Lessons Learned: Three ways to deal with your digital innovation challenges

While all our clients are different, they often use similar tactics to help them overcome challenges and innovate. Here’s what we’ve learned.

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that digital transformation isn’t just nice to have. It’s essential to create innovative experiences that help you react to, and proactively anticipate, changing customer demands.

But whatever industry you’re in, digital transformation projects can be complex. And without the right ongoing, expert support, they can be difficult to execute.

Over decades helping our clients achieve their digital ambitions, we’ve discovered some key tactics that have been successful in helping them overcome their biggest challenges.

Here are the three most important – and you can start using them straightaway.

#1 – Respond quickly when customer demands change

Failure to adapt to changing market conditions can potentially mean you lose out to more agile competitors, which in turn means you miss out on key revenue opportunities.

Customer demands are at the heart of most changing industry trends. Particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s never been a better time to put your customers at the centre of your digital strategy.

One way to achieve this is by introducing new and innovative digital services that help improve the customer experience.

We helped Govia Thameslink to do just that. We worked closely to design and deploy a live passenger counting system that delivers train capacity information to customers in real time – improving passenger experience and reducing station dwell times.

As well as listening to your customers, it’s important you have the ability to scale on demand to adapt to new challenges. Our major retail clients like Argos and Waitrose & Partners know this better than most.

The ability to scale digital systems quickly helped both companies navigate the seismic shift from physical stores to online during the UK’s nationwide lockdown in 2020 – coupled with unpredictable disruption following Brexit – and keep their customers satisfied across any channel.

#2 – Be proactive, not reactive

Change isn’t always easy, particularly when your current strategy can appear to be working. But in reality, you could be fostering unnecessary complexity in your organisation.

Take manual processes for example.

One of our public transport clients realised that its managers, who had responsibility for its public areas, were spending so much time recording passenger footfall using pen and paper, they had little time left to carry out their basic duties.

It’s why we worked with our client to create an app that helped eliminate these manual processes. It not only made reporting far more efficient, but it also provides deep insights which now influence space and building designs – something that would have been impossible before.

By identifying a problem and taking proactive action, our client was able to unlock new efficiency gains and insights that help it better anticipate customer trends.

#3 – Test and learn constantly

Due to their ability to foster innovation, test-and-learn programmes have been at the heart of many of our clients’ digital development initiatives for years. And the best part is that test-and-learn doesn’t necessarily need a huge investment in time and resources.

The truth is, an effective test-and-learn programme can begin with something as simple as an email A/B test. As long as you’re gathering data and using it to make continuous iterations, you’ll soon see the benefits.

While our work with University College London Hospitals NHS Foundations Trust (UCLH) to develop and launch its Tuberculosis symptom checker app was a significant project, the foundations for our ongoing work are simple: regular idea dialogues and feedback workshops that use direct user feedback to continually improve the platform.

Once you’re confident with test-and-learn, it’s also a good opportunity to experiment with emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – something our client Waitrose & Partners is using to reduce food waste and save money.

Discover opportunity in your biggest challenges

Now more than ever, it’s essential to engage with customers in more innovative, digital ways. But digital transformation projects require specialist skills – from design and build to integration, operation and improvement.

It’s why choosing the right partner to help you achieve your digital ambitions – and who understands the value of 24/7/365 support from embedded teams – is critical.

CACI is that kind of partner.

Backed by decades of experience helping major organisations such as Argos, UCLH, Waitrose & Partners and Mitchells & Butlers to deliver new digital solutions (and even legacy support services), we help you get complex, large-scale technology projects delivered on time.

We offer four core services to support successful project delivery:

1. Specialist consulting services to scope, design and deliver digital projects
2. Development of data-intensive software applications
3. Secure and compliant cloud hosting solutions
4. Ongoing management and monitoring of complex software systems

Find out more about our digital solutions and discover how we can help you manage your digital challenges.