With ongoing digital disruption transforming everything in its path, businesses need to find a way to respond to changing customer expectations. Whether embarking on or continuing a digital transformation journey, one thing is clear, digital transformation is now a matter of survival for many businesses.
What is digital transformation?
So much more than upgrading technology to automate business processes or integrate business systems, true digital transformation marks a major shift in how a business uses technology, people, and processes to innovate.
At its core, digital transformation is about using digital technologies like mobile, data analytics and smart embedded devices to reinvent customer relationships and business processes.
Digital transformation strategy
In the digital era, credibly transforming an organisation with new technologies, data security, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and analytics, and the Internet of Things must take centre stage.
To get the strategy right, digital transformation must be fully aligned with the business’ overall vision, mission, heritage, and planned future. And one of the first things a business needs to do ahead of embarking on its digital transformation journey is answer the critical question: What business outcomes do you want to achieve for customers?
Ensuring technology adoption delivers valuable business outcomes requires a sharp focus on the customer and what they want. Now more than ever, technology and economic forces have put customers in control of their interactions with businesses.
4 success factors for digital transformation
1. Customer experience
To better serve customers in a global and digital economy, businesses must invest in new technology and business models with a focus on the customer experience. Focusing digital transformation on the customer experience forces your business to address all the customer touchpoints, including marketing campaigns, interactions with sales people and processes, and where they first encounter your company’s products and services.
2. Leadership and culture
Digital transformation needs to be owned by the CEO and supported from the top down. Having the right leadership for your digital transformation efforts is critical to moving your goals forward, as is fostering a culture where your people are given the opportunity to do their best work.
3. New technologies
Digital transformation is all about making optimal use of the new and emerging technologies available right now to improve business operations and performance.
For example, with so many employees forced to work from home, businesses that have adopted cloud technologies such as software-as-a-service apps like UCaaS smoothly switched their workforces into remote work routines. With UCaaS, employees can securely connect to the corporate network and collaborate using their preferred communication channels from home on their own devices, while businesses can quickly scale up and down to support enterprise mobility.
4. Data-driven decision-making
As automation and digitisation generates insights into your business processes, customers and services, it’s essential to use this data to inform and guide decisions. Businesses need to take advantage of all data sources, connecting back-office systems and real-time Internet of Things sensors to collect insights from just about everything to improve both the accuracy and timeliness of business decisions.
Accelerating innovation
The need to accelerate innovation and experiment with new digital services and capabilities has never been greater. Whether it’s to stay at least one step ahead of the competition by enhancing existing offerings or venturing into new markets – for many businesses, digital transformation is now a matter of survival.
If COVID-19 has sparked a change in how your business uses new technologies to operate, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know if you’ll continue to support remote working after the COVID-19 restrictions lift by taking our quick poll.
