Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2015. Ross has managed a lot of digital change in the years since. 

“When we think of digital transformation, we think of leveraging digital tools in ways unimaginable just five or 10 years ago,” Ross says. “You don’t have to have a massive data center. You don’t have to have a lot of infrastructure to get out there and deliver excellent solutions and deliver them quickly. That means as an organization, knowing what we have, establishing the right platforms like Workday, and leveraging those platforms in a rapid way to deliver value to our stakeholders and to our business partners—that’s really what’s become of the era of digital transformation today.”

How Finance and IT Can Partner to Drive Transformation 

“First of all, IT needs to make a compelling case for technology investments,” Ross says. “All too often IT goes to finance [with] technical talk that doesn’t deliver any compelling reasoning to the finance group. So whatever IT can do to demonstrate real value to an organization, real business value, the easier it is for finance to make that [the] focus.”

Ross says that it’s also important for IT to be accurate about both the one-time and ongoing costs. “IT really needs to provide truth in advertising,” he says, “which means IT is going to need to be able to speak finance. On the flip side, finance really needs to understand that IT is how business is now done. IT is not a department—IT is how every department performs [its] functions, especially in this post-pandemic world.”

Ross also emphasizes the importance of helping finance understand the power of digital opportunities. In order to thrive in today’s environment, he notes, it’s crucial that CFOs leverage technology that can quickly adapt to change and provide critical insights. “When a digital opportunity in the market becomes available, it’s important for any business or any government to seize that digital opportunity as quickly as possible,” shares Ross. “[That] often starts with having platforms in place, having the right kinds of solutions and the right kind of understanding to take advantage of it. By finance understanding the power of digital opportunities, and just how transformational it becomes to an organization, the more [finance] can move at the speed of IT.”

If you’d like to learn more, watch the full “#WDAYChats” conversation between Ross and Blair on YouTube .

Making change happen can be difficult, especially within the federal government. Marina Nitze, former CTO of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, advocate for foster care reform, and author of the new book “Hack Your Bureaucracy,” discusses how she helped solve seemingly impossible challenges in governmental and private organizations to create lasting change.

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Conversations around artificial intelligence are happening everywhere, but how is this technology relevant to the world of work? Break through the jargon and learn about the business benefits of AI.

Digital transformation is a strategic initiative that incorporates digital technology across all areas of an organization. Digital transformation evaluates an organization’s processes, products, operations, and technology stack to identify ways to improve operational efficiency and bring products to market faster.

It has become more important as organizations increasingly take a digital-first approach to all aspects of a business, from its business models to customer experiences to processes and operations. Organizations now use artificial intelligence (AI), automation , cloud environments and other digital technologies to leverage data and streamline intelligent workflows , faster and smarter decision-making, and real-time response to market disruptions. And ultimately, it can lead to the ability to pursue new opportunities and create new products that meet customer expectations.

Digital transformation is as much about business transformation and cultural change as it is about replacing analog processes with new technologies. It requires the CEO and CIO to work hand-in-hand to identify what changes need to happen within the organization to modernize and achieve their pressing business goals.

Many organizations felt an increasing need to reimagine their businesses and prioritize digital innovation during the Covid-19 pandemic, which supercharged the collective march into the digital age. That is when customer expectations and habits changed, leading to an over-reliance on digital experiences and decreased brand loyalty. As a result, organizations got more serious about change management , of which digital transformation is a major component.

Meeting the expectations of all stakeholders is a core component of digital transformation. For example, meeting customer expectations has always been an important component of the digital transformation journey. Today, customers expect to conduct all business digitally, wherever, and whenever, using any device, with all the supporting information and content they need close at hand. Ultimately, digital transformation is about meeting these ever-escalating expectations.

Companies are increasingly pursuing digital transformation because it can foster a competitive advantage, leading to an increase in business value and attractiveness to potential employees. McKinsey research found that digital leaders achieved about 65% greater annual total shareholder returns than digital “laggards” from 2018 to 2022. 1

Its goal is to build a technical and operational foundation, to evolve and respond in the best possible way to unpredictable and ever-changing customer expectations, market conditions and local or global events.

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As McKinsey points out in a recent report , several drivers are necessary to build a robust digital transformation framework effectively. 2

• Strategy: Establishing a strong digital transformation strategy involves identifying an organizational North Star and clear roadmap for execution. As Deloitte has posited , “digital transformation success starts at the top.” 3 Enterprises start by envisioning the experience they want customers to have with their product and their brand for as many months or years as they want them to be customers. This objective means they must analyze their market, along with technology trends, to forecast or anticipate how customer needs or expectations may change and to spot opportunities for disruption. Organizations then determine how they must transform the digital business from end-to-end, including infrastructure, product development, operations, and workflows. And finally, they bring the customer experience to life and improve it continually in response to opportunity and change.
• Data: No digital transformation will work unless the organization can identify, manage, and analyze the data they have produced. Thankfully, new technologies like AI and machine learning can streamline an organization’s ability to accomplish this important task. Those who harness their metrics better than the competition will have several competitive advantages. They can better understand their customers to improve user experience. They become experts at deploying new products quickly. They understand their energy consumption and output better, so they can improve their sustainability.
• Talent: Digital transformation and employee experience go hand-in-hand. Organizations that incorporate new tools like generative AI , machine learning, Internet of Things and advanced data platforms also need to train their employees to use them. In addition, executives and HR leaders need to motivate employees to embrace change and participate in the transformation of the organization.
• Operating model: Organizations that invest time and resources into beginning their digital transformation journey must also rethink their operating models. New technology and agile processes will matter little if the organization’s structure and hierarchy remain the same. The way an organization operates must be as flexible as the new tools allow.

Virtually any digital technology can play a role in an organization's digital transformation strategy. Here are some examples of digital transformation trends that every organization should consider embracing.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation:  AI technologies, such as machine learning , enable a computer or machine to mimic the human mind's capabilities. AI learns from examples, recognizes objects, makes decisions and quickly processes large tasks. The list of things AI can do has increased significantly in recent years, especially with the rise of publicly available generative AI models. AI can replace manual activities, such as those in customer service. It can now answer questions and suggest content, helping customer care representatives work on higher-level problems. It can create personalized workflows and analyze large datasets, helping organizations make smarter and more efficient decisions.
• Cloud computing: Companies are increasingly turning to the cloud as a way to manage IT costs, boost efficiencies, and remain agile. Those that do migrate to the cloud must decide whether they choose a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment.A hybrid cloud infrastructure is a cloud computing infrastructure that connects on-premises IT, public cloud and private cloud resources with orchestration, management and application portability. By creating a single, flexible, optimal cloud for running every workload—and by not locking an organization into a single platform or vendor—hybrid cloud provides the agility, scalability and resilience required for enduring digital transformation success.
• Microservices:   Microservices is a cloud-native application architecture in which a single application is composed of loosely coupled, independently deployable components. Together with Agile or DevOps methodologies, microservices are an engine for creating or countering digital disruption. It enables organizations to deploy new software or product features daily or sometimes hundreds or thousands of times a day.
• Internet of Things: The Internet of Things (IoT) are objects and devices equipped with sensors that collect and transmit data over the internet. IoT devices are where digital technology meets physical reality. Applications like supply chain logistics and self-driving cars generate real-time data that AI and big data analytics applications turn into automation and decisions.
• Blockchain:   Blockchain is a distributed, permanent and immutable ledger or record of electronic transactions. Blockchain provides total transaction transparency to those who require it and is inaccessible to those that don't. Organizations are using blockchain as a foundation for super-resilient supply chain and cross-border financial services transformations.
• Digitization: Also known as  digitalization , digitization  is the conversion of paper-based information into digital data. It’s also a cornerstone of foundational transformation initiatives in healthcare (electronic medical records or EMR), government (making public records more accessible and enabling citizens to make service requests online), and other industries.

