There is no doubt the world is changing fast. The reason: Digital. Because of the changes from digital technology, businesses must adjust and adapt to stay profitable and relevant. You must understand your pain points and challenges in this new world and transform to overcome them.
Embracing digital is not as complicated as it may initially appear, and it can significantly impact your business. To simplify digital transformation, we can divide it in two different approaches. Both improve your business’ ROI and increase revenue.
Improve Business Process
Let’s start with business processes and how digital can improve these systems to reduce costs and time.
Remember switchboard operators? They had to manually connect calls, repeating the same steps over and over 24/7/365. Technology allowed that task to be automated, speeding up the process and allowing for more calls to be made every day.
Artificial Intelligence and cognitive technology is the latest way digital can make our lives and jobs easier. It can automate processes inside and outside of IT. For example, a customer attempting to purchase an airline ticket but has questions about the baggage limits, costs, size, etc. An AI assistant with natural language processing and deep learning can help answer consumer questions quickly, improving efficiency for both you and your customers.
New advancements in data analytics are allowing companies to discover new pain points and then proactively respond. It’s no longer a dream that your computer can warn you before a problem and in some cases, fix itself. This is not only less frustrating but more productive for employees.
These technologies can be applied across industries and departments. Factories can apply Industry 4.0 and IoT methods to improve plant productivity and reduce downtime. HR, legal and finance can skip manual document scanning and used Advanced Optical Character Recognition to transfer documents into searchable and shareable computer files. These are only a few of the examples of business applying digital to improve business processes.
Create New Business Models
Now that we’ve optimized your business processes, you can also open your business up to new revenue potential.
An easy example of this is a brick and mortar retailer opening up an ecommerce store online. This digital business model allows you to reach a new and unlimited customer base. Instead of your local or regional customer base, you can now reach the world of almost 8 billion customers.
Digital also provides you a better view of your customer and their needs. When you have a better understanding of their pain points and challenges, you can create new products and services to serve that need. Amazon keeps reinventing itself by doing this, understanding customers’ needs and then meeting them. The company isn’t about books anymore, it’s about the simplest and fastest shopping experience.
Both of these approaches to digital transformation are important to your business for the future. The digital world will only get more tech driven and dynamic. The speed of change is increasing, and by embracing digital you will be able to keep up and jump ahead of your market competitors.
*Beth Gebrai is the Vice President of Process Leadership and PreSales for Stefanini