Leveraging Digital Transformation to fuel business growth
As businesses grow from startups into mid-sized or large organisations, many find themselves struggling through pain points that hinder growth. The reason is that most 7- or 8-figure businesses are still operating as though they’re making 6 figures. They are using business systems that they have grown out of which sit on top of manual processes, costing the businesses millions in lost profit, as well as adding frustration at each touchpoint with both their employees and customers.
If you don’t know what Digital transformation is, here is a refresher. Digital Transformation refers to the adoption of digital systems and processes to achieve strategic business goals. It means you buy or build new business software that integrates within your business, creating new streamlined processes and giving you access to new data to put you ahead of the curve. This allows you to accelerate and take the lead ahead of your competition. When done properly, it can positively impact both top-line revenue and bottom-line profit. But, more importantly, it meets your customer’s needs seamlessly and efficiently, allowing you to exceed their ever-increasing expectations.
Why would you want to upgrade your technology? Because new technologies impact the way that your customers and clients shop, listen to music, consume, and even make hair appointments. With this in mind, it makes sense that to keep up with customer expectations and competitors, businesses need to steadily evolve their digitisation strategy too. Yet interestingly, while 89% of companies plan to adopt a digital-first strategy, only 44% of them have actually done it.
If your business is among the 56% stuck on the planning (or pre-planning) phase, don’t worry, you’re not alone. It can seem daunting at first and it’s often a big project to sink your teeth into. That’s where we come in. Our experts are here to guide you through the digitisation process every step of the way.
But, before you get started there’s something you should know. There is a very simple distinction between digital transformation projects that succeed, and those that fail. Many people focus too much on the tech, but they forget about two other key areas: people and change. Digital alone is not enough, you need to put the same amount of emphasis on the transformation. It’s not just about buying new software that’s going to instantly make you more money. It’s about changing the ways that your teams work together, not just the systems they use to do it.
While digital transformation looks different in every company, there are some common characteristics:
Digital transformation should be collaborative. It should involve all levels of your organisation, not just management or the C-Suite. Transformation works best when people across the organisation can partake in a shared vision.
Digital transformation is cultural. When you make changes to your key processes, you also need to reassess your previous business structures and hierarchies to ensure they will fit into the new way of working.
Digital transformation is agile. Being mainly cloud-based, digitisation allows your processes to be both streamlined and economical. This means they can evolve and adapt over time, depending on your business needs.
Digital transformation is innovative. A business that adopts new technologies is always experimenting and learning from the past. This results in data-driven decisions based on the results.
Digital transformation focuses on the customer. As you are always collecting and analysing data about your customers, you are in a position to provide better customer service and improve your overall customer experience.
When all of these tenants are followed, it becomes easy for businesses to cut costs and increase profits.
Still trying to decide if it’s for you? Watch our video on Digital Transformation here.