While every digital transformation project is different, there are some powerful initiatives that many organizations adopt to take full advantage of their investments.

• Building digital experiences: Organizations as diverse as banks and other financial services companies, retailers, and entertainment providers have all in recent years prioritized their digital user experience. Now, customers can take a variety of actions, such as signing up for accounts, making purchases and checking balances without needing to chat with someone.
• Automating customer service: Improvements in AI, machine learning and algorithms have revolutionized customer service. Increasingly, organizations make chatbots, self-service knowledge centers, and dynamic FAQs the first line of inquiry when customers need help. This frees up customer care professionals to focus on higher-level issues.
• Tapping into external ecosystems: Digital transformation has created many different ways organizations can partner with each other to serve customers. The rise of business ecosystems, driven by APIs and other advanced technologies and a growing interconnectedness between non-competitive companies. Software providers can enable users to sign in with accounts from third parties. For example, an email provider may create a marketplace where users can connect their task management software or customer relationship management provider.
• Digital twinning: Organizations can now make digital replicas of their physical solutions or factories to test out ways to improve features or efficiencies. For example, a factory can A/B test different placements of machinery to determine which will make the environment safer or able to produce more goods. Or a product manufacturer can create digital replicas of their products to identify ways to produce ones that are more ergonomic or easier to use.
• Automating business processes: Adding AI and automation serve customers better and do higher-value work. They create intelligent workflows that simplify operating models, increase productivity and enable employees to make better decisions faster.
• Defending against disruption: Digital transformation implements technologies and best practices for fast product creation, new customer experiences and new business models in response to shifts in competitive threats, market trends and customer expectations. 
• Dealing with change effectively: This process can include modernizing legacy technology to run on modern infrastructure and interoperate with modern applications. It builds resilience into systems and processes and assimilates applications and data from acquisitions or mergers.
• Enabling on-demand access to more resources, with fewer limits: Digital transformation empowers the business to adopt the widest possible range of solutions and services from ecosystem partners, industry solution leaders and multiple cloud service providers.

Integrate processes across organizational boundaries and legacy systems to succeed with digital transformation. Improve efficiency by unlocking data across finance, procurement, customer service and talent management processes.

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1   The value of digital transformation , HBR, 31 July, 2023

2 What is digital transformation? , McKinsey, 14 June, 2023

3 Digital transformation success starts with leadership at the top , Deloitte, 17 April, 2023

Digital Transformation Journey: Why, Where and How

What is Digital Transformation?

The term “digital transformation” refers to the process of adopting digital technologies. A digital transformation strategy can help organizations achieve several objectives, including:

• Improve business processes and productivity across the organization
• Deliver better user experience and employee engagement
• Manage business risks
• Control and optimize costs

A digital transformation strategy can greatly vary from one business to another, encompassing a wide range of tools and processes. Each organization carries out a unique digital transformation journey, discovering the best way to adopt digital technologies and practices into its core processes and product offering.

In this article, you will learn:

Why Should You Embark on a Digital Transformation Journey?

Where should you start on your digital transformation journey, what should a digital transformation strategy include.

In today’s digital economy, digital transformation is essential to keep up with the accelerated development and diversification of consumer needs. Both consumers and employees benefit from adapting the business to the digital era. Digital transformation lets you react much more quickly and more effectively to customer requirements, gaining a competitive advantage.

In the past, IT systems and software were considered a cost center. Today businesses understand that the technology needed for digital transformation is an innovative center that can directly contribute to business growth and revenues. Cloud-native technologies like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) , Platform as a Service (PaaS), containers and serverless are tools that help companies better serve their customers.

Digital transformation is becoming a staple for businesses everywhere. According to Seagate , 66% of CEOs are focusing on digital strategies. Gartner reports that 56% of CEOs say that digital transformation is driving revenue growth. 

Yet, there is a gap between digital transformation initiatives and customer expectations—in a Qualtrics survey, 60% of companies reported they have a good mobile experience, while only 22% of consumers said they are satisfied with their shopping experience on mobile.

The following 5-step process will help you get started with a digital transformation initiative.

Evaluate the need —identify how urgently your business needs business transformation, what is the business value for specific applications or business processes, and the investment needed to digitize them. 

Create a multi-year plan —digital transformation can take time. Create a phased plan, starting with processes or applications that are easy to evolve, and are less risky. Determine your long-term budget for business transformation. The plan should include interim steps and migration strategies, to ensure that current applications continue to function while you are developing and transitioning to new applications.

Build a business plan —digital transformation is costly, but can also have major economic returns. There are two ways to “pay back” an investment in digital systems—cost savings compared to current systems, and increase in revenue. Build a business plan that combines these two elements to show how digital transformation will demonstrate a return on investment over time. Track progress against your business plan, and adapt programs to ensure they meet ROI goals.

Mitigate risk —digital transformation programs face various risks, including failed migrations, crashes, downtime, compliance violations, and cybersecurity incidents. These risks can delay and even cause the failure of a digital transformation initiative. It is important to plan for the major risks that face your project, plan how to mitigate them, and put monitoring in place so teams can recognize and respond to them.

Determine your focus —ensure your digital transformation initiative focuses on the areas that will generate the biggest impact for your business. This can include improvements in resilience, improved efficiency, contributing to a better customer experience, and enabling more agile development practices. 

Here are the primary components of a successful digital transformation strategy:

• Goals —the goals of a digital transformation program should reflect the current and future needs of your business, the competitive landscape, customer requirements, and existing technologies and skills. 
• People —a digital strategy depends on the skills of your entire team. It doesn’t start with technology, and cannot be separated from the efforts of developers, designers, marketers, strategists, content creators, etc. All of these need to understand the value of digital transformation and be trained in the relevant digital technologies.
• Process —define how business processes operate today, where they could benefit from digitization, and how to integrate and improve existing work using modern technologies. 
• Platform —the technology platform you choose for your digital transformation initiative should be strongly connected to your goals. Don’t adopt technology for its own sake—ensure that each component has a measurable impact on business goals. Platform components can include cloud systems, software as a service (SaaS), content management systems, data analytics systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and more.
• Products —identify how digital transformation will impact the products and services your organization delivers to customers. Will the products themselves change? Or will digital transformation improve delivery and usage of existing products? A balanced strategy involves optimization and improvement of existing offerings, as well as new digital offerings strongly tied to the company’s core competencies.
• Channels —determine which channels consumers will use to interact with your company and products. Which channel is best suited as a strategic delivery channel? This includes in-person shopping experiences with digital enhancements, email or messaging systems, social media, websites, and connected devices.
• Experience —observe how consumers interact with your company, especially those from the digital-first generation, and identify gaps in the existing customer experience. a digital transformation strategy must include a clear vision of the user experience. Ensure branding and messaging is consistent, attractive, and compatible with a digital experience. 
• Customers —who will benefit from your digital transformation program? An effective digital transformation benefits not only end users (external customers) but also employees, suppliers and partners (internal customers). Digital transformation has the potential to make all stakeholders, both inside and outside the organization, happier and more productive.

Digital Transformation Journey with CloudBolt

CloudBolt is here to help you no matter where you are on your digital transformation journey. We believe the long-ingrained ways of doing hybrid and multi-cloud management are over, and that a new cloud order is taking shape.

Our orchestration and automation services help with managing your hybrid, multi-cloud environments, while empowering your developers with self-service IT. By turning your enterprise IT into the cloud provider, unleash a responsive, agile alternative to runaway IT that gives your DevOps what they want. With our cloud cost management and security optimization services , you can automate extremely complicated and time-consuming aspects of your cloud management so you can focus on more strategic initiatives. And with our integration platform , you can eliminate cumbersome custom coding to make your IT teams and tools work together more easily.

Discover how much easier your digital transformation journey can be with CloudBolt. Talk to us today.

