There’s a lot being said about digital transformation this year, especially in light of the pandemic driving all things online. When we take the on subject, its sometimes easily confused with buying in more technology and using expensive automated systems to speed up processes. This isn’t always the case.
Digital transformation in a business means doing your research into shifts in your customer behaviour towards digital. Working back from there, it’s important to understand how that forms the basis of ensuring every interaction your customers have with your business is a simple and stress free one.
Why is digital transformation important?
Put simply, if you don’t do it, your competitors will. In a world that is so digitally advanced, you need to be one step ahead. With a sound strategy, you’ll always be able to adapt and survive. Never lose touch with digital trends and customer feedback.
If you can recognise a shift, your customers will keep coming back. For big established businesses it can be hard to stay agile, simply due to the amount of stakeholders and change it takes to implement a new process or system.
For SMB’s it’s much easier, especially the start ups, tech is often what they do and even if it isn’t its just a natural path for them to take. The adage of ‘thinking like a start up’ can really come to the fore when you come to start your plan, imagine a clean slate and build on it from there.
Where do I go from here?
- Data & behaviours
Start with your data, find out as much as you can from your analytics as to where your customers are, how they behave and interact online. You want to make it as simple as possible for them to reach your end goals and purchase or engage with you.
Theres nothing more frustrating than having to get through a lot of red tape to make a payment for example. Could you skim their data from their sign in and pre-populate? Perhaps use a Google or social sign-up interface. No one wants to tap in their name, address, banks details and inside leg measurement if they don’t have to.
Likewise with live chat, perhaps think about using a bot to take enquires and give out insights, case studies and product tours. You can pretend it’s a person or be upfront about it, either way, these AI team members can easily and quickly qualify your leads in and leave you with a nice list of contacts to follow up.
Always remember, the better the experience customers have with your brand online, the more referrals you’ll get.
2. Aim for the target
Start with what it is you want to achieve and work backwards. Perhaps you want someone to download gated content so you can capture their details and work the lead from there. How do you go about it?
Put yourself into the mindset of the customer, not many people give away their email address easily for fear of the dreaded spam. How valuable do you make that content so they can’t help but fill it in? Or do you make a clear promise not to bother them? Buyer personas come in handy here too. Its worth having those ready to shape this part of your strategy.
When you really understand your customer and what motivates them to buy, then you can create high value content for them they will want to consume.
3. Linking your systems
If you do go down the road of implementing say a new CRM, accounting or analysis tool, make sure they all work together or at least integrate in some way.
Do your research, luckily this is now way more advanced than it used to be and the integration market is vast. Just make sure your platforms talk to each other easily, this is essential to see the ‘bigger picture’.
If you have a legacy system that struggles to work with anything and the integration is clunky or woolly at best, it might be time to make a bigger change. Most SaaS packages are easy to implement and can be simply scaled up or down to meet the needs of your business.
Biting the bullet to futureproof your business and enhance your digital transformation journey needs to be done at some point for any business to stay ahead.
Collaboration is also key, both with your internal teams and customers. This forms the basis of your ongoing success.
4. Protection
As with any new foray into advancing your business, make sure you keep precious data safe and protected. Should the worst happen, you need to make sure you have a sound backup in place. If you migrate your data to another platform for example and something goes wrong, you need to make sure everything is retrievable.
Likewise make sure your cyber security protocols are adhered to and there’s no chance of any data breaches or leaks. Its easy to overlook these as you start on your journey but its imperative you have them in place to avoid data and revenue loss.
We’re always here to talk all things digital and to help and advise you along the way. If you’re starting on your journey we can help with the cloud infrastructure basics right up to the complex networking and hosting. Call us on 01225 776555 or email us here.
