Accelerating Enterprise Digital Transformation | Paul MacGregor & Brittany Boles

How do we accelerate business’ digital transformation journeys?

Accelerating transformation requires organisations to do the research required to gain a holistic view of their customers. Rather than creating a wish list of new functions and features and developing them at top speed, it’s important to ask the questions: what improvements are most useful and important to your end users? What’s going to push your business’ value proposition ahead? What are the associated strategic goals tied to digital requirements?

Putting the right team in place is also critical to acceleration. For example, organisations need the right project management expertise to ensure business and product teams are in sync, chasing after the same goal rather than pulling in different directions. If everyone on the customer and agency side understands the priorities and goals outlined, then you’re going to experience a high level of velocity, which is a friend to accelerating transformation.

Finally, one of the key drivers to accelerating digital transformation is the mapping process between what a business may already have in place (current state) and where the business wants to go (future state) to understand the efficiencies in leveraging existing models and feature sets, bridging the gap between present and future. In this sense, in order to continuously improve the digital transformation journey within an organisation or across organisations, it’s important to appreciate how far an organisation has come thus far.

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What are the most cost-effective strategies to help clients enhance customer engagement?

At NovaFori, one of the areas where we help clients enhance customer engagement is through the implementation of machine learning (ML) across our clients’ marketplaces. Once a customer has made the decision to have a digital offering, we’ll analyse data from that marketplace. For example, we will look at behavioural analytics to understand what people are actually doing on the platform, and pair this with transactional analytics, to form recommendations on how the business can best engage with its users.

One use case for this approach exists in the mobility sector. We recently carried out a project for a client, using machine learning to analyse the customer’s online car marketplace. Pairing behavioural data with transactional data, we were able to provide recommendations to buyers (end users) on the platform for specific cars they might be interested in, based on their behavioural journey on the platform prior, in addition to transactions they have made in the past. This has increased transactional volume going through the platform significantly.

Taking it a step further, it’s possible to understand with machine learning tools when cars might sell in particular countries, or what format of auction might generate the best overall price at any given time. These types of insights provide marketplace owners (operators) with more clarity, enabling them to solidify sales and marketing strategy.

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This is just one example of how better understanding your customers drives engagement, revenue, and value for end users. From a customer point of view, being fed recommendations, both on-platform and through notifications, means less time surfing a site when you are served information on exactly what you are looking for. As a customer, you want to engage with a platform that understands your preferences.

We’ve implemented these tools, and more, across our marketplaces and have created significant value for our clients as a result.

At NovaFori, one of the areas where we help clients enhance customer engagement is through the implementation of machine learning (ML) across our clients’ marketplaces.

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How are you guiding your clients to become more agile and resilient?

Our technology naturally provides the foundation on which to build agility, allowing our clients to be resilient whilst knowing they have technology behind them which they can lean on.

If we consider the fine art market for example, the sector faced enormous challenges during the pandemic, when there was a big step back from physical auctions and a need to pivot the market in new ways to survive. As we provided the marketplace technology, our platform has been the foundation for building an agile strategy in addressing the evolution of the art market, including the adoption of digital art and NFTs onto the platform.

It is likely that physical auctions will return after the pandemic, but a significant percentage of business is now done online, and revenues have grown substantially as a result. This is partly due to the number and variety of sales made available online attracting a new, younger customer base, but also due to increasing the reach of sales to bidders across the globe. This accounts for cross-border trade implications, allowing a sale based in New York to settle in Hong Kong for example. In this sense, online auction technology has allowed businesses the ability to attract and engage customers who might not have been interested in engaging with an auction house before the pandemic, or were limited in the amount, and type of, sales they had access to.

As post-pandemic digitisation has unfolded, it has become clear that agility and resilience are encompassed in a mindset, and it requires active alertness to ensure that organisationally, you can change course quickly when necessary, but in a way that prioritises what is most important for your value proposition. Conventionally, organisations have tried to ‘fix’ outdated processes and make forward-looking decisions upfront, but that’s not possible in today’s world due to the evolving nature of the digital economy. Instead, organisations must embark on a journey to continuously re-evaluate their current reality in order to accelerate their digital transformation journey most effectively. This is how we guide our clients.

It has become clear that agility and resilience are encompassed in a mindset, and it requires active alertness to ensure that organisationally, you can change course quickly when necessary, but in a way that prioritises what is most important for your value proposition.

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NovaFori builds digital marketplaces for companies around the world. The company approaches every new project focused on delivering a great user experience informed by cutting-edge data science. By using machine learning, NovaFori is able to create smart trading models that help clients to drive revenues.