Digital-first companies have forever disrupted the ways that companies, their employees, and their customers interact, setting a high bar for digital simplicity, user-centricity, interactivity, and responsiveness.

It's imperative now more than ever for businesses to digitally transform. “At this point, it’s do or die for a lot of companies,” Navin Sharma, Pitney Bowes VP of product management and customer information management, said in a new Forbes Insights white paper in association with Pitney Bowes.

In fact, according to a recent Accenture study, "Digital Transformation in the Age of the Customer," 63 percent of businesses plan to improve the online customer experience, but only 26 percent of organizations are "completely ready" to execute digital strategies. To stay in the game, pre-digital companies are reimagining their customer experiences to boost customer satisfaction and net promoter scores, tap into new sources of value, and drive operational efficiencies.

And there's no time to waste. Eighty-five percent of enterprise decision makers feel they have a timeframe of two years to make significant inroads on their digital transformation before suffering financially and/or falling behind their competitors, according to a Progress report on the state of digital business.

All of this begins with designing to delight the customer while deriving data and insights that have sales and operational business value attached.

Forbes Insights new white paper mentioned above, "Digital Transformation: Using Data-Driven Insights for Exceptional Customer Engagement," explores this topic and delivers some key takeaways by interviewing industry experts and analysts while examining real-world use cases of digital transformation.

Reimagining and redesigning digital experiences

Digital transformation involves making fast and profound changes in product, sales, service, and marketing experiences where interconnectedness are vital aspects. For the pre-digital enterprise, digital transformation is becoming an unavoidable reality defined by:

• Digital interaction
• Hyper-personalization
• Real-time responsiveness
• Real-time data

One example of digital transformation explored by the white paper is how organizations can engage in two-way, personalized conversations with their audience to use the data for tapping into new sources of value and operational efficiencies.

Forbes Insights interviewed Erika Trautman, CEO and founder of Rapt Media, a Pitney Bowes partner, about the potential for two-way conversations using personalized, interactive video. Here's a snippet from the interview:

“What interactive, personalized video does that broadcast video and most online video doesn’t do is it really becomes a two-way conversation, where the data that the video is able to deliver to the end viewer is much deeper, much more relevant, more powerful because it’s driven by our understanding of the viewer. Simultaneously, the viewer is able to make choices within the video, self-customizing his or her own experience. And when the viewers interact, they offer up a little bit of information about themselves, providing insight back to the company that created the video. What we find happens is that the return on the investment for that video is an order of magnitude higher for both parties. (Check out these case studies from The eLearning Guild to learn how PwC and Aon Hewitt use interactive video.)”

Download the Forbes Insights white paper to learn more about:

• Data technologies that collect insights
• Location technologies that drive responsiveness
• Content technologies that deliver interactive digital experiences