Giving Digital Strategy a Little Push
We all know that constantly pushing your employees or your organization is not the best way to get to success, but sometimes this is exactly what is necessary. With that being said, in a recent article, Patrick Lencioni, author of the bestselling book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, posits that sometimes the best leaders are those who are capable of pushing their employees outside of their comfort zones and into new territory. This often leads to achieving new levels of success that had never been dreamed of while living inside the “comfort zone.”
Moving up a level from managers and employees to executives and the organizations they lead, this article really resonates to us at InvestorCOM, specifically relating to our raison d’etre of becoming our clients’ “bridge to a digital tomorrow”. Our clients and prospects in the financial services industry in Canada and abroad all understand that there is overwhelming customer demand for increased digital communication touchpoints, but their organizations are largely stuck in a traditional print-based communication model.
There are many reasons for this, including decades of momentum and large back-office teams and processes that have been built up to support these functions. This creates a large amount of headwind (and sometimes whirlwind) when one of these organizations attempts to shift its approach and make inroads into the digital world. As financial institutions (FI’s) fight this internal struggle, often turning out digital conversion rates of less than 10%, the disconnect between the communications the customer wants and the communications their partner FI delivers continues to widen. This is not lost on the FI’s, yet the struggle to implement change is very real, and the potential threat of losing customers to a competitor who can “figure it out” grows with each passing day.
Circling back to Lencioni, this highlights a perfect example of when leaders may need to give their organizations a good push to fight through the internal struggles and confusion that digital conversion can present. By setting an aggressive conversion target, selecting a capable partner like InvestorCOM, and identifying the appropriate communication touchpoints to digitize, FI executives can push their organizations out of the proverbial comfort zone, and into a digital tomorrow highlighted by increased customer engagement, reduced communications delivery costs, and a big leg up on the competition.