As people and businesses move to more digital-first and contactless solutions, having a solid digital strategy with a robust digital foundation is essential. The demand for partners with proven experience and digital maturity who could help streamlining digital technology adoption, reducing operational complexities, and eliminating many IT and compliance challenges, has never been higher.

Behind every digital transformation is a team of dedicated people who make it happen. Companies that effectively manage assistance from their external technology vendors may effortlessly transition from a legacy position to a forward-thinking, digitally driven organisation. Those who don't will rapidly learn that a company cannot completely reinvent itself from within. As more companies aim to transition, it’s important knowing if you have the right IT vendor to aid you. Here are a couple factors to help determine the same.
 

Robust Integration for seamless digital journeys

For digital transformation journeys to be really impactful, they need to be frictionless i.e., seamlessly integrated with your internal core systems as well as third-party systems that are external to you.

The right vendor should have the relevant know-how and experience in integrating multiple systems for frictionless omnichannel digital journeys. For digital transformation journeys to be really impactful, they need to be frictionless i.e., seamlessly integrated with your internal core systems as well as third-party systems that are external to you. For instance, on an insurance website, if for example vehicle details are required or information related to claims are needed, the exchange of information happens right there and then rather than being redirected to external systems/websites. Further, the concept of it being omnichannel allows you to access the web through several means whether it be your phone, desktop, or a digital kiosk without having to undo any previous progress.
 

Designing Frictionless Digital Journeys

In an increasingly digital world, experience driven digital journeys hold the key to successful engagements. The missing piece however, is to ensure that the designed journeys are truly frictionless to provide an engaging experience.

The vendor should have the experience of designing & delivering digital journeys covering customers, partners, and employees in specific domains such as Financial Services, Insurance, Wellness, and Manufacturing. Further the digital journeys should be supported by a nimble and agile middleware designed to support digital use cases with right hooks and integration interfaces to deliver frictionless digital experience to the end users.

The digital journeys need to be designed with key stakeholders in mind viz. customers, partners, employees and should be focused around how to deliver a seamless digital experience. For instance, a simple procurement of a loan can be interpreted differently by different customers. While some may know exactly what they’re looking for, others may not. For those personas who are unaware of what they want, one needs to be able to guide them to select the right product and move forward with their journey. The existence of multiple forms rather than one is imperative to catering to different needs of different customers.

User experience design is paramount to customers having a successful and frictionless journey. Now a days, customer shortlist companies less on the breadth of services and more on the customer experience they provide. This is key to drive engagement and conversions. It includes creation of personas, wireframe, mockups, wireflows, digital journey mapping, digital touchpoints identification and finally the high fidelity visual designs. Through the user interface and process, the vendor should be able to gain their customer’s trust with minimal inconvenience.
 

Suite of Digital Products and Solution Accelerators

A digital ecosystem starts with a highly-capable digitally-enabled foundation platform which is composed of several components essential for achieving frictionless digital journey. These components are not necessarily the ones which fits your overall enterprise architecture and have served you well in the traditional world. Today’s omnichannel digital world demands instant fulfilment of customer requests and super-fast completion of digital journeys. Hence it’s important to evaluate your digital transformation partner on these capabilities.

Does your vendor provides generic re-usable accelerators and components already available to manage commonly occurring digital scenarios such as Quick Quote or EMI calculators, proposal generator, payment gateway integration, attribution model etc.?
If yes, it will greatly reduce the time to market and result in better TCO. Furthermore, software products designed to integrate the digital frontends/channels with 3rd party service providers and internal core systems with capabilities to manage various rules and validations etc., will accelerate your digital transformation. The existence of digital products and solution accelerators help customers witness a faster turnaround of their digital initiatives and deliver a robust digital foundation.
 

Vertical Specific Platformication

An advanced & flexible platform with open architecture designed specifically for the industry verticals such as insurance, financial services, manufacturing etc. will greatly enhance a customer’s capability to quickly launch new products and services, engage with its own customers, and participate with its partner and supplier ecosystems with speed.

A vendor should have the expertise in creating vertical specific platforms for its customers. The digital foundation created with these platforms with deep knowledge about the industry and the environment within which the customer is operating, will provide flexibility to the customer to easily pivot and adapt based on the fast changing market conditions and technology landscape.
With expertise comes the ability to challenge the status quo and co-create with customers. While one’s digital transformation is often complex the customer may lose sight of the obvious, among pressing technical decisions and business priorities. As a result, the vendor should have the capability to challenge the status-quo if things are not going right or the right thinking is not getting applied as bringing all the stakeholders on the same page and driving the big picture is a quality worth its weight in gold.