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The City of Los Angeles has been transforming the way cities provide street lighting for over a century and continues to explore new technologies to improve the quality of life for its residents. LA Lights’ connected infrastructure solutions will contribute to the safety, innovation, and inclusion of communities through data and technology. This allows the development and implementation of sustainable practices that address our city’s growing challenges. Our Smart City Strategy consists of 18 Smart City programs combined with smart lights. These solutions make city engagement convenient and connect city management with city residents.

LA Lights Executive Director, Miguel Sangalang gave the International Keynote Speech at the 2021 Virtual Digital City Infrastructure Conference. The conference focus was on expanding and enhancing existing IoT ecosystems. The keynote discussed several projects undertaken by L.A. Lights, including the City’s Transitional Lighting Zones (Smart Lights), Air Quality Sensors, and partnerships with industry to realize the benefits of IoT devices to drive livability outcomes for citizens.

Presentation available in the link below.

Conference Agenda

L.A.’s first ever Smart City Street Lighting Conference showcased LA Lights’ nationally recognized programs for LED conversion and electric vehicle charging stations. It also highlighted the smart city initiatives that utilize streetlights to create a connected infrastructure and provide services such as motion activated lighting, USB charging ports, 5G network capacity and public Wi-Fi.

Smart City Streetlight Conference Part 1

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Smart City Streetlight Conference Part 5

Smart City Streetlight Conference Part 6

LA Lights will undertake a digital transformation journey to develop a fully adaptive Smart Lighting Network for all city lights and digital solutions to provide a better-connected Los Angeles now and in the future. We adopted five Smart City Principles to embrace new technologies, express our values, embolden our mission, and exemplify the noble goals in the City’s Sustainable pLAn.

• Pair technology with infrastructure to improve public services.
• Leverage data to inform program decisions and resource allocation.
• Develop inclusive, responsive and proactive solutions.
• Apply technology that enhances the user experience and accessibility.
• Design solutions to people and City challenges.

Download Strategic Plan

It is the policy of the City of Los Angeles to provide access to its programs and services for persons with disabilities in accordance with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, as amended. As a covered entity under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the City of Los Angeles does not discriminate on the basis of disability and, upon request, will provide reasonable accommodation to ensure equal access to its programs, services and activities.

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Digital customer journeys: from awareness to advocacy.

13 min read Just understanding a customer’s needs and wants is no longer enough. You need to know not only what they think and feel about every online interaction with your product, but also what they might do in the future. This is where digital customer journey mapping comes into play.

Customers expect not only a high-quality digital experience ; they also expect to be treated as individuals. Their online experience must be personalized, relevant, and tailored to their wants, needs and interests. And where customers have high expectations , it follows that they have low tolerance for a below-par experience.

Now, more than ever, customers will abandon a purchase or a brand with a single click if they’re not happy, and move onto another brand that seamlessly delivers what they want. A recent study from the XM Institute asked large organizations to evaluate the quality of the experiences they deliver across different channels. Less than 30% rated any of their digital experiences as “good” or “very good”.

Modern customers are digital kangaroos, able to hop from brand to brand and product to product, on any device. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that your brand’s path to purchase is as easy as possible, to stop them from hopping off to a competitor.

How do you do this? With digital customer journey mapping.

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

What is a digital customer journey?

This is the path to purchase and retention – from first noticing the product to buying and using it. The journey combines all the touchpoints (i.e. points of interaction with your business) a customer has, and collects consumer data, transaction information, cross-device browsing history, and customer service interactions. There are five stages in the digital customer journey:

• Awareness: this is the point at which a customer notices your product . Awareness can come from a multitude of channels: social media and word of mouth from friends, influencers and brand advocates, search engine suggestions, adverts, marketing emails, blogs, SMS, apps, loyalty programs, and affiliate marketing.
• Consideration: A customer likes what they’ve seen, so they start to think about and research the product. They’ll visit your website, engage with a chatbot, sign up for free trials, demos, webinars, look at discounts, and check online reviews and testimonials.
• Purchase: To buy online, customers will create an account (or log into their existing one), fill their shopping cart, may be upsold or cross-sold, apply discounts, choose an electronic payment option, check out, and leave a review about the purchase.
• Experience: This is how well the order is fulfilled, and includes: shipping and delivery, tracking, online help center, support content (FAQs, instructions and assembly guides), chatbots and assisted chat, guarantees, follow-up emails and social media interactions.
• Loyalty: Loyalty programs , personalized rewards, newsletters, and social media interaction are all well and good. But creating an emotional connection with the customer, and ensuring they receive the value they expect from the brand is the new approach to loyalty: is the product good quality? Did the customer receive good support ?

What exactly is a digital customer journey map?

When you map out the digital journey graphically, including all the devices, and touchpoints your customer interacts with, you’ll understand how they make decisions, connect and interact with your brand. You can also identify and rectify any pain points that make the customer experience less than seamless.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

• You’ll walk in your customers’ (virtual) shoes : Employees sometimes find it difficult to empathize or understand the customer’s perspective. They may try to second guess what customers are feeling, rather than experiencing the journey themselves. By collecting feedback at touchpoints along the journey, the customer can express how they are feeling (frustrated? Happy? Disappointed? Cared for?) and employees can jump in to solve issues and make the customer experience smoother and more enjoyable.
• The whole company will work together: All too often, organizations work in silos: not only communication silos (when different teams don’t speak to each other) but also system and data silos that hold customer information that’s specific only to that part of the journey.  It’s the lack of a 360 view of the customer and seamless sharing of insight that creates this fragmented experience. With a customer journey map and centralized customer information, everyone, across all departments, knows where they fit in and what their role is in delivering a seamless experience.
•   You’ll inform your content marketing and content creation: Customers buy more if your content is relevant and targeted to them. Your customer journey map will help you build a full 360° picture of your customers: demographics , behavior , and psychographics , so you can target new and returning buyers.
• You’ll be able to predict customer behavior: Not only will journey mapping give you valuable insight into customers’ wants, needs, feelings, actions and aspirations, you’ll also be able to use the data to predict and influence how customers will behave.
• You’ll be able to identify gaps: when you map out each stage of the journey, and then map out your existing processes, you can not only uncover gaps, but also identify what your highest value journey touchpoints are. Without mapping, you could be focusing on optimizing touchpoints that are not really that influential, while missing a more important point.

Creating your digital customer journey map

The first thing to understand is that you have no control over a customer’s journey. A customer will go where they like, on whichever device or platform they choose, negotiating the touchpoints to achieve their goal of a satisfactory purchase. Your role is to build an omnichannel framework that anticipates where they are going to go and supports their goal.

• Base it on your sales funnel:  You will probably have the basis for your digital customer journey already – your online sales funnel (awareness, interest, decision, action). Use this as a guideline to define how many touchpoints your customers have, and how each interaction funnels into the next.
• Put your customer hat on: Walk through all the stages of your sales funnel as a customer would, noting the touchpoints. What social media would they interact with? Does your website have the right information? How easy is your booking process? How helpful are the after sales people? Is the loyalty scheme attractive? Would you be happy to recommend your own product ?
• Customize your touchpoints: You know which social media platform attracts most customers, how to respond to reviews so your business demonstrates it cares about customers, how your purchase process works, how good your aftersales team is, and how you reward loyal customers. These are the touchpoints that are specific to your company. When you bolt them onto your customer journey map and collect feedback about each of them, you’ll be able to see if they are performing as well as you think they are.
• Create personas: As companies scale, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of individual customers. This is where personas come in: these are fictitious customer types based on real customers, using demographic and psychographic profiles that include age, gender, socioeconomic background, lifestyle, interests, opinions, likes, dislikes, and attitudes. Each persona travels along their customer journey in a slightly different way, enabling a company to recognize the differences and cater to every type of customer.
• Use customer journey mapping software: Customer journey solutions are now so sophisticated that they can give real-time visualizations of your customers moving towards purchase and beyond, capturing their online interactions with your brand. AI-enabled software will flag any touchpoint where customers are struggling and highlight any places where they drop out. Not only can you jump in and fix the problems, you can also measure the impact that improving the customer experience at those points has on the company’s bottom line.

