Digital technology is constantly evolving and being revolutionized by industry leaders, making it difficult for businesses to keep up. As such, these businesses tend to fall behind the curve with digital technologies, which in turn costs them clients, time, revenue, and opportunities.
Digital technologies should streamline every process in your business to make your team more efficient and effective rather than getting in the way of success. Keeping up with new and evolving workplace technologies and using them to streamline and improve business processes is referred to as digital transformation.
Like digital technologies, a company’s digital needs are constantly changing and evolving, requiring reassessment every two to three years in order to stay comfortably ahead of the curve. These changing and evolving needs are largely influenced by the rate of technological advancement. For example, in just a period of just two years, Google has implemented advanced AI and machine learning features and capabilities in its popular G Suite solution. These new features have gone a long way towards improving employee efficiency, collaboration, and productivity.
Successfully implementing digital transformation is something that even enterprise-level and digitally savvy businesses struggle with. This struggle is even more common for businesses in more traditional sectors. Smaller workplaces with less than 100 employees are twice as likely to successfully implement digital transformation than large businesses with 50,000 or more employees.
Though the threat of a failed digital transformation is present, the benefits of successful transformation are unparalleled for businesses of all sizes and sectors. From increased productivity and streamlined processes to improved customer satisfaction and overall better customer experience, there are many reasons why your business needs to stay ahead of the curve and take advantage of the latest digital technologies. With so much at stake, there’s simply no room for failure when it comes to digital transformation.
How your business will be transformed
The most outwardly noticeable effect of digital transformation comes in the form of enhanced customer experience, which is ultimately one of the main goals of a digital transformation. Modern customers expect simple, fast, and reliable service from the brands that they engage with. Your business’s transformation will mean that the service expectations of customers are exceeded. Customers will be far more likely to engage with your brand when they see that your business is consistently working to meet their needs and enhance their experience, making you more interesting and relevant in the eyes of new and returning customers. Using digital transformation to enhance customer value will go a long way in retaining customers and customer loyalty, and generating leads.
Internally, your team will see massive strides in efficiency, as they will be working with digital technologies that allow them to better collaborate interdepartmentally, as well as with remote employees. This lets your team share ideas and information with each other, creating a stronger team that is able to solve even the toughest challenges and meet the tightest deadlines.
After a successful digital transformation, formerly time-consuming processes are now streamlined and simplified, giving your team members more time and energy to focus on tasks that actually matter. In addition, staying in the loop and interfacing with team members through conference calls or video and audio chat is easier than ever before with digital tools that work together.
What a successful digital transformation should look like
A successful digital transformation will completely redefine the way you do business, putting you and your team on the cutting edge of workplace technology. This will transform your business in a variety of ways, ultimately enhancing the experience of everybody from management to customers.
Every one of your workplace technology solutions will ideally work together to create a unified workflow that allows team members to work collaboratively and easily communicate with each other, no matter what department they’re in, or where they’re working from. While the initial price tag of your business’s digital transformation may not seem cheaper than your previous technology stack, the benefits offered by digital transformation will go a long way to offset the costs by maximizing the time of employees and greatly increasing their efficiency.
When looking to transform your business, the most important thing management needs to do is ensure full adoption by your teams. Without everybody working together within the same tools, your operations will not be as efficient or effective as they would be with full adoption. Business intelligence tools can be used by management to identify team members who are hesitant to adopt new technologies and processes, allowing you to address these problems and arrange for additional training for these employees. This can be achieved by selecting a member of the executive team to be a champion of the rollout and ensuring that they are extensively trained and informed. This way, your executives are leading from the top rather than telling employees what to do without their own experience with the technology. Staff inherently trust this approach more, and it could be useful for change-resistant employees.
Ideally, digital transformation will be successfully implemented without any interruption to your day-to-day operations, with teams working within solutions that they may already be somewhat familiar with, reducing training time and making the transition far more comfortable. Additionally, unified digital tools designed to work together reduces the overall training required by team members, as they’ll be able to pick up a variety of tools simultaneously.
Everybody needs to be at the table for a successful digital transformation
In order for digital transformation to be successful, it needs to involve everybody in the organization - including C-suite executives. Digital transformation affects every aspect of a company’s DNA and has major impacts on the company’s bottom line, brand awareness, and on the experience of customers.
Digital transformation can’t be developed or implemented by a strict IT-focused team, but rather should draw influence from members of the board, IT specialists, as well as lower-ranking team members. With the board involved in the transformation, digital initiatives have a greater chance of success, especially when C-suite executives are directly involved in the process rather than simply delegating tasks. There’s too much at stake to write off these business-changing technologies and processes. Any significant change within a company demands strong leadership that isn’t afraid to take chances or get their hands dirty. It’s been reported that 56% of CEOs who successfully led digital transformation in their workplace realized an increase in profits.
Digital tools that will transform your business
A major part of your digital transformation will be the implementation of a unified workflow, featuring digital tools that work together in order to boost employee productivity and efficiency. With a unified workflow, your business email inbox, productivity suite, CRM solution, and telephony system integrate and interact with each other, acting as one easy-to-use collection of tools that benefits both employees and customers.
Team members can easily collaborate and communicate with each other in G Suite apps like Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Hangouts Meet, bringing your team closer together. Telephony calls can be made and received from a team member’s Gmail inbox, where they will also be able to access and log customer data in their CRM solution without switching tools. Employees can even log sales calls from their telephony system directly into their cloud-based CRM solution, giving them instant access to in-depth histories and information about existing customers and leads.
A long history of digital transformation success stories
UpCurve Cloud has a long history of successfully guiding businesses of all sizes through digital transformation, offering a variety of easy-to-manage integrated digital solutions that immediately show tangible benefits for employees, customers, and the bottom line. One of our proudest accomplishments came with Coolhaus, an artisanal ice cream maker that experienced challenges regarding burdensome practices, lack of mobile support and security, and problems regarding collaboration and communication capabilities. UpCurve Cloud stepped in to provide Coolhaus with the digital tools needed to overcome their problems and improve their overall experience. G Suite was implemented to allow employees instant access to emails, documents, and calendars, offering the mobile capabilities that Coolhaus so badly needed. G Suite also allowed team members to communicate and collaborate freely and offered enhanced security that the company could rely on.
To find out how UpCurve Cloud can help guide your business through its digital transformation with integrated workplace solutions like G Suite, cloud-based CRM solutions, and telephony, contact us today.
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