At any stage of the business lifecycle, taking necessary steps to increase overall value sets the business to thrive with longevity. Whether as a growing start-up, an investor’s dream, or a successful acquisition, how much your business is worth significantly impacts future opportunities.
There are many factors to consider when driving business value through a recession. Digital transformation helps improve a few key factors that fundamentally improve how the business operates and delivers value to customers.
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Let’s explore digital transformation and how a business can make its digital transformation journey successful.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation integrates technology into all aspects of a business to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the overall customer experience.
It can be anything from automating manual tasks to adopting cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
By adopting new technologies and processes, you can improve efficiency and productivity, which will ultimately lead to increased financial performance.
In addition to its many other benefits, digital transformation has the potential to enable businesses to enhance customer experiences, which is increasingly crucial as customer expectations continue to evolve rapidly due to the widespread use of mobile devices and the emergence of digital natives.
For example, a small retail store can benefit significantly from integrating an e-commerce platform, allowing the business to reach a more extensive customer base and provide a more convenient shopping experience.
A business that still uses manual processes may struggle to keep up with rivals that use automated systems, such as point-of-sale systems, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and supply chain management platforms.
Give Your Business a Digital Makeover.
If you think your business could do with a digital makeover for increased efficiency or want to reap the benefits of technology, here are a few steps to assist you with digital transformation.
Assess Your Current Processes.
To successfully execute a digital transformation strategy, assessing your business’s existing processes, customer touchpoints, and potential customer pain points is the first step. It would be best if you started by identifying the following:
- How are you managing your inventory?
- How do you process requests?
- How can a customer view your product/service?
- How quickly are you able to handle complaints?
- How simple is the sales process from start to end?
- What tasks are consuming most of your time?
Once you have identified gaps in these areas, you can begin developing a plan for implementing digital technologies to address its unique needs. Examples could be a digital inventory system that can reduce time and human error or a ChatBot that can direct the customer to relevant information.
Analysing business performance metrics can uncover workflow chokeholds and which business areas profit most. These are areas to focus on for potential growth.
It’s Important To Start Small
The best approach to digital transformation is to start with small, incremental changes. Whilst finding the best solutions for your unique business needs is essential, it’s equally important to consider change management of such solutions when integrated into the business. Staff adoption and training will make or break your digital transformation strategy.
As you and your staff become more comfortable with the technology and process changes, you can add more advanced tools to improve efficiencies and automate other areas of business operations.
One of the key benefits of digital transformation is increased efficiency – A key value driver in business. Efficiency drivers are essential because they enable companies to operate more smoothly and effectively.
Improving the Customer’s Digital Experience.
Another benefit of digital transformation is improved customer experiences. For example, a business that adopts a CRM system can gain deeper insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and needs.
By analysing CRM data, the business can identify the evolved buying behaviours of customers and tailor digital buying experiences, products and services to meet customer expectations better and increase customer satisfaction. This, in turn, can lead to increased customer loyalty and repeat business, which are key value drivers.
Digital transformation should also be considered at a point-of-sale level. For example, a local restaurant struggling with a cumbersome manual ordering and fulfilment process can implement an online ordering system that streamlines its operations, reduces wait times, and improves the accuracy of orders. This, in turn, leads to increased customer satisfaction and repeat business, which is highly valuable in challenging economic conditions.
Additionally, an automatic feedback system post-purchase could result in deeper insight and produce overriding patterns of business performance, product or service performance, and customer expectations.
By analysing this data, the business can understand what other products/services are in demand in your current market and how best your business can fulfil the need.
Analyse your current customer experience and customer buying behaviours to determine how you can transform them into digital experiences and touchpoints.
Use Existing Resources More Efficiently.
Changing processes to suit the technology is not enough value in itself. Automating and streamlining mundane and time-consuming tasks allows current resources (e.g. staff) to be utilised elsewhere.
With the time saved from automating specific tasks, staff can focus more on human-centred tasks such as customer service, product development, and marketing.
Prioritising aspects of the business that result in increased profitability means that resources can be utilised for the highest return.
Digital Transformation Is A Competitive Advantage.
Digital transformation is essential for small to medium businesses to remain competitive in today’s fast-paced digital landscape and build value.
Companies can increase efficiency, improve customer experiences, and drive continued growth by assessing the businesses’ unique needs and adopting digital technologies.
In today’s fast-moving business landscape, where the economic conditions are harsh for some, winning companies embrace digital transformation to survive and thrive whilst simultaneously building business value.
If you are looking for the proper value drivers in your business and need help understanding how to add more value, contact us today. Our valuation specialists will help you build a more resilient and high-performing company.
Contact one of our experts at enquiries@afpaccounting.com.au or call (02) 7804 1849.
