Who is responsible for achieving digital maturity in your business?

Achieving digital maturity is becoming a necessity for business success. But to digitally transform your business, you first need the support of your internal stakeholders and business leaders. Read this blog post to understand the different stakeholders involved and how to convince them to drive digital maturity.

The benefits of being a digitally mature business

Digitally mature companies earn more and grow faster. That’s according to a recent Deloitte study on digital transformation, which also found that digitally mature businesses are better positioned to adapt to the rapidly changing marketplace.

But what does it mean to be digitally mature?

From setting up remote work teams to launching digital-only services, companies have increasingly embraced digital strategies to meet their business goals. This is because digital technologies can greatly improve what your business can do and how easily they can do it.

Digital maturity doesn’t mean having the latest and greatest technology. Rather, it’s a measure of how digitally capable your company is — and how able your employees are to exploit these capabilities. You can measure your digital maturity by asking:

Have new technologies been integrated into my business?
What digital tactics and strategies have I implemented?
Are my digital strategies helping me beat the competition?
How do my digital strategies refine customer experience?

As digital maturity has become linked to success, you need to ask yourself – “Who is responsible for achieving digital maturity in my business?”

Why your stakeholders are key to digital transformation

Is your CEO’s head stuck in the cloud? You should hope so. A recent analysis published by the Harvard Business Review shows that businesses only achieve fast and efficient digital maturity when their leaders are committed to digital transformation. Clearly, your internal stakeholders have a huge responsibility in developing your digital maturity.

While our guide to digital maturity can kickstart your digital growth, you need to know how to engage with your key stakeholders so that they can drive your digital maturity. Part of this is explaining how becoming digitally mature will impact their roles — often empowering them to do more with less.

How digital maturity benefits your stakeholders

Considering their influence, helping your stakeholders to see the benefits of digital maturity is critical in turning them into digital advocates. Here’s what your stakeholders can gain by becoming more digitally mature:

IT — Increased digital transformation boosts IT readiness and competency in adapting to business challenges. New digital-led and customer-centric IT approaches help you build systems that drive efficiency and positive customer experience.

As COVID-19 has accelerated work-from-home trends, IT departments have become responsible for ensuring business cybersecurity over a decentralised network. From an IT perspective, becoming more digitally mature during the pandemic has involved creating new policies and installing software to protect company data.

Check out our podcast with Ben Johnson, General Manager at IT distributor, Dicker Data, where we discuss the growing demand for security as companies turn to remote working.

Operations — Smoother sailing with easier ways to communicate and fully integrated procedures. Automated processes do away with the tedious tasks – letting operational managers focus on scaling the business.

As part of their digital transformation, Marriott Hotels, a global hotel chain, implemented shared metrics and performance goals to drive improved customer experiences. By using technology to facilitate inter-departmental communication and measure performance, the company is in a better position to handle its operational issues.
Sales — Sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems reduce sales friction, deepen your customer relationships, and manage your sales pipeline.

By using CRM to collect and analyse customer data, sales teams can personalise their messages to better address prospects and their unique challenges.
Marketing — As marketing is data-driven, your team benefits from digital tools that offer better data access and analysis. Why settle for a ‘garden hose of data’ when you can have the whole fountain?

Global toy and entertainment company Hasbro has achieved incredible growth by innovating their marketing efforts. Using digital tools, their data-first approach led them to segment their audience, which enabled superior targeting and a significant improvement on their marketing return on investment.
Finance — Greater access to up-to-date customer and employee information makes for easier invoicing. It can also give you an alarm for customers who have bad debt.

A Levvel Research study on digital maturity in finance departments shows that digitally advanced teams more quickly and cheaply approve invoices, achieve more discounts and incur significantly less cost-to-company than digitally novice finance teams.
Customer Service — Have a better handle on customer challenges and customer ticketing. Digital processes and automation allow you to more quickly communicate with and onboard customers.

An example of this might include live chat features that allow your service team to field queries in real-time. A chatbot can be built from these queries and their answers, allowing for customer self-service and a more efficient buyer’s journey.

Achieving digital maturity with your stakeholders

By showing your stakeholders what they get out of digital transformation, you’ll be in a good position to gain their support. But revealing the benefits of digital maturity is only one part of the solution. You also need a clear model to show your company what it means to be digitally mature.

We’ve included the top questions that you and your stakeholders need to answer to accelerate your digital maturity. Your answers will be the first step toward providing world-class digital experiences.

DIGITAL BLUEPRINT FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS
Model stage	Answer these questions to accelerate your digital maturity:
Planning	How do you plan and develop strategy and use technology to support it?
Awareness	How do you attract prospects that are not aware of your brand, or that your products/ services can solve their goals and challenges?
Consideration	How to attract and engage with prospects who are aware of your brand and how your products/services can assist, and are comparing your solution to alternatives?
Closing leads	How to turn leads into customers?
Winning back customers	How to re-engage with lost prospects and customers?
Onboarding / fulfilment consideration	How to fulfil new orders and/or onboard new customers?
Upsell / cross-sell	How do you facilitate existing customers buying more?
Retention / renewal	How to keep existing customers as customers?
Customer service	How to ensure customers can easily get help quickly and have a good experience when needing assistance?
Advocacy	How do you encourage and facilitate customers to proactively promote your brand, products/services?