As we cross over to the first week of 2018, we at Soft Solvers Solutions would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy & Prosperous Year ahead! Having been spearheading the Digital Transformation drive from mid-2017, we have huge plans for executing this campaign with a big bang this year.
From our observation, many organizations have still not been able to grasp the benefits of digital transformation. Digital transformation is vital in making every organization improve its efficiency and profitability. As the organization grows, processes become even more complex and many a time, more processes are put in place. This is when the digital transformation process has to kick in. This would greatly automate many of those arduous tasks and let employees perform better by doing what they do best. Turnaround time improves, employee morale is kept optimum and in that process, the entire organization benefits manifold.
Digital Transformation is not something that happens organization-wide overnight. It is a step by step process of automating each and every business function, be it Sales, Marketing, Human Resource, and every other aspect of the business. This incremental effort would have a build up effect over a period of time and the entire organization would find itself to be on an accelerated mode, all because of this collective automation effort that has been happening in every nook and corner of the organization.
Having spoken on the organization-wide benefits now let’s look at some of the benefits that the various departments or business functions would eventually gain from the digital transformation exercise. One of the key things that digital transformation would do for the sales team is to enable them with access to customer information anywhere anytime. With mobile and internet technologies, this is made possible and it empowers the Sales team to walk into meetings with confidence and full knowledge of the customer’s purchase history as well as all touch points. This enablement empowers them to close deals faster and reduce the sales cycle. For managers, there’s a wealth of charts and reports that are automated on a real-time basis that delivers meaningful data and helps manage the team in an even more efficient manner.
Not only does the Sales team benefit from this digital transformation exercise. The same could be applied to the Marketing team as well. The way things are done is cut short, saving a lot of time by automating many of the background processes and this enables the Marketing team to more efficiently reach a greater audience. Highly engaging marketing campaigns can be executed with ease and this would invariably generate quality leads that the Marketing team could nurture and eventually pass over to the Sales team for follow up. This end to end exercise is captured, results are recorded and this enables the Marketing team to execute marketing campaigns that deliver optimum results and maximum ROI.
The Finance team would also be empowered very differently. The way they approach work would also differ. Many of the menial and routine tasks would be taken off their shoulders as automation sets in. Tracking of invoices, payments, statuses of daily collections and many of the transactional level processes could be easily done with automated reports. This transactional level activity can be digitized and the entire backend work is taken care off by automating the billing cycle. Generating reports would have never been easier as these can now be easily generated with just a few clicks. This overall transformation gives the Finance team the needed edge to make meaningful decisions that would help take the organization to that desired level.
One of the most stressful departments in any organization would be Customer Service. They face customer grievances daily and their greatest challenge is managing all these complaints, ensuring proper follow-ups are done and eventually making sure that each and every one of these customers remains happy and loyal to the company. When Customer Service embraces digital transformation, this naturally puts state of the art technology in front of your customers for their convenience. Complaints could be lodged as and when it is needed instead of waiting for the next business day for a person to be available on the other end of the telephone. All interactions and touch points are recorded, escalations and workflows kick in and customers are never left out to dry. Imagine what this would do for your Customer Service team; employee morale improves, issues are resolved way faster than it used to be and customer satisfaction increases and in the long run, customer retention also increases with it.
Human Resource department would also be able to ride on the benefits of digital transformation. Many of the tedious processes would be cut short, paperwork would be reduced with digitization and record keeping would be much more organized. All those huge paper files would be replaced by online archival, employee information & history would be available in a matter of seconds and keeping track of leave application, approvals and leave balances are all done digitally. This effect would also cascade down to the Operations team which now can manage and plan their resources more efficiently. No more shortage of manpower on any specific day, projects & tasks can be digitally assigned & managed and managers would be able to get a birds-eye view of their entire team anytime anywhere.
The above are just some examples as to how digital transformation can deeply impact the entire organization and this shows why it is important for medium to large corporations to embrace this. Incremental changes in each and every department can have an exponential impact on the entire organization and it’s effectiveness. Top Management would now be able to request any reports anytime and these can be churned out in a matter of minutes. With the entire organization working on utmost efficiency, swift decision making can be done thus driving the whole organization in an accelerated mode to reach the desired destination.
We hope that we were able to shed some light on the importance of digital transformation. We shall be sharing more of these along with some case studies in the weeks to come. With this, we shall be signing off for the week and Thank you for reading this blog of ours. If you find our content to be a good read, kindly do share them with your friends. Till we meet again with a new blog post, here’s wishing all of you a blissful weekend!