Digital Transformation in the Real World

Digital transformation goes beyond adopting new software for a single purpose. It is transforming the business operations entirely to refine the company structure, meet market requirements that rapidly change, and add value to customer service.

Digital transformation is adopting digital technology to a company’s operations, thus enhancing its products, services, and operations. It opens doors to the vast digital arena for businesses to grow and thrive. However, it is also a risky step to take, as companies often fail in the process, thus leading to a downfall. Nevertheless, it is still a worthy risk that must be taken through thorough analysis and market research.

Digital Transformation in this Day and Age

There was a time when there were businesses that were successful with their traditional in-person sales and businesses that were growing in their online arena. The rate at which these two operations integrate was slower initially. This is no longer the case. Now the operations are intertwined between in-person sales and the e-commerce marketplace. And there is no doubt that the latter is going for the win.

Along with sales, digital transformation has drawn discernible changes to how businesses run their work culture, change their production, and organize their workforce. And it is worth mentioning the aftermath of Covid-19. The pandemic increased the adapting rate of digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation.

To attain the said digital transformation, companies must undergo various changes, namely digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation. It is important to note that these three stages are processes of their own outside the transformation of an organization.

Digitization is the process of converting data from paper to digital records. The best example would be scanning a paper and saving the data of that document digitally in a pdf format on a phone or a computer.

Digitalization is an extension of digitization. It can be understood with the document in the above example. In digitalization, you upload the document to the cloud and then share it with others through the same cloud, where they can access it, view it, edit it, and download it. A lot of business operations can be automated with digitalization.

Digital transformation integrates both digitization and digitalization. It transforms the operation of an organization, of an individual working in that organization, and the entire culture in which the individual is working.

Digital transformation makes a business get closer to its audience and potential customers. Implemented correctly, it provides a tremendous competitive edge. Let us discuss a few advantages of practicing digital transformation.

Advantages of Digital Transformation

Understanding the advantages of digital transformation helps you relate the circumstance in your business operations. Let’s dive in.

Customer Experience

Customers are usually on the edge while dealing with customer service in any business. This is because they usually face an issue or look for a solution. And, with diminishing attention spans, customers rarely take time to go through content or data that is not comprehensive. Digital transformation helps businesses to add value to their customer experience. Whether implementing chatbots that support 24/7 or providing digitalized data regarding the services or solutions they provide, digital transformation helps refine the user experience on many levels.

Better Analytics

Digital transformation makes it easy to track various business processes by bringing them to one or limited platforms. Whether it is data regarding sales, revenue, finance, marketing, or customer service, the data is easily accessible with digital transformation. These metrics can further help decision-makers take measures faster to improve their ROI significantly.

Reduced Costs

Digital transformation can help businesses save a lot in operational costs and increase profitability. From decreasing the infrastructure by introducing complete remote or hybrid work culture to using several SaaS products and hosting servers, businesses can rely less on physical property and invest reasonably in digital assets.

Agility

Digital transformation allows businesses to adapt to ever-changing market trends quickly. Businesses that undergo digital transformation have the flexibility to implement well-suited strategies with minimalist changes to their business processes.

Digital Skills

The digital arena has proven to be more spacious for more players to roll. It means you can find more eligible employees for your business. You can train them faster to improve your business productivity through several SaaS products and services.

Enhanced Work Experience

Digital transformation has improved hiring and managing employees, making the life of the HR department easier. From onboarding to training and performance measurement, digital transformation has brought solutions to modernize and improve the efficiency of a business operation.

Along with the most common advantages of digital transformation, let us look at some of the most common use cases of digital transformation in the real world.

Most Common Real-world Uses of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has impacted the lives of individuals worldwide, whether they realize it or not. Let us look at some common uses where you know digital transformation has been applied.

Remote Work Culture

Businesses have their workforce working from across the globe thanks to digital transformation. Now individuals do not need to travel to different cities, states, or countries if their employers allow them. They can continue to be part of the organization by working remotely. As mentioned earlier, this can help save the cost of infrastructure as the organizations need to spend on infrastructure and travel or relocation costs of an employee. There are tools that would help employees monitor their remote workforce with detailed breakdowns of how they contribute to the organization's goals.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is designing a product or solving a problem with user-centric solutions. Design thinking undergoes a few stages to create such solutions: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Digital transformation helps design better solutions by helping carry out design thinking significantly. It helps majorly in empathizing with the users. Digital transformation provides data on what customers search for, what features they like the most in your product, and what they interact with. This deep understanding helps identify the friction points and define the problems. Once the problems are defined, it gives your teams the space to ideate the plans to work on. With enough resources, you can create prototypes to test and produce working and efficient solutions.

Automated Customer Service

As we have discussed earlier, digital transformation helps in improving customer services in a business. Businesses can automate most of their customer service department with 24/7 ready-to-serve bots and efficient IVR systems.

Sales Efficiency

Businesses can now organize their prospects and interact with customers effectively and efficiently thanks to digital transformation. Many businesses use the most advanced and AI driven tools and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to automate lead generation and organize their customer engagement. These tools also provide crucial data on their sales performance, making it easy for decision-makers to act wisely.

Employee Performance Management

Many organizations are now adapting personalized tools to increase the performance of their employees. Learning Management Systems, Objectives, and Key Results tools are digital and SaaS products that help employers analyze how their workforce is performing and train them when necessary to make their efforts more fruitful.

Along with these use cases, you can study how several popular businesses have adopted digital transformation. It is a necessary change for both organizations and individuals to adapt and learn.