Traditional ways of running businesses are changing. The world around is developing for good. Global communications have brought us close with real-time applications, collaborations are increased, remote work is on the rise, and whatnot.
Technology is transforming the business world from HR to customer service, and everything in between since the past couple of years.
According to Statista, the worldwide expenditure on digital transformation is likely to reach around US$ 1.3 trillion, with an average growth of 10.4% every year.
In fact, the pandemic taught businesses to increase their operational efficiency, enhance customer experience, and improve communications.
And you know how important these three metrics are for a business to thrive.
Hence, if you have not yet adopted digital transformation, now is the time so you can beat challenges, lower competitions, and move forward for growth.
In this article, we will help you unleash things about digital transformation, how it can help you, and how you can incorporate it into your business.
Stay tuned!
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation refers to a process of integrating digital technology in every corner of a business. It includes leveraging cloud services, managing remote teams with technology, utilizing more applications to make workflow easier, and so on.
According to a survey by Tech Pro Research, 70% of respondents told that they already have a strategy for digital transformation in their companies or working on it.
It eliminates usage of legacy systems, in-house software, repetitive tasks that consume huge time, and more. This process results in fundamental business changes in terms of their operation and the way they provide value to their customers.
In addition to this, digital transformation brings a culture change as well that needs companies to challenge their status quo, strategies effectively to surpass failure, and experiment often continuously.
Digitization vs Digitalization: They are not the same!
Digital transformation is not the destination; it’s the journey, the process. In this journey, you will find two stops – digitization and digitalization. And the truth is both are NOT the same.
These words have similar sounds, but different meanings and importance for enabling digital transformation.
Let’s explore each one of them.
- What is Digitization?
Digitization means bringing technology to replace the traditional brick-and-mortar business environment. It enables you to feed information on computers, replace pens with your keyboards, maintain manual documentation with emails and digital formats, and utilize cloud storage.
This way, you can easily manage everything using your computer and from anywhere across the world beyond your 9-5 job. It also decreases the workload on your employees, increases productivity, reduces travel costs, makes communication easier, and cuts off expenditure.
Hence, you will get more time for solving problems, critical thinking, innovation, client engagement, and track performance to better plan and strategize our every move. Thus, you can serve your customers better and open the door to growth.
- What is Digitalization?
Digitalization is automating your business operations with data and insights you already have processed in your database. It is actually the next step forward after you have embraced digitization into your business model.
Digitalization takes place with the help of certain software applications developed to perform specific functions such as accounting, bookkeeping, manufacturing, order management, procurement, customer contact, and more.
Instead of using a separate network of computers for every department, digitalization allows you to merge them into a single network in a standard format.
As a result, it leads to many benefits such as stronger data encryption with cloud computing, machine automation to improve outputs, better quality management and product diagnostics with advanced computers that function accurately, quickly, and reliably.
You can feed customer and sales data into systems and forward it to your marketing departments, so they use it to channelize their marketing efforts for better conversion rates with more personalization
.
The advantages of digital transformation
Digital transformation is not only the next step but also a necessity to survive in the current business scenarios. The pandemic has increased market pressure with changing consumer expectations.
Hence, adapting to these changes with the help of digital transformation is needed to be in the race. These are the advantages digital transformation brings for you:
- Enhanced customer experience
Delivering top-level customer experience must be the top priority for your business.
A report says that 67% of end-customers and 74% of B2B buyers want to pay more if they get a great user experience.
This is proof that you need to enhance customer experience by working on interactions, value proposition, and deliverability. It will help improve your reputation and foster growth.
Digital transformation is an excellent way of doing it as it increases more convenience for your consumers. You can incorporate mobile applications to increase their experience, and make it as user-friendly as possible.
For example, Uber has increased convenience for its customers with its app that users can use to get a car ride, buy a home or room temporarily. It also expanded its service with UberEats to satisfy hunger.
- Increased growth of mobile applications
Digital transformation has increased the use of mobile applications. And you know the craze for mobile phones in the world. Almost everyone has a smartphone these days.
Therefore, there can never be a better way to reach your customers than through mobile applications. When it comes to the digital transformation approach, smartphone applications are one of the best gifts.
People use it anywhere they want for whatever reasons they may have; whether it is shipping online, ordering foods, getting a cab or booking a healthcare appointment. With cloud storage, you can use your documents anytime you want without downloading and storing them.
- Encourages progressive web applications
A progressive web app is similar to a web app that works on a browser, without requiring the user to download it from an app store.
These apps such as Google Chat facilitate innovation, including synchronization capabilities, offline features, quick updates, and more.
And digital transformation encourages the development of progressive web apps. In fact, producing these apps is profitable for SMEs as well.
Web apps open the door to new revenue channels, boost customer experience dramatically, provide advanced CRM solutions, and many more.
