Digital transformation: It’s the process involved in utilising digital technologies either to modify existing or create new business cultures, processes, and customer experiences so that changing business and market needs can be met.
Digital transformation goes above traditional roles such as marketing, sales, and customer service. Rather, it begins, and it also ends with how you go about thinking about and engaging with your customers.
For the smaller business that is just starting out, there’s no requirement to establish business processes and then, at a later date, transform them. Your business can be future-proofed from the outset.
Building a new business on handwritten ledgers and Post-it notes is not sustainable. Rather, thinking about, then planning, then building digitally means your business will be flexible and ready for growth.
Adding Value to Customer Interaction with Digital Transformation
Digital transformation changes the way business is done. Sometimes, it creates an entirely new class of business. Through digital transformation, companies take a large step back and revisit everything they do on a day-to-day basis. That may include anything from internal systems through to interacting with customers both in person and online.
Questions are being asked: “Are we able to change our current processes to enable much greater efficiencies, better decision-making, better customer experiences?”
These days, all kinds of businesses are creating smart, effective and disruptive ways that they can leverage technology.
A great example of this is Netflix. Netflix began as a mail-order service and it went on to disrupt the more traditional video rental business with a brick-and-mortar high street presence. Through digital innovations, widescale video streaming became possible. Now, Netflix competes with long-established broadcast and cable TV networks as well as production studios through offering a vast collection of on-demand content at unbeatable prices.
Through digitisation, Netflix was given the ability to directly stream video content to consumers and to also achieve terrific insight into viewing preferences and habits.
This data is used to better its user experience through to the developing of movies and first-run TV shows at studios that are in-house. This is true digital transformation: Running with available technologies and using this to dictate how the business runs.
Understanding the Potential of Digital Transformation
One of the key elements of digital transformation is having an understanding of your technology’s potential. To find out, you need to consider what your technology is actually capable of. Then, it’s a matter of adapting your business and business processes so that you’re making the best of your investments in technology.
Again, with respect to Netflix and how they have embraced digital transformation: Directly streaming content that was subscription-based to consumers’ TVs, mobile devices, and computers was a clear-cut disruption to high-street based video rental businesses.
Netflix then considered what other things could be done with streaming technology. In turn, we now have innovations such as an artificial intelligence content recommendation driven system.
Leverage Digital Transformation by Adapting your Business
Similarly, the way companies handle customer service has been reshaped through digital transformation.
The more traditional model was all about waiting until customers would find you. That was either by way of making a phone call to an 0800 number or by paying a personal visit to your brick-and-mortar establishment.
The popularity of social media, though, has changed customer service just as it has changed marketing, advertising, and also sales.
More progressive businesses, both large and small, embrace social media by extending their service offerings to potential customers on the customer’s social media platform of choice.
Ensuring that in-store service desks and call centres are run more efficiently with the implementation of cutting-edge digital technology is an excellent way to go. But real transformation occurs when all available technologies are considered.
After this, business owners should think about how to adapt their business to those technologies that will provide customers with an improved experience.
Social media is not here to replace call centres. Nevertheless, social media has taken on an additional channel and definite opportunity of providing improved customer service.
Making adaptations of your current service offerings so that you are able to better embrace social media is yet a further example of digital transformation.
There is, though, no need to stop there.
As mentioned above, digital transformation helps to encourage businesses to review and then reconsider everything.
This does not necessarily mean that you should encourage your service reps to start running marketing campaigns. It could mean eclipsing walls that exist between departments.
A presence on social media can encompass marketing and customer service. This would be tied together through a digital platform that captures information about your customers, creates journeys that are highly personalised, and dispatches customer queries through to your service department.
To find out how your business can benefit from the digital transformation that is sweeping the business world, please do contact Xeretec.