Data you can collect with digital customer journey mapping

These are just some of the types of data you can collect along your digital customer journey. When you feed all these into a single platform for analysis, you’ll be able to see how they relate to each other, and where they have knock-on effects.

• Web-browsing data: Every time someone clicks onto your website, you can track their activity on the site and see how they are interacting with your brand. You can also see what devices they are using to access your site.
• Mobile app data: If a customer is using your mobile app, they already have a degree of loyalty. Mobile apps yield more customer information from profiles, sign-ins, and location.
• Sales data: You can track a customer’s purchase history and shopping habits over time. Do they buy immediately, leave items in their shopping cart, or abandon their cart periodically? Don’t forget sales that didn’t happen – finding out why not is valuable for understanding what needs to improve.
• Advertising data: Who has clicked through to your site from an advertisement? This data will give you information about customers who are just starting out on their journey with you. You can marry advertising data with sales data to test the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
• Loyalty data: Your best customers are usually those in your loyalty program. By analyzing who they are and how they use your brand, you’ll be able to target people just like them.
• Survey data: Want to know what customers think of your brand? Ask them. Sending surveys at touchpoints along the customer journey can give you quality information about what’s working and what’s not.
• Social media listening: Increasingly, customers interact with brands through social media. Understanding the nature of this interaction can help develop your social, as well as general marketing strategies .
• Aftersales data: Information from your customer services department can reveal a wide range of issues: product quality, delivery reliability, areas that need product support. How customers are treated after they’ve made a purchase is pivotal to whether they become loyal, or not.

What about B2B digital customer journey mapping?

Whether you’re selling B2C or B2B, the main principles of journey mapping are the same. After all, although you are trading with companies, you are still selling to people within those companies – there are just more of them, and your feedback processes will need to be a little different.

When you map B2B journeys , you need to bear the following in mind:

• More types of people are involved in a B2B journey than a B2C one: Therefore, you’ll need to create more customer personas. For example, if you’re supplying an online finance platform, you will have to deal with the CIO, executives, managers, tech personnel and the call center assistants. All these people are your customers, segmented by persona.
• B2B customers are more valuable: Building business relationships can take years of investment, and if you lose a business customer, you might lose a lot of revenue as a result. You’ll need to prioritize and segment your customer personas by business value: the CIO has more purchasing power than a single call center assistant, for example.
• B2B customer feedback is different: Because much B2B is built on personal interaction and recommendation, business people often know each other. It’s more acceptable to pick up the phone and talk through a problem than send out a generic survey. Your feedback techniques will have to be much more personalized to each of your B2B customers, so that they feel heard, and still special.

An example of a customer journey map template

The brands that thrive in this new reality are those that understand what customers want in digital and take action to deliver the experiences they expect. Here’s a customer journey template for you to start mapping out your digital journey.

To learn more about customer journey management take a look at our free online course below:

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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How to Drive Adoption With Digital User Journeys 

Well-defined customer touchpoints are the foundation of a strong digital experience with your product. As the SaaS industry evolves and gets more sophisticated, so do customer and user journeys along these touch points.

Today’s customers expect a seamless omnichannel experience as they move from onboarding to product adoption to renewal—and it’s critical to lead them to value quickly to ensure your product becomes sticky along the way. Here’s a look at how to drive adoption with digital user journeys. 

Customer Journeys vs. Users Journeys

Let’s start with the basics. What’s the difference between a customer journey and a user journey ? The terms “customer” and “user” are sometimes used interchangeably—but each has a distinct set of priorities and needs when it comes to their digital experience with your business and product. And, most importantly, product teams need to address both journeys with their in-app and digital product experiences to drive adoption and retention. 

Customer journeys encompass everything with an overall account. For example, are they new to your product and still need to implement product tags or integrations to complete setup? Has the previous customer admin for your product found a new role and a new admin needs training ? These milestones and lifecycle events are critical to address via your in-app programs and should be a key part of your customer journeys. 

Unlike the customer journey, user journeys address the specific needs of an individual user of your product. While customers, or accounts, have a few significant lifecycle moments, users vary greatly in terms of specific user types, product needs, and daily usage. User journeys can include granular mapping to key features, re-engagement if users go dark in your product, and outreach such as one-to-many webinars or feature release notifications. 

Creating a Cohesive, Measurable Digital Program

When you think about your customers’ and users’ digital journeys, many touchpoints probably come to mind. You might send automated emails, have a welcome video play in-app, or guide users through activating certain features in-product via step-by-step walkthroughs. 

Most organizations have elements of these journeys but lack a cohesive way to orchestrate—and measure the impact of—their digital efforts. Having a cohesive and measurable digital program as part of your customer’s product experience is critical. 

Suppose you don’t know when users will navigate to certain features or what in-app touch points are actually moving the needle on adoption. In that case, you’ll have no way of guiding your users successfully to value—a critical need for Product teams, customer-facing teams, and overall SaaS business success. 

The good news is cohesive and product-driven digital journeys are easier to curate than you might think, and there are a few key ways you can ensure these journeys align to increase adoption and retention, not only within your product but across the entire customer relationship.

Using Digital Journeys to Drive Adoption

Whether your business is high touch, low touch, or somewhere in between, it’s just not feasible to guide users to adopt key features at scale when these efforts are all manual. Expecting your Customer Success (CS) team to effectively support all customers and intervene when they are dropping off in adoption flows isn’t realistic. 

Digital adoption journeys, especially when based on product usage, let you curate one-to-many content in a way that provides all customers with a cohesive experience and scales your manual efforts. The best user journeys should:

• Be based on usage. Trigger in-app content that guides users to the content they need to reach value based on their sign-up date, feature activation, or user parameters. 
• Prioritize high-value feature activation. When helping users reach value quickly, it can be overwhelming to promote all feature/functionality. First, guide users to adopt tools in your product with the most value-add to reach fast time to value (TTV) .
• Showcase curated content via an accessible checklist. With a knowledge bot embedded in your product, you can organize and launch in-app guides to specific, stage-based milestones. For example, you may surface an onboarding checklist or an adoption one to users as they get deeper into your product. Using an embedded checklist also helps users relaunch guides if they want to review specific content. 
• Change over time. The best journeys are continually evolving as user feedback is collected and acted upon. Review the impact of your in-app content on feature adoption and use in-app surveys to ask for user feedback to collect information, such as Customer Effort Score, to fine-tune how you guide users to value.

Influencing Retention via Digital Journeys

Both user and overall customer account retention are essential in SaaS, and ensuring your digital user journey content promotes sticky experiences that lead to retention is key. A few ways to lean on the digital journey to drive retention are to:

• Promote features that correlate with retention. You may think you know what features add the most value for your users. Still, it’s essential to do regular Retention Analysis to understand what features are strongly correlated with retained users. These are the features that should be promoted via user journey flows to increase overall retention.
• Address user friction points. By reviewing where users get stuck or encounter challenges when using your product, you can proactively address user needs via in-app guides that help them navigate around key challenges as well as use data-driven analysis to make future roadmap priorities to address these challenges long-term. 
• Ask for in-app input on leading indicators like NPS. By incorporating rolling NPS programs into your in-app digital content, you can get a better measure of the likelihood of customers to renew. Asking for NPS in-app instead of via email or in person has a dramatic impact on response rate, with some Gainsight customers seeing increases of 3,900% and 2,700% in NPS responses, just by moving from email to in-app. You may also use a combination of in-app and email NPS to approach different levels of stakeholders or end-users with more targeted surveys.
• Automate renewals via digital touchpoints. When renewals are highly manual, customers take longer to renew and have more opportunities to discontinue their services. Consider making renewals a part of your in-app and email programs, in order to simplify the renewal conversation and automate renewal outreach. 
• Encourage users to dive deeper into your product. Whether it’s via a thriving community of peers sharing new use cases, or by promoting deeper feature usage for more proficient users, guiding users to more deeply engage with your product will build stickier experiences making renewal a no-brainer. 

