Driving business growth and staying agile to changes

Digital maturity is essential to not only driving your business forward but making sure it is profitable in the process. Without it you can find that you're turning over a lot of money but not really getting anywhere. 

The crucial part of maximizing the opportunities presented by digital maturity is to plan your technical development alongside your business growth, putting ecosystems in place that will enable you to grow rather than having systems that constantly need to catch up with you as you develop. Without digital maturity you risk making high-cost, low-value decisions or making commercial plans that your systems can't support.

Summing up their own digital maturity assessment, the UK's NHS summed up what it means, saying:

"Digital maturity refers to an organization's ability to respond to changes and trends in technology. It can also be viewed as an organization's 'state of readiness' to be able to adapt to, and integrate with, these technologies. A digitally mature organization will be able to demonstrate a clear link between their digital strategies and their core business objectives."

Enabling new strategies and customer satisfaction

We have worked with lots of businesses that are frustrated because the technology they have been using inhibits their growth as a business. Sometimes this is because every action requires costly and cumbersome customisation to achieve. Sometimes it's because the system really isn't capable of doing what the business wants, and as a result they create their business around its limitations—compromising on their customer experience and the service they want to provide. 

That said, we also work with businesses that don't realize how much they're being held back until they switch to an alternative. This is perhaps the most concerning for established enterprises, when they eventually realize how much profit and opportunity has been lost over time. Once they had moved to keylight, they were blown away by the difference it made both to their experience and their bottom line.

Broadly speaking, digital maturity is a key predictor of a company's likelihood of success, which is not only important in terms of aspirations and due diligence, but as a powerful reassurance to investors. With those illustrations in mind, the benefits of digital maturity relate to user experience, financial opportunity, commercial competitiveness and the connectivity between them. 

Enhance your business’s digital capabilities

The crucial thing is to start by understanding your current state of digital maturity, to create a pathway for the best digital capabilities and addressing issues or gaps meaningfully. There are key characteristics of digitally mature businesses, which typically include:

• Automation
• Customer-centricity
• Efficiency
• Flexibility
• Innovation
• Operational efficacy
• Insight
• Quality
• Accessibility
  

However, as well as being a technical function, these are enabled by three key pillars that facilitate a combination of technical capabilities and company culture:

Mindset

Technology should deliver value to the core of the business in a step-by-step approach that helps businesses to truly understand their system, and switch from a preexisting one where necessary. However, making this happen effectively can't be done without the right mindset, creating an aligned way of thinking to the whole business from billing to customer service.

At keylight we believe that customer centricity is the magic ingredient that binds and defines a successful, scalable, sustainable subscription business. That means understanding that monetisation of the customer relationship requires a platform that offers more than a recurring service. It needs a dynamic approach that facilitates different forms of usage and features such as consumption billing, traditional one-offs, project-based billing and flexible bundling. 

This mindset also means considering a sophisticated and easy customer journey from end-to-end, as well as enabling seamless automation for cohesive operations that enables internal users.
 

Technology

Technology is about much more than simply enabling repeat subscriptions and simple automation. It needs to deliver true value that reflects the vision of the business. That means being able to design the products, packages and details of subscriptions without barriers or limitations resulting from the platform itself.

For example, keylight is a business platform designed specifically for subscription organizations. From a technological standpoint, configurability, logic and a modern technical foundation make it the most powerful subscription business system on the market, equipped with everything you need to operate and grow your business at pace and without barriers.

Vision

Lots of businesses have their vision quickly limited and shaped by the parameters of the technology that they have. With the right technology, the vision leads the way and technology acts as an enabler to achieving it. The subscription landscape is fast paced—the demands of customers are constantly changing and if a business has the right proposition and capabilities they can grow fast. That means that you need to think three steps ahead in order to stay on track, looking to your future needs and planning for them today in order to facilitate a seamless environment, connectivity with customers and empower internal teams.
  
Advanced digital maturity can be reached when you:

• Develop a digital infrastructure roadmap
• Include the right people with the right knowledge and mindset 
• Create a culture of continuous learning and development
• Use the right data to achieve continuous learning and development goals