When you order an item from home and the doorbell rings with your delivery six hours later, you’re experiencing the gold standard of customer service. Chances are, your order came from Amazon, which has set and then exceeded the standard for eCommerce – even during the height of a global pandemic. The Amazon effect, as it has come to be known, has changed our expectations for customer experience forever. As consumers, we all view our interactions, both personal and professional, through a distinctly Amazon lens.

So how do we live up to those lofty expectations in a highly transactional business-to-business environment plagued by the complexities of a worldwide supply chain and the record-breaking pace of technology evolution? At Molex, we evolve how we enable customers to engage and realize value, and we enable our employees to understand how their jobs connect to the customer value chain. In short, we commit to mutually beneficial transformation designed to ignite customer advantage by making Customer Experience our north star.

Through our digital transformation, Molex is on the journey to create an operating model to enable optimal agility, promote company-wide collaboration and expedite product development. We are moving toward connecting with and ultimately driving tremendous value for our customers in the forms of faster speed-to-market and improved experiences with our entire ecosystem. But we can’t do this without making sure our employees have the necessary resources and skills to help drive this value. That means looking at specific workstreams and transactional processes through the customer lens to enable deeper and broader perspective on how to become a preferred and trusted partner from both an aspirational and operational point of view.

We believe that even companies that don’t have a direct-to-consumer relationship need a customer-first mentality. This is especially relevant today in designing products to meet growing demands for mass customization and personalization. And this is why one of the pillars of our transformation is aimed at improving our new product development capabilities. And we’re starting with an ear for the challenges – straight from customers who experience them. Indeed, we realize that our product development and new product introduction capabilities will be enhanced greatly through a better understanding of our customers’ businesses and the markets they serve. We recognize that the path to driving value from where we are now to where we need to be lies in how we deliver for customers. And as we’ve progressed on this transformation journey, it’s become even more clear that the experience of delivering a service or product is more important than the product or service itself.

Modernizing our technology infrastructure has been a key component in our transformation. Like Amazon did in its own transformation journey, we also know that the role technology plays in business needs to be continuously reimagined. We are always thinking about what layer of capability we need to create for our employees to deliver services at a high degree of quality and speed. After all, in a disruptive environment where the first one to market often wins, the value created through agility is clear. But quality is table stakes as well. There are countless examples of companies who won the first lap of the relay but lost the race because their closest competitor brought a better, more reliable solution to market after the race seemingly won.

Connecting to customer value is vital to ensuring the whole team aligns to the goal. That’s why thinking about value drivers and what each person does to deliver customer success is particularly important. We started by connecting our technology operating model to our business operating model. Then we focused on advancing our capabilities in new product development. We have created global product teams equipped with leaders who understand what it means to lead through innovation. Those teams work closely with our business teams which allows for greater collaboration across the organization. We’re redefining our roadmap to connect the entire digital thread starting with the minute we accept an order to the minute we fulfill it.

We know the transformation journey will always shift to meet customer and business needs because the needs of our customers are continually evolving. This is a journey, not a final destination. By being agile and willing to do the “hard stuff” we will unlock technology to enable Molex to be the best it can be. And by unlocking the potential of our people through self-actualization, we create powerful connections that drive mutual benefit.

Driving transformation at an 80-year-old company is no small feat – but it is an exciting time to be at Molex. Embedded culture, mental models and processes that have served the company well in its evolution to a $7 billion company require holistic shifts and new ways of both thinking and working. Our contributions to that end game will require that we tap our teams’ comparative advantages and working together to follow our customer experience north star. Our digital transformation is Creating Connections for Life through people, processes and technology, a trifecta that will ignite untold advantages for our customers along the way.