Digital Business Demands End-to-End Visibility: Do You Have Blind Spots?

In the “old days”—you know, way back before 2020—most companies regarded high-speed digital business as something that only the likes of Apple® and Netflix® had to worry about. For the rest of us, “digital acceleration” mostly meant looking to boost efficiency.

But today, every business in every industry has had to radically reimagine how to deliver excellent customer experiences in the hybrid digital-physical world of 2021.

That pace of change will not let up because customers—whether consumers or businesses—have become fully accustomed to getting what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and where they want it.

To meet those expectations, businesses need to have end-to-end visibility into all facets of their business. Because if they don’t, customers are going to get hit with a bad experience if any of the following is deficient:

• Customers and their fast-changing expectations: Are your salespeople able to move at the speed of your customers, or are they relying on hunches and guesswork to try to anticipate what those customers might want?
• Inventory levels and procurement plans: As customers become more demanding and expect that you can meet their shifting requirements in real-time, do you have complete visibility into whether you have what you need to meet those requirements?
• Workforce planning and scheduling: Is your company able to schedule and deploy your talent across design, production, field service, sales, and more? You must ensure you have the right people in the right places to delight customers.
• Returns, replacements, replenishments: Customers who buy online regularly purchase excessive products with the expectation that they’ll keep the ones they like best and return the rest. Do these returns create nightmares for your company, or can you master this new challenge and create a distinct competitive advantage? The devil is in the data.
• Flexible pricing: How long does it take for your sales teams to get approval from “headquarters” to close a deal with an impatient customer? Maybe you’ve got that approval process down to 48 hours, representing a great achievement for your company, but what if the customer demands an answer in 12 hours? The only solution is real-time data accessible to everyone involved.
• Synchronizing inventory, customized shipments, and your workforce: Those old days of “you give us a check, and we’ll drop off everything at your loading dock” are long gone. More business customers are demanding that fulfillment be highly customizable across time and locations—do you have the data-driven insights to master those challenges?
• Co-innovation and co-creation with customers: There’s a powerful trend toward allowing business customers and consumers to be involved earlier and earlier in product planning, design, and production. Do you have the type of “data culture” that not only allows this but welcomes it?
• Elegant customer-centric service engagements: If a customer calls with a question or complaint, your company has the chance to either frustrate the heck out of that person and lose her/him as a customer, or turn that call into a winning experience that turns the caller into an evangelist for your brand. Can your service teams access all the necessary data to turn those calls into winners?

There are certainly other operational challenges as well. Still, these underscore the fundamental point: if your business systems and applications can’t meet all these customer-centric demands and expectations, those customers are likely to take their business elsewhere.

The good news is that a new generation of business applications exists to meet precisely these types of modern digital-business requirements. By design, these applications work together across your functional units to ensure that your company can achieve that essential end-to-end visibility that will allow you to move at the speed of your customers and meet their increasingly personalized demands.

In this new digital business world, the winning companies will be those that align all facets of their operations around delivering great customer experiences by leveraging the power of real-time data to put their customers at the center of everything they do.

And for these companies, blind spots will become things of the past.