Our digital era has seen technological changes occur at a rate faster than ever before. Most recently, the global pandemic has created increased urgency for businesses to step up their digital transformation efforts and adapt to these challenging times.
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If businesses want to stay ahead of the curve and rise to success, they must embrace digital innovations or run the risk of being left behind. In this blog, we discuss what digital transformation is, why it’s important for businesses of all sizes, and share our top digital transformation tips for success.
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What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the process of leveraging digital technologies to reimagine key aspects of business, such as how you manage business operations, engage with customers, and deliver value. Through embracing new and innovative technologies, businesses are modifying their existing business processes, or creating entirely new ones altogether, to meet shifting market requirements.
Gone are the days of keeping hand-written ledgers and floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets. Digital transformation allows businesses of all sizes to remain agile, adaptive, and ready to grow – no matter what challenges come their way.
Top Tips for Digital Transformation Success
Whether you’ve just embarked on your digital transformation journey or you’ve been implementing digital transformation practices for years – the following 5 tips will ensure you stay on the road to success.
1. Identify your digital transformation objectives
Digital transformation can involve re-thinking and re-designing entire business models, so the planning stage serves as a vital foundation to your future success. Before you begin implementing your transformation strategy, think about what your intentions and priorities will be moving forward.
This might include objectives such as enhancing the end-user experience to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue; analysing data to make better informed decisions; or altering business processes to reduce operational costs and boost productivity, for example.
2. Think about how your day-to-day tasks can receive a digital upgrade
Often, it’s the small day-to-day tasks that businesses might overlook in their digital transformation, such as file storage and sharing, communication among staff, and employee expense management. These processes are extremely easy to upgrade to more innovative digital methods and though they might seem menial, play an important role in boosting productivity, reducing costs, and making business processes more efficient.
3. Communicate with customers via digital methods
Along with focusing on digitally effective methods of communication among staff, you should also implement new and improved digital communication methods for customers. Think about AI-powered chat bots, for example, which have dramatically risen in popularity over the past few years. Not only do they serve as a welcoming presence on your site, but they also reduce the time customers must wait to receive a response to a simple or common inquiry.
4. Utilise cloud-based services
Cloud-based software delivers on-demand computing services that are available remotely. They’re quick and easy to implement into all areas of your business and you’ll never have to worry about losing vital information again.
Here at ExpenseIn, for example, our cloud-based software combines receipt scanning, automated policy enforcement and seamless integration with the most popular accounting packages to make expense management effortless.
5. Empower staff to work in new and innovative ways
Last but not least, it’s one thing to implement ground-breaking digital processes into your business, but unless your staff are trained to work in these new and innovative ways, you won’t reach your full potential. Determine which skill-building programs are necessary to run and for which employees. Additionally, define how you can develop your employees’ knowledge and train them to adapt to these new mindsets and behaviours.
