As enterprises strive to stay on a path of digital evolution, the consulting and systems integration marketplace is rapidly transforming as well to deliver a new generation of digital services. Forrester data shows that services buyers are focused on the right priorities: improving customer experience and digitally reinventing the business for growth. But the path to deliver against those priorities is becoming increasingly complex. Most companies have already attacked the low-hanging fruit in the form of front-end design for digital experiences, but improving scale and providing contextualized experiences is even harder. 

For the new generation of digital evolution, these are two examples of pitfalls to watch out for on service provider engagements: 

  1. Don’t make the same mistake with immersive experiences as you did with mobileMany organizations are already experimenting with technologies like bots and intelligent agents to deliver immersive CX. But remember the great race to create a mobile app? That proved there’s no implicit value in developing a new channel alone. There’s no value in content without context, and you can’t deliver context without operational excellence too. Your services engagements should include alignment between the operational core and digital CX initiatives in order to deliver holistic, meaningful experiences at scale. 
  2. Watch out for legacy tech buying processes interfering with agility Services providers have made significant growth in building out new engagement models for working with clients and expanding their ecosystems to bring in non-traditional partners, like startups or academia. Despite desire on the client side to work in new ways, I often hear innovation-heavy projects face huge stumbling blocks when it’s time to sign on the dotted line. The next challenge for services buyers is to develop new sourcing and buying processes that enable flexibility without sacrificing security.  

One additional consequence of a new set of digital services for buyers is that sifting through these offerings is getting more complex too. I can’t remember the last time I spoke with a vendor that didn’t mention “end-to-end” capabilities. Agencies, management consultants, and tech services firms all speak in the language of digital transformation, and all are acquiring capabilities across the spectrum from design to cloud optimization.  

For more on these trends and what they mean, please check out the full report, “Three Trends Shape Digital Services Engagements“. 

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