Digital user journeys are key to effective user experiences, and aligning your journey with adoption and retention is critical to overall business success. When journeys are mapped to user needs and guide users to key value, product experiences, and overall digital touch points can drive adoption rates, reduce churn, and drive overall NRR. 

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Are you ready to make the most of your users’ experience with your product and drive real business impact? Check out Gainsight Product Experience today. 

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Delivering seamless customer journeys

When two rivers meet

Let’s do a little experiment. Visit two government websites on similar topics (for example, try buy.gsa.gov and gsa.gov/buy ). Do they look the same? Probably not.

There is a natural phenomenon that happens when you see two rivers meet. They’re both water, they’re at the same spot, they have the same people fishing right there, same fish, but where the water touches, you can see a seam that separates the two bodies of water.

At the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), we’ve found that we have many websites that share a similar purpose, but just like those two rivers, they start in different places, they’re managed by different offices or programs, and as a result they look different. When it comes to customer experience, a seam between two related websites is a distraction that makes our websites harder to use than they should be.

So, how can we make things seamless? GSA’s Office of Customer Experience decided to figure it out.

4 steps to create a seamless customer journey

Step 1. determine the services offered.

The Office of Customer Experience conducted a high-level content analysis on GSA’s 184 public-facing websites to determine the services each site offers. By coupling this analysis with a manual review of each website, we’ve identified 75 separate services that GSA offers to the public across all agency websites.

Is each website dedicated to a single service? No.

Of those 184 sites, 102 (57%) of them provide more than one service. Of that 102, 86 of them provide the same service as another site in that group, typically with a slight difference in scope. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but we do recognize that, to outside users, similar services are like those two rivers meeting in one spot, and it is GSA’s responsibility to make them flow together seamlessly.

Step 2. Define the challenges

It would be a mistake to assume all website managers face the same challenges. Some of our websites support up to five different services, and it’s a complicated challenge to build a website that seamlessly serves multiple audiences, services, or customer needs.

Another complexity is in the realm of documentation and compliance burden. A single website manager could be operating nine different websites tied to 10 different services (a real example we uncovered in our research at GSA). Each federal website must comply with hundreds of federal requirements. That’s a lot of institutional knowledge, and a lot of documentation that a single person or team must maintain.

To complicate matters further, of the 75 services we identified at GSA, only 16 of them are supported by a single website dedicated to that purpose. In other words, of all the services GSA provides, more than half are carried out by people who work for different bosses in different reporting structures.

Pairing our knowledge of website managers with human resources data, we dug in to figure out what the added cost of collaboration is for the people doing this work, right down to the supervisors, website managers, and content contributors that need to be on the same page. In some cases it’s an enormous challenge. The manager of a website marketing a GSA program might need to coordinate with 17 other sites, 12 other website managers, 11 GSA departments, and 5 other business lines.

Step 3. Determine common metrics

Back in October 2022, the Office of Customer Experience wrote about measuring over 70 agency websites in the six areas of:

• Customer-centricity
• Accessibility
• Performance
• User behavior
• Implementation of hyperlinks required by policy and law
• Implementation of the U.S. Web Design System

We generated narrative reports, with visualizations that look like the following:

Each slice of this colorful “pie” represents one of the six categories above. The bigger the slice, the closer the website is to performing in an ideal manner, according to our methodology. Read more about how we use this methodology to determine the true value of a website.

A year later, we’ve reviewed 136 websites, and we’re reviewing the remaining sites this year to gain further insights from across our entire web portfolio.

We’ve learned that a small website about a single acquisition vehicle should probably not be evaluated in the same way as a site with the scope and size of, for example, our agency flagship website, GSA.gov. Grouping websites by services means that, at the very least, we consider similarities in customers when we compare measurements, which helps us begin to understand customers who are likely to visit more than one site as part of their journey.

Step 4. Connect people with data they can act on

Related services are more likely to share common customers. They also represent a collective set of “deal breakers” when it comes to customer experience. If customers who are particularly sensitive to performance issues use two related sites, poor performance on website A will reflect poorly on website B, even if there are no performance issues on site B.

When people have a bad experience with one government website, it may impact their impression of every government website. Consequently, every government website manager is not just responsible for their own website performance. They own some responsibility for every bit of traffic they pass on to other government sites, as well as how their site’s performance reflects on the trust and performance of the entire federal government.

Even when two sites are less likely to be in a single journey, if they offer a similar service, they are likely to ask the same fundamental questions, or provide similar functionality. It doesn’t matter if a site is about office supplies or lighthouses (two things GSA offers), both sites have to decide where and how to display products, present a price, and complete an online transaction. Each web team is asking similar questions. They need to learn from each other, to improve consistency in online interactions across the agency and the federal government.

What happens next?

We know that seams exist between our websites. We know who is creating each site, and that they each know something about their customers. We also know that these teams are commonly not in the same office — and as a result, not talking to each other as often as they could.

Here are the next steps in our quest to create a more seamless digital experience at GSA:

• Compile our research by business line and service
• Host workshops on service categories to help managers look across their organizational silos and determine what’s required to develop sustained collaboration
• Analyze the results of these conversations to learn how we can continue to refine our digital services

We are seizing this opportunity. As we unify website managers around their services and their customers, GSA’s digital ecosystem will no longer be separate “rivers” with offices flowing through them. Instead, we will be serving the people who are at the river to fish, boat, and have an enjoyable day.

What can I do next?

Review an introduction to analytics to learn more about measuring website effectiveness.

If you work at a U.S. federal government agency, and would like to learn more about this work, reach out to GSA’s Office of Customer Experience at [email protected] .

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Digital Customer Journeys: The Ultimate Guide to Optimising Them Properly

Marie Jehanne

April 28, 2021 | 4 min read

Last Updated: Oct 3, 2023

Table of Contents

What is the digital customer journey?

The influence of digital on the customer journey, the different stages of the digital customer journey, why analyze your digital customer journey, how to optimize your digital customer journey, and finally, here are 4 examples of digital customer journeys.

Listen the article in audio format:

By multiplying the available points of contact between brands and customers, digital technology has considerably complicated the customer journey.

The recent pandemic has further reinforced this trend by converting “brick and mortar” buyers into e-buyers in the space of a few short weeks.

In this guide, you’ll discover why analyzing the digital customer journey is fundamental to business success, plus how to optimize it with illustrated examples of inspiring customer journeys.

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Access the 2024 Digital Experience Benchmarks Report and Interactive Explorer.

The digital customer journey is the path followed by an internet user – from the awareness stage right through to the purchase stage.

Essentially, it covers every single interaction that takes place online between the customer and the brand throughout the buying journey.

In some cases, the digital customer journey can extend beyond the act of purchase or subscription; to customer loyalty. For example, the brand may offer personalized post-sale offers or adapted content to improve the buyer’s knowledge and experience of their newly purchased product.

Initially, it was mostly the banking and insurance sectors that studied the customer journey in detail, due to the long and personal relationships they built with their customers over time.

But today, the digital customer journey is a hot topic amongst any brand that understands the breadth and importance of digital.

Over the last few years, the digital boom has impacted this journey by adding new stages – such as websites and blogs – alongside traditional physical stores, TV and radio advertisements, and catalogs. Closely followed by social media, voice assistants, chatbots, and even display advertising, the emergence of these new marketing channels has added layers of complexity to the digital customer journey.