- Reduces costs
Apart from improving customer engagement and reputation, digital transformation helps you reduce your expenses. You can use digital apps to save a lot of your money as cloud applications allow you to pay for the services you use, unlike traditional software.
Besides, you can use these applications anytime and anywhere across the globe to cut off travel expenses as well.
You can employ marketing automation to prevent repetitive tasks like sending welcome messages and emails, searching for SEO keywords, creating dynamic content, etc. Marketing automation applications and programs can handle such tasks efficiently and accurately.
This way, you don’t need to hire more employees for these tasks and save money.
- Drives innovation and better efficiency
Applications help you increase efficiency and drive innovation. These apps also assist you to manage projects effectively and foster better collaboration. You can use the apps to manage your workflows as well.
Modern businesses use applications such as Slack, Trello, etc. for collaboration and smooth communication instead of physical meetings or emails.
For example, Bank of America uses an app that can take care of taking pictures of checks and manage them, which you deposit while transferring money to others. This way, people don’t need to visit the bank every time to handle finances.
- Helps you stand out
Consumer preferences are changing as we speak. As a result, market competition has increased to become tougher. Previously, the competition was more on product development, advertising campaigns, marketing channels, etc.
But now, users need more customized experiences that can help them individually. This is where digital transformation kicks in with AI and ML. Companies are striving to deliver more user-centric, accessible, and convenient experiences.
For example, Google and Amazon, among other technology giants are leveraging machine learning and IoT to understand user expectations, trends, and predictions that can shape their efforts.
How to navigate digital transformation in your business?
Now that you are aware of digital transformation and how it is beneficial for your business, the next thing is to implement it and be in the race.
For this, keep a few things in mind:
- Strong leadership
If you want to incorporate digital transformation, strong leaders are needed to cut through the challenges. It’s because they are the ones making informed decisions that can help your business in the long run.
They will administer every activity from customer experience, replacing legacy systems, optimizing combinations, and improving marketing efforts to track performance and forecast the future.
For this, they need to have a stronger understanding of emerging technologies combined with management capability. This is why you must evaluate your leaders and make changes in the hierarchy, if that it takes to get the things done.
- Better business planning
Digital transformation is a continuous process. You need to make that first move, and then keep developing and exploring business prospects. Use it to think about how you can accomplish your long-term goals with proper planning and execution.
You can’t settle with the current technology because it will become obsolete in the near future. Plan on introducing new digital technologies that help your business move forward with trends.
Keep on improving consumer engagements, in-house processes, marketing efforts, payment methods, and more with the help of digital transformation.
- Prepare clear strategies
Your digital transformation strategies must be based on providing a better value to your customers. Hence, set priorities based on the planning for each department.
And when you explain these priorities and assign tasks to the team members, clarify each aspect properly, so they understand what they are doing and why.
For example, to help customers have better convenience, you can prioritize digital payments or integrate with tools like PayPal.
- Get more transparent with employees
Everyone in your team expects transparency. Don’t keep them in the dark even if you have to make some decisions that are not appreciated by all.
Due to digital transformation, positions might shift while automation may lead to elimination or merging of employees with other roles.
Whatever be the case, communicate it with your team members honestly, explaining the reasons. Instead of firing employees, you can also look for up-skilling or re-skilling them internally. Find ways you can utilize their talents to bring value in your team.
- Organize your data properly
Data is essential for your business; be it developing a new product, finding customer preferences, or optimizing your marketing strategies. And organizing data properly is also necessary for digital transformation.
Ensure data is accessible easily by centralizing repositories, sharing it with business leaders and product owners, and enhancing data integrity. In addition to this, prepare data catalogues or categorize them efficiently, so your team knows how to find the data and where.
- Empower decision-makers with agility
According to a report, 45% of executives think their company does not have the right set of technologies to deploy digital transformation.
Hence, to enable the digital transformation process in your business smoothly and effectively, you need to empower your decision-makers, leaders, and managers with some agility.
It will help them think quickly and act without having to climb the high ladder of approval from different departments or teams. Let them handle responsibilities such as profit and loss, based on which they can proceed fast, experiment more, and adapt to changes quickly.
Provide them with the right flexibility and technology to fuel your digital strategies. Let them enable cloud technology to be more dynamic and fast, which helps you test low-risk, cost-effective projects.
Allow them to connect SaaS apps, customer databases, applications, big data analytics, etc., to get a better customer overview to deliver an improved user experience.
Conclusion
Embracing digital transformation has become essential, especially after the global pandemic. It is the key to proving fast, improved, and tailored customer experiences.
Hence, implement digital transformation in your business as early as possible to steer clear of the competition.
Contact the App-Scoop Vancouver Mobile App Developers for further details.
