Digital transformation is something that has become more prevalent ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, and is a great way to upgrade your business to better fit into today’s market. Thanks to the changes brought about by lockdowns and a need to avoid interpersonal contact, innovations have sprung forward in the past 18 months in new ways, some successful some not.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the process of re-organizing your business’s approach to technology, integrating it with your services in order to improve the way your processes function. This lets you cast a wider net in terms of customer base, give a more streamlined approach when it comes to things like online ordering and advertisements, and allows you to develop new business models and revenue streams that you might otherwise miss out on.
Digital transformation is a top-down approach, meaning it needs to be planned at the highest levels before implementing. The process by which you digitize is called your digital strategy, and is created by CEOs and bosses in most cases with the goal of utilizing digital assets to their fullest potential.
Creating Your Digital Strategy
There are four key steps in creating your strategy. First you need to research your position — your assets, your customer base and your competitors are good places to start. You then need to analyze said research in order to see how effective digitization might be on your revenues.
Once that’s done, you need to plan your vision, pick what you want to achieve and lay out a course which will make your ideas possible. One of the key pieces here is your interface strategy, which is using your existing platforms and digital assets in order to kick-start the process. While you aren’t limited to using the platforms you’re already invested in, it’s a good idea to utilize them as a test case rather than investing in new technology assets which might prove ineffective.
Integrating New Technology — What to Use
One of the most important questions when considering how to implement a digital strategy is what platforms to use. This will largely depend on your product/services and your customer base, after all the more tech-savvy younger generations aren’t likely to respond well to calls or emails. The reverse is true if you’re planning on having older people as your main demographic, who aren’t as likely to be up to date with apps or social media sites.
Getting the Most out of Your Technology
If you want to get the most out of your technology, you’ll need to understand your technology’s potential. Finding new ways to provide services and speed up processes should be your end goal, not just doing the same things in a different way.
Things to Consider
Starting with the basics, there are several questions you can ask. Importantly, what are your platforms’ capabilities? What are some limitations? How do we plan to use this technology in order to make things easier? What is the end goal for digitization?
Focus on the Customer
Your customers drive your digitization methods, as they’re the ones who’ll be testing and reviewing the new approaches you take and telling you which ones work and which don’t. While raw numbers can be useful in telling you how many people are using what platforms, more detailed feedback can be great in the early stages when things are flexible. You need to be prepared to reconsider the way you do things and how to approach problems when it comes to the digital side of things.
Some Great Digitization Examples
Warby Parker made great use of the “always follow the customer” approach, surveying and tracking feedback which has made for some great adaptations. They’ve integrated technology deeply with their Try-On app as far back as 2019, which lets people see the fit of glasses without stepping foot into a store. It has saved customers time, employees time and has made the overall process of purchasing from them way more pleasant on the customer end.
Microsoft saw increased competition from Apple and other companies in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which made them rethink their strategy. They moved focus away from traditional software to cloud systems and other more fluid software, widening their net and raising their revenues.
Netflix switched its focus from renting DVDs to the new online streaming services that it’s now known for today. Out of the many businesses in the DVD rental business, they were the most on the ball when it came to digitization — a lesson that Blockbuster didn’t learn until much too late.
Discovery-Driven Planning
In the post-COVID age the process of digitization is often rushed and uncertain, with strategies during the pandemic being laid out without all the facts — what would normally be months of planning and research had to be cut down to weeks in order to let businesses adapt to the new circumstances they found themselves in.
The greatest way to adapt to the uncertainty and to be flexible in your approach is discovery-driven planning. This is the idea that you factor in new data as it becomes available, changing your approach to digitization as you see what works and what doesn’t.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
Using discovery-driven planning is great, but if you only invest in one platform it can be really difficult to see any useful information. By using multiple platforms and testing each one on a small scale, you can have an idea of how things are progressing and what’s working as you go. It’s a wait and see approach, which uses benchmarks as a measure of success rather than overall effectiveness. In this, failures aren’t necessarily wastes of money and resources, since you can apply what you learned from them to better your approach to other methods.