And because no industry is the same, the customer journey often takes different forms. For example, within a hospital environment, we call it a “patient journey” instead. However, a patient’s journey – from making an appointment on the internet to consulting the results online – has very little in common with the journey of a customer looking to purchase a new kitchen.

You could argue (with some degree of truth) that the digital world has given us as many stages of the buyer’s journey as there are grains of sand on the beach. And to be honest, you wouldn’t be far off.

But, you’ll be glad to know there are three essential buying stages that cover every customer journey – no matter the industry. Let’s take a look…

1 – Awareness: the discovery phase

The discovery stage is when your customer realizes they don’t have something, and they need something. For example, this could be replacing a broken refrigerator or buying a second bike that’s more suitable for cycling to work.

And what does the user do? They turn to the internet to do some research. This means, as a brand, you need to make sure you’re answering their questions. You’re not selling to them just yet, but you’re answering their questions and they’re starting to think you know what you’re talking about. The content you’ll create for the awareness stage is tutorials, blog posts, and e-books.

2 – Consideration: the evaluation phase

Once the customer has consulted various sources to help answer their problem, they’ll start to think about which solution is best for them.

To do this, they’ll compare their options by reading buying guides, browsing customer reviews, and watching product videos to choose the best option for their budget. This means as a brand, you’ll need to make sure you have this content on hand to help your potential customers decide you’re their best option.

3 – Decision: the selection phase

The decision phase is the final step. Customers know exactly which product meets their needs and must now choose from the various options on offer. As a brand, it’s time to ensure you have the right content to demonstrate your comparative advantage over your competitors.

If you can, why not let the customer make up their own mind with a free test period? This could dramatically help to remove any final obstacles, so be generous if you can!

Digital customer journey mapping has several advantages, such as:

• Detecting the points of friction encountered by the customer which lead them to modify, postpone or cancel their project
• Better understanding customer needs and habits to offer them the most suitable content at the best time
• Giving you insights to adjust your marketing efforts towards the most profitable or high potential opportunities

Focus on an omnichannel approach

In today’s world, the customer journey needs to meet the demands of multiple channels.

To do this, we need to adopt an “omnichannel” approach which gives equal importance to all stages of the journey.

The objective? To build a “seamless” user experience; one that’s consistent across all channels – whether telephone, social media, or your website.

The time for compartmentalization is over.

Get everyone involved

Reshaping and optimizing your digital customer journey isn’t a small task. In fact, it can lead to huge changes within your business.

That’s why involving all employees in the process is essential for maintaining consistency and output as you optimize your customer journey.

Feedback from each department is invaluable and will help contribute to the development of a “concrete” path based on reliable data.

Take a product tour

Get to grips with Contentsquare fundamentals with this 6 minute product tour.

Personalize the experience

In today’s heavily saturated market, personalization can help you make a difference and stand out amongst the crowd.

Nevertheless, personalizing your journey effectively requires excellent knowledge of your business goals and a clear understanding of your target personas. With these things covered, you’ll be able to determine the content to display on your site or application according to age, location, areas of interest, previous searches, or purchases…

Contentsquare’s customer journey analysis tools can help you do this.

We wouldn’t want to finish this article without sharing some examples of digital customer journeys that are as different as they are inspiring.

Example 1: Digital Experience

This customer journey shows clearly how a chocolate brand might create new followers; from discovering products by chance in the street to transforming the customer into a true ambassador.

Example 2: UXFirm

This second example from UXFirm has a different objective and emphasizes the experience of the customer at each stage – from awareness to purchase.

Example 3: wcig

The third example describes in detail each stage and obstacle faced by those with disabilities in a working environment. A very complicated (but enlightening) example of a customer journey!

Example 4: Zendesk

Finally, let’s conclude with an example of a digital customer journey by Zendesk that clearly shows the dynamics of customer acquisition, retention, and loss.

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Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare based in France. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!

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• What is a digital customer journey?

Last updated

22 May 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Learn the definition of the digital customer journey and why it’s crucial for your product in this comprehensive guide. 

The digital buyer or customer journey encompasses all of a customer’s interactions with your company, from discovery to purchase.

It consists of all the interactions across all online brand channels and touchpoints, including: 

The company's website

Mobile applications

Social media channels

SMS messaging

These interactions influence their purchasing experience. 

• Why analyze your digital customer journey?

Since a digital customer journey guides the customer to purchase, analyzing it will enable you to offer a seamless shopping experience. 

You should also analyze your digital customer journey to: 

Understand customer needs and expectations

Proactively detect friction points that are challenging a seamless customer experience

Gain insights into adjusting your marketing efforts for better results

• The different stages of the digital customer journey 

The stages of a buyer's journey vary by business and customer. However, when a customer embarks on purchasing a product or service, they go through these five distinct phases:

Awareness: The discovery phase

Here, customers are at the start of the buyer lifecycle. This is where customers discover their problems and seek solutions to these pain points. They have a goal in mind and need to find a solution. 

During this phase, customers become aware of your brand's existence and the products you sell. Brand awareness can span multiple channels, such as: 

Word of mouth

Social media

Brand advocates

Email marketing

Search engine suggestions

Affiliate marketing

As a business, good branding and a solid social media presence are essential to capture the audience's attention. 

With a digital customer journey, you have stronger control over your marketing campaigns than the traditional customer journey.

Consideration: The evaluation phase 

This is the stage where customers have done enough research and are now evaluating the different brands and their offers. The customer is aware of your brand and may start evaluating whether you can solve their problem. 

When a customer is dissatisfied with a brand’s offerings, they move on to one that delivers a seamless experience. 

During the evaluation phase, customers: 

Visit various company websites

Review platforms

Watch product videos to choose the best solution

Read in-depth case studies and reviews

Customers who are satisfied with your company will sign up for a free trial. A brand has a lot of control at this stage, so ensure that you demonstrate how you can solve their problem. 

Decision: The selection phase

This is the final stage of the digital customer journey. The customer selects a brand they want to proceed with and make their purchase. 

Some content to promote at this stage is free demos, consultations, and product promotions to demonstrate an advantage over your competitors.

Retention: Turning users into regulars

A common problem is ensuring stickiness to your product: Companies can achieve high logins and subscriptions but fail anyway. Preventing this requires learning what keeps their users from returning. 

Meta used “Facebook friends” to retain users, which was instrumental in achieving its lofty goals. The company learned that a new Facebook user with five friends was much more likely to log in regularly. 

Advocacy: The promoting phase

What could become the most vital stage to achieve is the advocacy phase. Here, a company can cultivate a more effortless marketing cycle. 

During the advocacy stage, users become champions of your product without prompt or incentive, referring their friends and peers. This obviously saves valuable marketing dollars, organically shuffling in primed users to your discovery phase. 

Amazon uses a version of the buyer’s phases known as The Product-Led Growth Flywheel , which it refers to as the virtuous cycle. 

The Flywheel encapsulates existing metrics and structures from marketing and product to achieve organic growth exponentially by cultivating champions that do your marketing work for you.

• What is a digital customer journey map?

A digital customer journey map visually depicts a customer's interaction with a brand. 

This visual representation gives a narrative of a customer's steps, from initial engagement with a brand to the last stage of purchasing a service or product. 

It comprises: 

Consumer data

Transaction information

Customer service interactions

Cross-device browsing history

A digital customer journey map provides insight into what motivates customers to purchase and their pain points when interacting with various touchpoints. 

• What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping involves developing a customer journey. The goal is to map out the customer's actions at each touchpoint. 

Customer journey mapping has endless benefits, including:

A deeper understanding of your customers

Customer journey mapping gives you a holistic view of all customers interacting with your brand. 

It allows you to understand their varying characteristics and purchasing behaviors. This enables a company to tailor its products. 

With customer personas , your brand can better address their needs and wants. 

Curating a unique customer experience

Journey mapping provides a perspective of the customer's experience, and you learn how to structure your processes to encourage more customer purchases. 

