Digital transformation is the adoption of a combination of new digital technologies and processes tocreate new, or modify existing business processes and customer experiences. It represents a cultural shift and makes a business impact on three primary pillars:
According to the SMB Group-conducted U.S. Small and Medium Business Digital Transformation Study of over 1000 employees, 81% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that using new technology effectively with digital transformation is key to their company’s survival and growth.
In today’s dynamic digital economy, customers interact with your business in new ways. Their experience, together with their expectations of performance and security, greatly influences their purchase decisions. Therefore, digital transformation becomes critical for small businesses to stay agile, reduce time-to-decision, transform radically to adapt to the marketplace, drive new business growth, and stay ahead of the competition.
Here are the major ways that digital transformation impacts your business
1. Attracts New Customers
Digital transformation requires the business to experiment often as it continually applies cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, robotics, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) to enable new types of products and processes. This gives businesses the chance to present new offerings to attract new customers as they strive to adapt to the competitive industry landscape.
2. Creates Data-based Insights
One of the major benefits of going digital is the ability to create a data-driven environment. Digitalization allows businesses to combine data from customer interactions and formerly unstructured sources into more useful and actionable data-backed insights. This helps businesses optimize strategies and processes. The swift flow of data-driven insights, and automated workflows, allows real-time feedback and agility, making it easier to grow and expand.
3. Fuels Growth
Digital transformation promotes deep alignment of business goals and IT’s efforts to support and supply technology to the business. This collaboration fosters a culture and environment that combines agile methodologies and practices with today’s powerful digital technologies to quickly adapt, modify, and continuously drive growth and profitability. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey of 600 global companies, 83% plan to increase, or say they expect to increase, investments in digital transformation in the next 12 months.
4. Streamlines Operations
Central to digital transformation is the ability to consolidate the business operations and processes, resulting in increased speed to market. By eliminating the dependency on legacy IT systems, businesses make themselves more nimble and agile and can swiftly respond to changing market trends and demands.
5. Improves Employee Productivity and Customer Experience
Digital transformation involves the use of technology to automate processes and reduce the workload on employees completing time-consuming tasks. This frees up time for tasks that matter and shifts the focus to what customers want, thus enhancing the customer experience. Additionally, new technologies further create capabilities that can help the business acquire, retail, and assist customers.
Small and mid-sized businesses that are succeeding with ground-breaking innovation and faster growth aren’t doing it on their own. They are collaborating with strategic technology partners like Analytix to embrace technology and redefine customer experiences as well as traditional ecosystems and business models.
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