Research has predicted that digitally transformed entities will be contributing to more than 50% of the world’s GDP by next year. Undoubtedly, the digital landscape is evolving fast, and businesses are all rushing to catch up to remain relevant and competitive. Therefore, digital transformation can change the way you do business for the better.
However, this transformation is unique to an industry and niche. Before diving into it, you need to have a clear vision and focus that effectively serves your business and customers. Before starting your digital transformation journey, you must have a solid understanding of its concepts. This is the only way it’s going to impact your business positively.
What is digital transformation?
It’s the process of applying digital capabilities to your business’s workflow and processes:
- Improve efficiency
- Enhance collaboration
- Boost customer value
- Manage risks
- Find and navigate new revenue-generating streams
To achieve those, you need to adopt technologies that enhance both internal and external processes, including those that help manage customer acquisition, sales, and marketing. Adapting and implementing digital transformation in your business means you have to be willing to change how your business operates. Among the digital transformation trends, you need to consider are the use of blockchain, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Here are the benefits you get by digitally transforming your business.
Increased scalability
One of the top benefits of digital transformation is higher business scalability. This helps your business to upscale or downscale easily, an excellent recipe for growth. You can easily adopt strategies that improve your market penetration or improve your product or service offering with more flexibility.
Better resource management
Another significant benefit of digital transformation is consolidating databases and processes into a suite. Averagely, enterprises rely on numerous business apps to run their operations, workflow, manage documents, collaborate, and communicate. Having a dispersed database can lead to poor resource management and confusion.
Digital transformation lightens the burden and eliminates silos caused by multiple apps into a single platform, supporting your business intelligence better. Your employees, business partners, and associates will be on the same platform, making it easier for any member of the business to see and review processes, accelerating workflow, and reducing resource and time wastage.
Data-driven insights in decision making
In today’s world, you can’t underestimate the value of data in making business decisions. Having a consistent database of information from different business touch points in the same place helps you collect and use more accurate and real-time data insights to help move your business forward.
Proper data insights help you understand:
- Your customers
- Their previous, current, and predictable future needs
- Market needs
Being able to collect and analyze data helps you to create actionable insights. With robust data collection and creation tools at your disposal, you are able to make more informed business decisions. Such insights are also useful in helping you create the best customer relations, sales, and marketing strategies that will drive business growth and sales.
Better customer experience
The customer or buyer persona is changing, and the modern customer is shopping online and has high expectations from brands. Winning customers within a niche has become quite competitive. Most managers believe that their businesses are competing with others to craft a better customer experience.
With digital transformation, your business has more efficiency. It also helps to create a more intuitive customer experience journey through product delivery, communication, sales calls, marketing, and customer service. Your business is probably engaging customers on social media, websites, chatbots, and self-service tools.
You’re able to tailor all your customer-facing aspects to meet the needs and demands of your audience. Streamlined processes will make it easier for your customers to engage with you, shop and interact with your business more efficiently. This boosts customer experience and satisfaction.
Higher levels of profitability
Every business wants growth and increased profits, and so are you; otherwise, you wouldn’t be in business in the first place. With a digital strategy, it becomes easy to create a roadmap for dealing with change, leveraging technology, dealing with uncertain times, and changing customer needs and expectations. In fact, 43% of businesses reported to have gained higher than average profits through digital transformation.
Improved team collaboration
In the era of remote work, working from home, and hiring freelance agents from across the globe, having the right tools for communication and collaboration is priceless. Digital transformation tools help to create a better and seamless way to communicate and collaborate. This can help to propel your business forward digitally. Besides, having a digital culture in your business helps to encourage employees to upscale their digital knowledge, benefiting your business.
Also, when you equip your teams with the most suitable tools, create an environment tailored for your business. Your employees and contractors can collaborate beyond the office space and geographical locations. When you give your team the right tools to communicate, share and collaborate, you’re essentially building an environment tailored for growth and efficiency. Seamless collaboration is a crucial part of digital transformation and takes your teams beyond office walls creating efficiency in teams working from different geographical locations.
New revenue opportunities
There are so many revenue opportunities as there are competitors in business. However, developing a digital transformation strategy can allow you to leverage available opportunities. What happens is you’re able to identify and address issues that hinder your business from benefiting fully from the available opportunities. By rethinking your current strategies, it’s possible to discover new areas to bring in business revenue.
For example, you might notice an opportunity in blockchain and cryptocurrency by accepting crypto payments, creating NFTs, or building a decentralized exchange platform. Look for blockchain experts if you need technology consulting for a DEX platform or any blockchain-related tech.
Conclusion
Creating and implementing a digital transformation strategy takes an inner look at your business’s technical and people processes. Once you understand its concept, you can take advantage of its numerous benefits. If you want to play on more competitive ground, engage customers better, boost profits, and enjoy more flexibility, digital transformation should be something to consider.
