Whenever you are willing to expand your business while cutting down your expenses, digital transformation is a top-notch tool for you. Today, various industries and businesses are adapting to the new rules of the new world by virtue of digital transformation.
Generally speaking, it is used to enhance customer experience and increase operational efficiency, but let’s have a closer look to get the whole idea of why the world can no longer live without it.
Digital transformation is essential when you connect people, things, and information
It’s an undeniable fact we live in a digital era., and customers have higher expectations and impose new (and) different requirements to which businesses have to adapt. The process of adaption is painless when you can easily connect with other companies, or provide your customer with personalized data, or automate monotonous processes saving your workers’ time for communicating with clients. Here, let’s clear out a couple of definitions.
Digital transformation vs. Automation
Automation is a tool to simplify an operational process, it includes digital solutions to streamline, organize, optimize certain operations. While digital transformation is something more complex, it means incorporating digital solutions to the very essence of your business, thus it is a client-oriented process.
Digital transformation vs. Digitalization
We should also differentiate digital transformation from digitalization. The latter means using digital data to change certain business processes, e.g. you upload a PDF with important information to the cloud drive and share it with your employees so that they could use it in their daily work. Digital transformation, in its turn, is a set of numerous tools to make your job in a digital way.
Components of digital transformation
So, here is a set of 7 steps to incorporate digital transformation into your business.
- Changing relations with customers
- Adapting your strategy and goals
- Transforming organization structure and human resources
- Reforming organization culture and knowledge management
- Altering business processes and data management
- Implementing new management and analyzing tools
- Remodeling marketing and distribution process
By changing your approach to communication with your customers, you inevitably find yourself transforming your human resources and organization structure, adapting your goals and marketing tools to the rapidly-evolving environment, and optimizing various business processes.
Examples of digital transformation technologies
Hence, the question came up: how, in theory, and in reality, can we leverage digital transformation to reach efficiency, prosperity, and agility?
Becoming a customer-centric business, which is of high significance these days, includes enhancing customer experience through, for example, implementing AI tools, or developing front-end applications, or introducing chatbots to manage claims instead of using call centers (which are believed to be more expensive than the former, by the way).
By developing back-end applications, automating various routines, creating modern HR solutions, a business not only initiates positive organizational changes but also contributes to a better corporate culture and order of knowledge.
Unique CRMs allow to collect and store customer data, predictive analytics solutions help to segment customers in a more efficient way, setting up a digital transformation lab contributes to better communication among technology and software specialists, scientists, and startup companies in their yearning to use innovations to benefit the business – all this causes drastic changes to numerous business processes, and extremely changes the approach to data management, analytics, and marketing.
Conclusion
So, good quality digital transformation is the bedrock of a blooming and affluent business, yet turning digital may seem like a hard nut to crack. Let me set your mind at ease by suggesting a couple of tips.
First, determine your end goal, decide where you want the digital transformation to take your business.
Second, create a customer success mindset, turn from “What is our profit and revenue this quarter?” to “What value are we providing to our customers? What experiences are they enjoying with us?”
Third, act fast. A modern environment is pretty competitive and rapidly-evolving, so be quick implementing seamless customer experience, loyalty apps, machine learning tools, or IoT and cloud technologies.
Fourth, an interconnected system with related companies will be very helpful at embracing experimentation and using digital transformation solutions in new beneficial ways.
And just like that.