Since customer demands are growing, digital journeys are becoming vital in how companies engage with customers. It allows companies to improve their customers' interactions over digital channels. 

Growth of business revenue

Knowing your customers' pain points positions you to offer solutions to their problems, so you can boost sales and increase revenue in the long run. 

Improving touchpoints will boost the customer onboarding process, building new revenue. 

Reducing operational costs

When you know more about your customers, forming a strategy is clearer and cheaper. Understanding their demographics means you’re less likely to spend money everywhere. For example, knowing your customers aren’t on Facebook can save your ad campaign budget. 

Sometimes customers have basic questions that bots can handle. Leveraging live chatbots can reduce the cost of hiring real agents to interact with your customers.

With personalized market campaigns, the marketing team knows what to communicate and when. This allows the company to optimize the return on market investments. 

• Creating your digital customer journey map

Here is a brief guide to mapping your digital customer journey:

Step 1: Conduct customer research

You create a digital customer journey map using data from primary research . Collecting and analyzing target audience data is vital to making customer-centric decisions. 

To ensure you have reliable information, conduct focus groups , in-person interviews , and brainstorming workshops .

Step 2: Design a buyer persona

With the collected research data, create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a profile of your ideal customer where you consider their characteristics and behaviors, such as demographics. 

As you design a digital customer journey map, account for different customer needs and expectations for your personas. These personas allow you to understand your customers better, including their motivations, challenges, needs, and what they need you to solve.

Step 3: Leverage the power of personalization  

Option overload is an issue as brands compete for consumers' attention. 

Personalizing the customer experience allows you to stand out and tailor products to their needs. With personalization, you can display appropriate messages to target personas instead of wasting resources. 

Step 4: Define the stages of a digital customer journey

The next step is to determine the actions that will lead your customers to conclude a purchase. 

Consider the customer's perspective, thoughts, emotions, pain points, and goals for each stage. This will help you understand what each customer is struggling with and trying to accomplish. 

Step 5: Outline all your touchpoints with the target audience

Touchpoints are where prospective customers interact with your brand. 

They can include:

Social media profiles

YouTube videos

First, list all the touchpoints and evaluate how each fits your customer's journey. Remember that touchpoints differ from one buyer persona to another depending on their customer journey map. 

Outlining the touchpoints allows you to assess which is most crucial in their purchasing process. 

Next, optimize each touchpoint for customer onboarding and conversion. 

If you’re unsure, use web analytics to identify traffic sources. 

Step 6: Align your touchpoints to offer a seamless customer experience

Once you’ve defined the customer touchpoints and the main stages in a customer journey, put it all together. 

Create a well-organized digital customer journey map to guide buyers from start to end. 

Step 7: Update customer journey maps frequently

A customer journey map is an ongoing investment as changes often occur. 

Once you’ve mapped out a digital customer journey, identify gaps and ways to improve customer satisfaction . 

To achieve this, frequently collect customer feedback and use it as a foundation for improvements.

You can also experience the customer journey yourself: Walk through all the stages while noting any obstacles you encounter. 

Here are some questions to get you started as you review your customer journey:

Was the purchasing process easy?

How easy was it to get in touch with customer care?

Was the agent helpful?

Is the whole exercise time-consuming?

Is the information at the different stages relevant?

How should you deliver a seamless customer experience?

• Digital customer journey examples

Here are two examples of digital customer journeys:

Example one: Repairing a broken car

During the awareness stage, the car owner knows the car is unfit for driving, so they must fix it. 

They search for a mechanic and may look for customer testimonials from previous customers of nearby garages. 

During the consideration stage, the client has various solutions and seeks the best option to solve their issue. 

Next, the customer will compare garages offering specific repair services before identifying one with the best reviews or a successful track record. 

Once the customer settles on a garage that offers repair services, they will interact with the mechanic and begin repair negotiations. 

Example 2: Booking of an airplane ticket

In this example, the customer's journey begins when they realize they need to travel. 

At the awareness stage, the customer will conduct online research on airlines and routes to their destinations. They may come across the airline via social media channels, advertisements, or even referrals from friends. 

Once they list all the airline brands, the customer will consider the available flights and decide which best fits their needs. 

On the other side, airlines try to upsell additional services to appeal to customers. Therefore, customers may consider airlines that upsell services such as priority onboarding or upgraded seats. 

Depending on their spending limits or airlines with better offerings, customers will compare the flight options that best suit their budget. They abandon tickets outside their means. 

The decision stage ends when the customers purchase a ticket and receive an onboarding pass, travel information, and guides via email.

Who is involved in a digital customer journey?

A digital customer journey is a process a user (potential customer) goes through when interacting with a brand.

What are the four types of digital users?

The four types of digital users are explorers, socializers, achievers, and listeners. 

Which department is responsible for the customer journey? 

Sales and marketing departments play a vital role in optimizing a customer journey map. 

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Angela White is done hiding behind Blac Chyna. She couldn’t love herself more.

The reality television star known as Blac Chyna is on a journey to get reacquainted with herself through love and faith and without the fillers.

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Angela White is radiant.

When shes walks up to our table at a cafe in Calabasas, there are no cameras and no filters. She is petite with a big personality and laugh. Her face is flawless and exudes warmth when she smiles. She is happy. Really, truly happy with the Angela she is now.

She is honest that media interviews are not always her favorite thing. Not when she has been burned before. Not when her openness hasn’t always been met with graciousness or kindness. But she has slowly but surely aimed to open up more. After all, she has nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of.

The price of White’s beauty over the years could be best summed up in needles, injections, fillers, burning sensations and judgment. When White was in the thick of getting cosmetic procedures, they didn’t hurt. But when she videotaped herself getting her cheek fillers removed last March, the reality TV star said it stung and burned.

The needle pricks and breast and butt reduction surgeries within the last year are the cost of change that White was determined to undergo physically, emotionally and spiritually in a less than kind or forgiving media environment. But whatever you call this phase of her life — a transformation or metamorphosis, or whatever you decide to call her — Blac Chyna, Chyna or Angela will do — White is eager to see who she will become.

She initially considered this to be her soft girl era but has changed her mind about that. She is calmer, more patient and focused on herself. Hell, she’s even taken up running in an effort to do the things she’s long hated. She will look you in the eye and tell you without a doubt, this is not a trend, this is who she is now.

“I was hiding Angela, because I had just been hurt so much throughout the years,” White said when we first met with her last September. “I feel like as a woman in this industry, people will try you, they will try to walk all over you and make you seem less than or that you’re not capable of doing certain things, and that’s just other people’s insecurities. And when their insecurities rub off on you, then you kind of start looking at yourself different.”

White first hit the celebrity scene more than a decade ago as a 19-year-old exotic dancer who became Nicki Minaj’s music video stunt double; she eventually became a video vixen after rapper Drake saw her working in a Miami club and shouted her out in the song “Miss Me.”

She then became a reality television star, making headlines in 2016 when she started dating Kardashian brother Rob and became pregnant. That led to the couple’s E! reality show “Rob and Chyna,” which documented their relationship, which went from promising to rocky during production, and they later split up. She has also been part of the cast for the BET reality show “The Black Hamptons.”

White was also at one point on the subscription site OnlyFans when the pandemic hit in 2020; there, she posted adult-only content. White told Forbes in a previous interview that she made $2 million in a two-year time span on the platform. She deleted her account in 2022 as part of her personal journey and out of concern for her children. In addition to her daughter with Rob Kardashian, White has a son, Cairo, with her ex, rapper Tyga.

Amid the changes she’s making in her life, White appeared as a cast member in the latest season of the Fox show “Special Forces.” She was also part of the cast of the Tubi platform movie “Vicious Affairs” and “Forever Us.”

