Digital Transformation: What are the Benefits?

Digital Transformation: What are the Benefits?

Digital transformation involves integrating technology into all areas of your business, but underpinning it must be a mindset for change and adaptability.

It is about reimagining your systems, how you engage with your customers and your employees, and how you can ensure your systems work well together to ensure your business thrives and competes.

But what are the benefits of digital transformation, if you use it to change how your organisation operates?

Data-driven Insight

Digital transformation enhances data collection, and optimises it for analysis. This provides businesses with a powerful forward-momentum.

Data helps unlock customer insights. If you collect, process and interpret it the right way, it will help you better understand your customers’ needs.

Insight then drives action, allowing you harness the potential of digital technology to connect and engage with your customers on a deeper level.

The data you use can be structured or unstructured:

• Structured data includes personal customer information
• Unstructured data comes from social media metrics and other sources.

Digital transformation gives you access to real-time analytics, helping you become not just reactive but proactive in your customer relations.

This can also help you manage and spend your marketing budget more efficiently, as you develop a keener customer-centric approach.

Improved Customer Experience

The better you understand your customers, the more you can tailor your services and communications to align with their needs and interests.

Digital has transformed customer expectations, and customer experience (CX) is the key differentiating factor for many enterprises, more so than price or even product.

Research shows that 89% of companies expect to compete on customer experience.

It’s easy to pay lip service to improving customer experience, and to have it as a desirable goal, but digital transformation provides the practical tools to make this happen.

Better Management of Resources

Digital transformation gives your business a set of tools that enables you to consolidate your information and resources.

Remember: you won’t have a single digital transformation or department. It is an all-encompassing transformation, designed to unite the various strands of your business in a strong, coherent whole.

Going digital removes physical paper-waste, and enables you to automate various processes and tasks.

This includes employee management, where digital tools can help you track things like attendance and performance.

You can also streamline your procurement and purchasing processes with digital tools, making your spend management that much more efficient.

Improving processes has a positive impact on your customers too, as it frees up resources to better manage customer relations, and fine-tune your responsiveness and communications with customer relations management software.

Reducing Human Error

If you automate tedious tasks, you can help reduce or prevent errors. This is especially true of functions like data collection.

You can also use digital management tools to improve the accuracy of your processes and to co-ordinate tasks.

Keep close tabs on assignments and deadlines, and eliminate error at every stage of a process or project.

You can also apply new technologies to training, adopting immersive and iterative e-learning techniques to enhance your employees’ skills.

Culture Shift

There is a two-way relationship between an organisation and its digital transformation.

On the one hand, a desire to change, and establishing the mindset for this, drives digital transformation. On the other, the opportunities that digital transformation provides help drive better collaboration and a dynamic digital culture within the workplace.

Productivity and Profitability

With the right kind of tech tools, and a strategic application of them that engages and inspires the workforce, digital transformation can improve your productivity. It empowers teams to work together more efficiently, in close collaboration.

From the  improved productivity of streamlined workflows, and an improved focus on the customer experience, comes the opportunity to boost your profits.

More Agility

Digital transformation works hand-in-hand with the agile approach to business. It allows you to execute continuous improvement strategies rapidly and accelerate your speed-to-market.

Technology provides pathways to progress, upskills your workforce and lets them take advantage of digital methods of working to improve project management and delivery of key objectives.

Agile, as a mindset and approach, provides the perfect framework for digital transformation.

Where businesses want to create powerful digital experiences for their customers, agile gives them foundation for developing the necessary software through rapid iterations.

It also helps drive a broader cultural shift that provides the right kind of fertile environment for effective adoption of digital tools and methods.

How Do You Measure the ROI of Digital Transformation?

It’s not enough to make bold claims for the benefits of digital transformation. You’ll also want to know how these changes are measurable.

This can be challenging where you have cross-functional projects and wholesale transformation of all aspects of an organisation.

Another issue is that digital transformation is an ongoing, ever-evolving process, which must keep pace with technological developments and enhancements in the wider world.

But simply implementing the technology is not sufficient. You need to make the connection with key performance indicators, including measurements from:

• Customer insights
• Effectiveness of business processes.

You must also consider the wider viewpoint: what does the overall performance look like?

For best practice, you should:

• Set initial metrics in advance of a project
• Set micro-metrics for agile working, including incremental products
• Include business outcomes, such as strategic growth and revenue impact.

The Business Environment is Changing

Traditional organisations have shaped themselves according to ideas of stability, where they operate in a well-known environment.

But the business environment is changing, and doing so rapidly. A huge part of this change is the result of technological change.

It makes sense, therefore, for companies wanting to take an alternative, agile approach to adopt technological tools to help them meet the challenges of a transformed, and still changing, environment.

If you want to know more about digital transformation and the agile mindset, then please contact Simple Progression.