It is undeniable – customer experience is critical to business success, particularly in this era of digital transformation. Today, commercial activity alone is no longer good enough to sustain long-term business success.

The old playbook to build competitive advantage is no longer sufficient. Instead, businesses today must embrace the opportunities that digital transformation can create to positively impact their operations, performance and, most importantly, their customers.

The pandemic, geopolitical conflicts and inflationary pressures are driving businesses to rethink their agility and adaptation. And digital transformation is sitting in the heart of this accelerated change.

Clearly, such factors will have a profound impact on customers’ trends and consumption habits, as evidenced by the increase in eCommerce revenues, which is projected to reach $3.6 billion in 2022 up from $2.1 billion in 2020.

Today, the hyper-connected world is expanding at an exponential rate. Many businesses are seeking new approaches that promise speed, agility and the ability to meet, and even detect customer requirements in a better way.

More business leaders in Kenya are embracing this new playbook — one that helps their companies become resilient in the face of even the most volatile situations. To build enduring business advantage, leaders must adapt — by crafting a new growth strategy, rethinking their operations and designing new organisational structures.

However, it is important to note that pivoting on digitisation wisely depends on redefining the customer experience journey. Yes, the question that will always remain is how can a business gauge the customer experience quality the product or service is providing? One of the best answers to this ongoing question is to involve customers upfront. Welcome customers into your innovation ecosystem, consider their specific pain points, work in sprints to solve their challenges, and then reiterate your offer development based on specific customer feedback.

Constant Development is an important part of the story: test first releases with customers, improve them, and then scale. Embedding more intelligence and software in products also provides data-driven insights to continually improve the customer experience, which will make or break the product itself.

This has always been part of our DNA at Schneider Electric and is a practice that we live by day by day.

With the rapid emergence of digital ecosystems, Schneider Electric is escalating its open ecosystem of technologies to solve business problems which translates to these three key benefits that companies can expect to gain.

Seizing data’s business value: Today, every company is generating vast amounts of data, and many are turning this knowledge into business insights that improve efficiency, drive down costs, and reveal opportunities for innovation. As a result, businesses can cut costs and reduce their impact on the environment.

Innovating and scaling business growth: Digital ecosystems offer businesses opportunities to interact with likeminded organisations whose services help complement their existing capabilities. Such collaborations can directly access a wide range of potential customers.

Improving efficiency and sustainability: Sustainability is at the forefront of nearly every company’s business strategy today. Technology and innovations– especially IoT and predictive analytics – are equipping companies with the tools to better track their environmental impact, identify improvement opportunities, and deploy sustainability solutions without reducing efficiency.

Across the economy, the technology and knowledge exist to solve specific market challenges — from energy management to automation — and companies need to define how digitisation’s full value potential can be deployed across the end-to-end processes to ensure efficiencies across the value chain.

Business experience has shown that making changes in established company processes may prove challenging without the right partnerships, but embracing digital transformation allows companies to work smarter, faster, more sustainably and more profitably.

—The writer is the country president, Schneider Electric   East Africa