Blac Chyna is the brand, but more than that, White’s protection since “Blac Chyna is not having it with nobody, like if it’s bad business, she’s not having it. Disrespect, she’s not having it,” she says referring to her alter ego in third person. White said she can also be no-nonsense but Blac Chyna wasn’t always very soft.

“I’m soft to the people that I need to be soft with, that give me respect, and I give that respect back,” White said. “If people want to be nasty and rude, I’m still not going to give that back, but I’m going to guard myself. I don’t want people to think that, ‘Oh, I’m soft. Because I’m not.’ I’m a soft person, I’m a gentle person, but I’m not soft.... This is not an era for me.”

White, who grew up in Washington, D.C., always felt beautiful as a child. She remembers being made fun of sometimes for the size of her forehead — ”I have a big forehead,” she laughs — but overall liked how she looked.

For beauty and style icons, White looked up to her mother, Shalana Hunter, known as Tokyo Toni, for being a true “glam girl” with “the big hair, makeup, lipstick, 6-inch pumps, belly chains and the two-seater fast cars and the cash.” She also loved Jennifer Lopez. When White looked at a photo of herself from when she was 12, she realized that she had already developed physically — a small waist and bottom heavy like her mom — but she was flat-chested.

“I couldn’t wait to turn 18, get me some boobs ... like going bra shopping was so much fun, you couldn’t tell me nothing,” White said with a laugh. “I wanted to look like a woman before my time, in which all of that stuff is going to come with age. You start to fill out, and then you start to thin out and I feel like I’m starting to thin out.”

But White became more determined to get cosmetic work done while she was working as an exotic dancer. She started with butt injections, then got breast implants and then started getting face and lip fillers. The women she saw making the most money were the ones who had all of those things.

“You’re looking around and seeing fully developed women like that, you’re like ‘I want to look like that,’ how am I going to make some money when they got big old booties and I got this little rump?” White recalled. “I needed a big rump, so that’s what I went and I got. Video vixens at the time had the breasts and the body and all of that and it was really just to appease the male species, to collect money from them.”

After she had cosmetic work, White said her money and opportunities increased. She was known to the public as the beauty with the blond hair, the face piercings, the dimples and tattoos all over her body. She said that she loved the results and that she felt beautiful and, more important, that it aligned with her vision “to look like something out of this world.... I wanted to look nonreal.

“I wanted that Hollywood look, like the Angelina Jolie carved out symmetrical face. I just wanted everything to be perfect and structured, because most of the magazines and the models, they have very symmetrical faces, and the lips needed to be a certain way, but for me, I kind of started to go overboard.”

The decision to change her life came after she was baptized in the pool at her home last year. White posted a video on Instagram in 2022 of a minister holding her head and back before pushing her underwater. White said she wasn’t thinking about anything at the time. After she was baptized, two of her friends decided to get into the baptismal pool too, a moment that makes White smile.

White said that she has always had a strong relationship with God but that she “just needed to come back so that he could really show me some cool stuff.”

Nowadays, in between comments on her Instagram posts from fans — and some haters and doubters — there are comments from more religious-inclined followers offering prayers and Bible Scriptures.

White says the warm welcome that’s come as she’s been more open about her Christian faith has included people sending her customized Bibles, books for her kids and other books senders say have helped them. She also received a doctorate of liberal arts from the Sacramento Theological Seminary and Bible College this year.

“I never needed anyone’s welcome into faith, because I’m not doing it for them,” White said. “As long as God knows my heart, that’s all that matters. Now, if we’re in a community, then we will be in a community together, but I’m not doing it to get somebody’s welcoming.”

Thinking about her faith in bigger ways is also one of the reasons she became sober in 2022. White said that although she wasn’t drinking every day, she would binge drink every couple of days. In speaking about being sober for more than a year, White says “the blessing with that is that nothing happened for me to want to change.” She added that she’s glad she stopped drinking on her own terms and without a DUI, hurting someone or possibly even having her children being legally taken from her. She realized how alcoholism could eventually catch up to her in her personal life.

“I was drinking, I just had to open up my eyes and realize it,” White said. “And then not even just in front of people, even in private. A lot of times, we do things in private, or try to hide things from people, but once you start being real with yourself, that’s when you start to really see or realize certain things and your life is just going to get better.”

But White had also started taking a more intense look in the mirror and realized that she no longer loved the woman she saw. She had been working out but felt like her lips were too big, her breasts were too big and her butt was starting to feel heavy. Something had to change, so she called her doctor. White had her butt reduced. She also had breast reduction surgery and was under anesthesia for 8½ hours. Initially, her doctors thought she would need a breast lift but White was concerned about scarring. Doctors had to remove her nipples, pull in her skin and then sew around the nipples again. During a follow-up a week later, her doctors told her she was healing quickly.

Although White had never been one to document her life by video, she said something compelled her to film herself — while still on pain medication — talking about her surgery, which she posted on Instagram. She then went to sleep. She woke up at 4:30 a.m. with her phone blowing up with notifications and assumed something had happened. Instead, she found many supportive comments across her social media. The reception on social media gave White the courage to be open and honest about her experience.

“So many women have died from surgery, you know, and what I’ve learned is [that] most of the time, we do it for ourselves, but [that] nine times out of 10, we do it for other people or men,” White said. “It’s so crazy to me because some men might not like big boobs or they don’t love big booties and you went and got a big booty.”

Not long after that, White posted video of herself getting her fillers removed on her social media. The six-minute video is not for the needle phobic, as White films herself lying down calmly with her eyes closed as a doctor inserts a needle into her cheeks and her lips and even jiggles it around to dissolve the fillers. Viewers can slowly see White’s face turning back to its natural state. White has had to go back several times for additional treatments to remove the fillers.

The key things a woman considering surgeries to remove enhancements need to think about, White says, include finding a reputable doctor, not going abroad for cheaper rates and realizing that complications might not crop up until later. She pointed out that not every doctor she’s consulted with is willing to help repair complications.

White said the videos have had an effect, with some women simply walking up to her and giving her hugs. Many have expressed appreciation that she‘s talked about her own surgeries. White said she has no regrets about her cosmetic procedures but believes she got lucky. The most complications she had were with her butt shots, when she would sometimes become ill with flu-like symptoms. She said that years ago, she was in a hospital for a week due to surgery complications. Some of her face fillers migrated.

“I’ve had like a lot of women come up to me and say I was literally two weeks out, like I was about to get this surgery and I was like, ‘Nah. I’m good,’” White said. “It’s just sad that the girls, even after I posted my surgery, I physically went on my Instagram, on my socials, and I’ve seen women pass away from it and I’m like, ‘Yo, how many times are surgeons not going to be careful in their work?’”

White went back in late December for additional breast reduction surgery. But she posted on Instagram that there were complications with her left breast becoming encapsulated, with the muscle contracting around her implant. White said she had to keep an implant. Otherwise, her breast would not be properly shaped.

She said months before she wanted them to be smaller as she hopes for more acting roles. Within the next few years she plans to get out of the reality television world. She couldn’t get the size she wanted initially during her first breast reduction surgery because the skin had to heal after the surgery. She emphasizes that she wanted them “just a little bit smaller” and slightly lower. It was never about being a specific size.

But she hopes this is the last time she has to do any procedures.

“If I remove anything else, I’m gonna remove myself,” White joked.

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Envestnet , a U.S. software vendor with a market value of about $3.5 billion, is exploring options that could include a potential sale after receiving takeover interest, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

OTTAWA, April 16 (Reuters) - Canada will press ahead with introduction of a digital services tax on large technology companies, which would raise C$5.9 billion ($4.3 billion) over the five years starting fiscal 2024/25, the federal budget showed on Tuesday.

Portuguese police and tax agents searched the premises of Uber Technologies in Lisbon on Tuesday as part of a wider investigation and raids targeting some of its delivery partners, but not the U.S.-based company's local unit, Uber said.