Why Does Digital Transformation Strategy Matter?

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Transformation Strategy (145-slide PowerPoint presentation). Digital Transformation is being embraced by organizations across most industries, as the role of technology shifts from being a business enabler to a business driver. This has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thus, to remain competitive and outcompete in today's fast paced, [read more]

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In this age, digital transformation is not optional. Any business that wants to remain competitive and earn sustainable profitability. This approach involves making technology the center pillar for delivering value and enhancing customer outcomes in your venture.

However, many businesses do not understand the concept. To some, it is all about installing new technologies and digitizing various processes. They do not have a strategy for carrying out their digital transformation projects. If you belong to this group, you might be losing handsomely. Having a strategy for digital transformation is important. Here is why it matters:

It Offers You a Competitive Advantage

The success of any business is delivering the best value to its customers and remaining innovative. Your venture must make innovation part of its core value. Having a digital transformation strategy enables your business to realize this goal.

The strategy brings all teams on one page. This ensures collaboration and cooperation on aspects essential to your customers and business. This way, your business gains a competitive advantage by enhancing innovation, real-time responses to market changes, and offering the best customer experiences in its niche.

Improved Efficiency and Productivity

Modern businesses struggle with productivity and enhancing efficiency. The cost of running businesses is rising. In essence, some businesses are shutting down due to the inability to meet their operational costs. You can turn around by leveraging digital technologies. However, this does not end with installing new technology.

Considering digital transformation consulting as you implement new technologies can be a good idea. The assistance from these experts will enable you to automate manual processes, streamline workflows, and enhance collaboration. A digital transformation strategy will enable you to automate various tasks leaving the staff with time for other high-value activities. This way, your business will witness increased efficiency and productivity.

Enhance Cost Savings

Cost is a major setback to many businesses and one of the reasons why they need to undertake a digital transformation. Every entrepreneur understands that saved cost is equal to added profit.

Having a digital transformation strategy is important for a business seeking to enhance cost savings and efficiency. The strategy enables you to identify areas that require automation. Also, you will understand the type of technologies needed and their purposes. This way, you will enhance resource optimization and avoid wastage which transforms into low-cost business operations.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Customer experience is the dime in the modern business world. Your customers have high expectations you must meet consistently if you must retain them. For instance, your customer expects you to offer limitless choices, low prices, and speedy services. Your business must also provide a seamless digital and in-store experience while delivering high-quality services.

Digital transformation is core to enhancing long-term customer experience. The approach can help businesses provide personalized omnichannel experiences aligned with the dynamic nature of customer needs and expectations. It will allow your business to deliver a solid, unified user experience and interaction across all channels and touch points. As such, your customers will always feel cared for and valued, keeping them intact in your business.

It Will Power up Data-driven Decision-making

In a modern competitive marketplace, data is everything. Your position in the market will depend on the amount of data you have and how you utilize them for your business benefits. However, this data is not readily available. You must put in place systems and processes to help you gather quality and insightful information to power your venture decisions.

Here is where digital transformation strategy becomes critical. The strategy informs you on the most effective systems and approaches for accessing real-time information from the market. It offers you a series of data analytics and business intelligence solutions for data collection and analysis.

Also, you can determine the AI and machine learning tools to combine to help you understand your business operations, production, customer journey, experience, and finances. With this information, you will always make data-driven decisions to enhance your business operations and performance.

Makes Your Business Future-proofing

The Covid-19 pandemic taught entrepreneurs important lessons. Things can turn upside down and lead to the crashing of businesses. The lockdowns and restricted movement had a huge impact on many businesses globally. However, businesses that were future-ready survived and remained competitive.

One of the elements was digitization. Any business that had embraced digitization and workplace technology had a seamless transformation to the new nature. No one knows how the future things will turn. But the truth is technology will be the driving force.

Through digital transformation, you will prepare your venture for future disruptions and market changes. It will help you build agile and flexible structures to enhance your business operations and customer experiences.

In a word, a digital transformation strategy is an essential element in your business. It is a guide that will offer approaches to utilizing technology to deliver your customers the best value and experience. Hence, you need to prioritize having one before implementing any digital transformation program.

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Digital Transformation is being embraced by organizations of all sizes across most industries. In the Digital Age today, technology creates new opportunities and fundamentally transforms businesses in all aspects—operations, business models, strategies. It not only enables the business, but also drives its growth and can be a source of Competitive Advantage.

For many industries, COVID-19 has accelerated the timeline for Digital Transformation Programs by multiple years. Digital Transformation has become a necessity. Now, to survive in the Low Touch Economy—characterized by social distancing and a minimization of in-person activities—organizations must go digital. This includes offering digital solutions for both employees (e.g. Remote Work, Virtual Teams, Enterprise Cloud, etc.) and customers (e.g. E-commerce, Social Media, Mobile Apps, etc.).

Learn about our Digital Transformation Best Practice Frameworks here.