Unilever is a British multinational company headquartered in London, England, and it also operates in Switzerland. Recently, Unilever announced a boycott of Facebook’s advertising if it did not change their advertising standards. Unilever argued that currently, the social media platform allows ads of mixed messaging to be placed alongside theirs, which they feel could diminish the value of the Unilever brands.
Today however, it is not only in advertising where people are starting to question the subject of “over digitalisation”. In fact, with privacy laws becoming increasingly more strict, there are signs that many businesses are becoming weary of the subject.
The above does not necessarily mean however, that digitalisation will disappear altogether. In fact digitalisation and digital transformation are important drivers for change in the business world. This is because they establish new technologies, which often help improve processes which can aid the customer experience. However, digital processes should not forget that the single most important aspect of business relationships is trust.
Building brand integrity, and with it trust, takes a long time. Having the right product or services ready for market is based on experience, closeness to the market and ability to develop great products and services, that people want. This in turn helps create trust.
Companies aim for their customers and suppliers to be “partners”. This is because partnerships are harder to break compared with “2 dimensional” client and supplier relations. People increasingly do not like to be force-fed digitalisation for its own sake. To many there is a risk that digitalisation can seen as a master rather than a slave.
A recent Financial Times post highlighted the fact that digital transformation failures continue to challenge many organisations, with more than 70 percent of enterprises failing to create any value at all from their digital transformation efforts. Not only is digital transformation often resisted by employees, but the business’ customers may also feel alienated – and do what all humans do when change happens. They resist!
Leaving internal digital change challenges aside and focusing on the client side of things, the goals for a company to digitalise its service offer should be:
- First and foremost to improve the customer experience
- Secondly to empower its agents (to ultimately offer an improved customer experience)
- Encourage its clients to engage in digital channels as an accepted touchpoint of their customer journey
- And use rich client data gained through digitalisation to improve the customer offer and service levels
At the Accurity Group, our business ethos since foundation over 25 years ago has been to offer the best personal customer service possible. This embodies the spirit and culture that Accurity still represents today.
The world was a very different place in 1998 when Accurity GmbH was launched. Back then, there were just over 2.5 million websites worldwide. That number today is 1.13 billion. And with the growth in Internet usage and the progress made in technology, businesses worldwide have had to digitalise their systems and processes to align with how the world interacts and does business.
According to founder and Group Head of IT Stephen Clothier …
“Across the Accurity Group, our approach to digitalisation has been clear from the outset: although we have always led the market in terms of digitalisation, we treat IT as a tool to improve customer experiences by supporting but not replacing our renowned holistic personal service. We rely strongly human interaction to develop trust and maintain integrity.
Accurity is SECO licensed with a 20+ year enviable reputation as a trustworthy, reliable and transparent partner for companies of all sizes including SMEs, contractors and recruitment agents. Our core services include Employer of Record or EOR for contractors and international and domestic clients wishing to engage contractors. Our pricing system is fair and transparent. We are based in Switzerland and have excellent local knowledge and connections. Contact our team to see how we can help you.
