What is a digital twin and what are the potential benefits for customer-facing businesses?
A digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical system, process or product that can be used to simulate, monitor and analyse its behaviour and performance, and model change. In the context of an organisation, a digital twin could represent all or part of an entire operating model, including all of its connected processes, assets, resources, and stakeholders.
Manufacturers have been using them for years; the aerospace industry design and build virtual aeroplanes in a digital environment and fly them millions of virtual miles, testing for efficiency, fuel consumption, safety and wear and tear before ever committing a penny to nuts and bolts.
The same logic applies to non-manufacturing businesses. By creating a digital twin of their organisation, customer-facing businesses can create a holistic, joined-up view of their operations and better understand the interactions and touchpoints between different departments and functions. This knowledge can lead to effective decision-making and highly refined process and organisational optimisation, resulting in improved efficiency, quality and customer experience.
For example; a digital twin could help a financial services organisation to analyse customer contact patterns, customer / user journeys and interaction strategies, and anticipate demand fluctuations to model and identify optimisation opportunities.
Similarly, a digital twin could help a service organisation to monitor schedule performance, identify and resolve resourcing issues proactively, and personalise services based on customer preferences and planning data.
In summary, a digital twin of an organization can benefit customer-facing businesses by providing a detailed, joined-up view of their operations, enabling data-driven decisions and enhanced customer experience through personalised and efficient services.
Advances in technology are unlocking new opportunities
Part of my recent work has been helping organisations to identify ways that digital tooling can support their ongoing transformation initiatives, by capturing intelligence and modelling change before committing a single penny to real world transformation.
Here are some benefits that new technologies enable by creating a digital twin for customer-facing operations:
1. Improved Customer Experience: Digital twin technology can help businesses monitor and simulate customer interactions, which allows them to identify pain points and optimise customer experience. This, in turn, leads to happier customers and repeat business.
2. Better Visibility: Digital twin technology can provide businesses with a detailed snap shot of operational process efficiency by mining processes via API. They can identify inefficiencies and address them quickly, which improves the overall performance of the business and maintain the health of the organisation, process or function through regularly scheduled re-mining.
3. Accurate Predictive Analysis: With a digital twin, businesses can run simulations of different scenarios to identify potential issues such as volume surges, system outages and impacts of loss in services before they arise, in a completely risk free environment. This helps companies avoid costly downtime and other critical issues which may have severe regulatory, financial or reputational implications.
4. Increased Efficiency: Digital twin technology helps businesses identify the right opportunities to automate and streamline processes, reducing the need for manual intervention. This increases efficiency, and reduces human error.
5. Cost Savings: By using digital twin technology, businesses can identify areas where they can cut costs without impacting the customer experience. This allows them to operate more efficiently and compete more effectively in the market.
Summary
In a nutshell, advances in digital tooling are enabling a more systemic approach to change, providing us a powerful opportunity to start identifying and modelling opportunities in our organisations, risk free, in ways we never before thought possible.
In my next article I will dive deeper into how building out a digital twin in a dedicated platform enables transformation teams to identify, test, analyse and make decisions faster, when compared to using standalone modelling tools such as Visio and MS Excel.
However, if you would like to find out more in the meantime, please get in touch.
Read the next blog in this series.
