The outcome of Digital transformation
The effectiveness of Digital Transformation is expected good.
But had anyone expected this to happen within years of adopting a disruptive technology? Here’s what BBVA’s CFO announced in the 8th Financial Encounter, which was organized by Expansion and KPMG. As he says – “The bank has made substantial progress in its digitization process in recent years: the mobile banking app has gone from offering 16% of products three years ago, to 80% currently, and will reach 90% next December.”
Digitization and Digital transformation bring in a game-changer – the data. Businesses that are data-driven have proven to be successful. Once you adopt digital transformation, your employee morale will increase, their efficiency will increase, they become more productive and profitable to your organization. It’s all data-driven! As your business has loads of data to analyze the customer behavior, their purchase patterns, the market trends, customer service pattern, the issues that are repeatedly popping up, the compliments that are pouring in for a specific aspect of your product/service etc. using Big Data Analytics, you can make good use of it to draw valuable insights. Using these insights, you can know what’s going right and what’s not. This analysis is largely being used by the decision-makers to take less risky decisions. Digital transformation is all about converting data to insight, insight to action, and action to outcome. Here’s what more you gain from digital transformation:
Best of both worlds
Digital transformation lets your business encompass the conventional and modern capabilities. The conventional processes are transformed into digital, sometimes, automated ones. This not only increases its speed, but also the efficiency of such processes. The decision-making still remains conventional, only its basis changes into solid data rather than assumptions. Data-driven decisions are proven to be successful.
Operational excellence
Data gives you insights into your processes. With digital transformation, you know exactly how long a certain process has taken to complete and what were the hurdles. Similarly, you also know what else can be digitized and/or automated. Digital transformation offers operational excellence. With the right data in your hand, you know how exactly you must use the right technology to make the most of the information at hand.
Follow the trends quickly
The transformation opens up your window to the current market trends. Since your company insights will be available with you instantly, you can compare that with the market trends and re-align your processes to compete with your rivals.
Better scalability
As your process/customer insights help to foresight the near future, your business can gear up to upscale or downscale comfortably. Real-time information offers better insights into what’s happening currently, and the cutting-edge technologies such as AI and ML offers better predictions which help businesses foresee scalability matters and prepare to face it tactfully.
Cut down on the risk
When your actions are based on solid insights they are less likely to carry major risks. Or, it would be known risks which you can prepare well in advance to combat. Risk management remains one of the major challenges in businesses. Typically, in a conventional model, the ratio of unknown risks will be far higher as strategies are formed based on assumptions. In a data-driven model, strategies are based on insights. Modern technologies such as AI and ML gives you a better prediction which is more based on these insights and probabilities calculated from the real-world data. Such predictions are less likely to fail and also offer a better foresight into what risks can be expected. With digital transformation, you can cut down on the risks.
Increase productivity and service levels
Digital transformation involves a complete process transformation into digital. Though ERPs and MIS offers insights into the business’ profitability and cost factors, they seldom offer insights into process efficiency or offer suggestions for improvements. With IoT and analytics-based AI systems, you can now plan and schedule better and also gain from automation. According to IDC, an end to end closed loop of digitized processes will make your business processes more effective and resources more efficient and productive.
As Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell puts it “The idea of the digital workplace is to bring that same simplicity and intuitiveness to employees when they’re doing their mission-critical work.” He further adds that an impressive customer experience is possible only when there’s an impressive employee experience which can be assured with digital transformation. Data-driven workplaces make the employees feel like working on mission-critical projects. Since every process is being recorded digitally, including the timestamp, they realize that being time-efficient is critical to their existence which must be appreciated by the management. This will ultimately reflect in customer service also.
Increased Customer Engagement & Retention
With Big Data analytics, AI and ML, the patterns and predictions are driven by real-time data. This means that as soon as a customer opens your website, you can be ready with a personalized page with recommendations based on data analytics. AI and ML adds another dimension to the patterns drawn from the information giving the business a more trustable foresight. Personalization and recommendation are two major influencers in effective marketing. They need extensive volumes of data to analyze to come up with more accurate recommendations and predictions. Digital transformation offers that data.
Increase in Sales
End of the day, every business wants to hear this – increased sales! According to the MIT Center for Digital Business, “Companies that have embraced digital transformation are 26% more profitable than their average industry competitors and enjoy a 12% higher market valuation.” As the process efficiency, productivity, resource efficiency and customer engagement level increases, it facilitates increased sales. As newer technologies are adopted and integrated, data flow remains consistent and continuous which ensures that the analytics are more accurately based on real-time data. Lead generation is influenced by this data which makes it more effective. As leads turn into customers and customers turn loyal, the brand value and profitability of the business increases significantly.
Conclusion
Digital Transformation affects the business in every minute process. The more effective the transformation is, the better the benefits gained by the business. In a well-planned environment, strategic digital transformation will prove to be extremely beneficial to all businesses. From lead generation to customer retention and superior employee experience, digital disruption enhances the business in every aspect making it profitable and sustainable in the long-term.
