Five Steps to Digital Transformation
The world is a much more digital place today than it was twenty years ago, but many businesses still hang on to manual and paper processes. If this describes your company, consider the risk of avoiding digital transformation: your competitor may be headed for digital already.
For customers, the convenience of online and mobile access to their favorite brands is no longer a perk — it’s a requirement. Consider how often you reach for your smartphone to look something up; if a company isn’t focused on making things easy for you to find online, you’re likely to opt for their competitor that does. Here are five steps to making sure you’re reaping the benefits of digital transformation:
Make paper forms digital. Skip the spreadsheets and go straight to digital forms that work easily on a mobile device. Modern e-forms are user-friendly with automatic calculations, validation, and e-signatures, so you never have to print the form to finish it. Today’s digital forms don’t even require any coding knowledge, so you can simply drag and drop fields where you want them for a professional finish. Investing in a digital form platform is a great start to a digital transformation plan.
Automate processes. Once you have that form filled out, automate the associated processes. Each form has a path required to achieve the intention of the form, from a supervisor’s signature to initiate a set of actions. Automate these processes with conditional routing, escalations, and notifications to achieve the desired end.
Provide a data connection. A critical component of digital transformation is allowing access to relevant data, whether that means allowing purchase orders to access inventory platforms or customer history data that’s accessed by the customer relationship management platform.
Centralize data electronically. Invest in an electronic data storage system, and strongly consider whether this should be a cloud solution. Cloud data storage offers many advantages, including enhanced security features, scalability, redundancy, reduced costs, and accessibility from mobile devices.
Optimize. Once you’ve introduced digital transformation initiatives, you’ll likely never check it off your list. There are always ways to improve data sorting and analysis, for instance, and you’ll identify internal obstacles that need to be addressed. As you gain customer data, you’ll gain new insights into their buying behaviors, their preferences, and how well you respond to their concerns.
Digital transformation is an important process for companies that want to remain relevant in the future. From readily accessing customer data to providing digital forms that are easy and convenient to complete and submit, customers are demanding more in terms of their experiences. Contact us at Net Tel One Communications for more information about digital transformation and to discuss tools that can ease the transition.