At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… if they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate digital technologies.” - John Chambers, CISCO
For the last decade or so, the focus on digitalization has been immense. Companies, irrespective of the industries they are in, are on a fast-track mode to digitalize various aspects of their business. This trend has further been catapulted by the onslaught of the Covid pandemic on businesses worldwide. The pandemic has brought to the fore the very fact that companies were dodging for so long – the potential long-term gains which digitalization initiatives can provide when one considers the cost of operations or dishing out seamless customer experiences.
Digital transformation has had a bad reputation as a buzzword that might not have true meaning. This may stem from many business leaders attempting at going digital but creating little or no business value in the end. With little or no options available to businesses, most companies are scrambling to sell products and services online with the hope to stay afloat. That might be a mere band-aid solution to what possibly should be a longer-term strategic shift.
By implementing a chatbot or an e-commerce store or placing ERP modules in place, companies are hoping to digitally transform their businesses to the next level. More often than not companies are looking to deploy pieces of technology in isolation in their quest to go digital. By integrating these isolated technology solutions and connecting them either using APIs or RPA to form a digital ecosystem, it might not be ideal from a digital transformation perspective in the longer term.
The New Normal: A dynamic business environment
The changing consumer outlook and buying behavior because of the pandemic will push companies to redefine how they sell during and after the pandemic. What is also bound to change is how companies go about their daily operations – regardless of whether you’re on a skeletal workforce on-site, 50% capacity, or 100% capacity.
We’ve identified four common areas that every company would have to focus on:
Remote work enablement- Providing the right tools for employees across different departments & roles to stay productive, even if they are working remotely.
Paperless interactions- Minimizing points of physical contact on-site (whether it’s employee-to-employee or employee-to-customer) by bringing most of the traditional paper forms online.
Crisis response- Creating flexible workflows that will be triggered when an employee falls ill or a sudden surge in cases leading to a stricter quarantine.
Process efficiency- Simplifying processes to support remote work, and automating basic decision-making to address management-level bottlenecks.
These all point to the fact that companies need to accelerate digital transformation.
But wait, what exactly is a Digital Transformation Strategy?
As suggested by Enterprise Project ‘Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It's also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.’
Digital transformation simply means creating great customer and stakeholder experiences, leveraging digital technologies. It is about using technology to bring to life seamless, convenient, transparent, and (most importantly) relevant experiences for customers and stakeholders alike.
It’s a shift from looking at human-machine interactions from a systems perspective (as with creating systems architecture diagrams) to a customer-centric perspective. How your internal processes and systems should operate is no longer your company’s call – it’s your customer’s call now. Going digital aligns perfectly with the changing times, from the need to reach customers online, to the need to adapt to remote work arrangements, to the need to minimize physical contact at the workplace.
The mistake – clubbing together random and isolated pieces of technology solutions
Now that we have identified what it means to digitally transform, the logical next step is to understand how to go about it. To survive in this volatile environment, your company has probably initiated digital transformation. But in reality, it’s just a mish-mash of email, chat, and disjointed apps that barely enable people to work from home or take care of some basic chores for the company.
However, these random applications working in isolation would end up causing more damage than any potential benefit. Even if you attempt clubbing them together in your digital ecosystem and while you might achieve some level of interoperability to facilitate data transfer, it would be far from achieving a comprehensive digital transformation catering to the unmet needs of customers and stakeholders.
This kind of patchwork digital transformation strategy would have the company grappling with several issues which would need to be tackled:
Ensuring extendibility- Beyond the core system and the ERPs, the IT is tasked with ensuring that the requests for business users are met and that all the existing gaps and automation requirements are catered to. By implementing random technology applications, it would be difficult to bring all stakeholders on one platform to ensure a seamless data flow.
Overall lack of visibility- There have been often cases when service agents log into multiple systems to complete a request. A large majority of their efforts and time is lost in copying data from one system to another; not to mention any manual errors which could potentially lead to inefficiencies in the system. This would be the case if the organization does not have a big-picture strategic direction behind the digital initiatives they are implementing. It should also be mentioned that if all stakeholders and data are present on one unified system, it would make it easier for creating reports and generating insights from them to drive business results.
Operational inefficiency- If you are not clubbing disparate pieces of technology with each other, you can achieve so much more. With predefined rules that trigger actions or alerts, a layer of automation could be created which would ensure a minimum manual intervention. Paper forms and bills are eliminated through creating digital versions of it securely stored on the cloud and easily accessible when needed. Streamlining processes ensure that all the actors play their part in the system which is orchestrated effectively by the suite you choose to glue the technology with together.
The need for engaging experiences- Driven by experiences in the consumer world, users are demanding fast and engaging enterprise applications that go beyond providing merely a utilitarian experience, which would be the case if say a chatbot is deployed, without connecting it to defined workflows with automated triggers built-in.
Scalability concerns- It might still be manageable to have disparate technology applications working in isolation if the business is small and could still be managed by a handful of agents. The problems start creeping in once the organization looks to scale its operations to cater to a larger customer base and manage heterogeneous environments with a single dashboard.
Regulatory compliance risk- Having an automation platform ensures that all facets of regulatory guidelines are addressed. Having digital auditable trails ensures that no action on the system could be overlooked. Pre-defined rules on your automation platform ensure that all actors stick to the timelines assigned to them to avoid any automatic escalation. Pre-set templates outline the form fields that capture the information needed by process owners and ensure that all aspects of compliance are maintained and monitored, even when there is little or no activity in the office.
QuickReach: Defining your New Normal
There has to be a better way to go digital and thrive during these uncertain times. The pressure to reduce costs, work with skeletal workflows, manage customer expectations have to be tacked by a well thought digital transformation strategy complemented by a platform that not just helps you customize applications to meet your unique process needs, but also help launch them at a fraction of cost and time.
QuickReach, a No-Code Digitalization Platform is meant for your end-to-end operational requirements. The solutions built on QuickReach...
can be implemented in as fast as two weeks
are modular and customizable to fit your unique processes, and
are easy to connect with your existing systems
QuickReach is ideal for companies seeking to drive efficiency, manage costs, improve customer satisfaction, and future-proof the business. It’s no longer enough to adapt to the new normal of doing business. With QuickReach, you have the power to define your new normal.
To understand how the QuickReach No-Code platform would impact your operation, reach out to one of our Customer Success Consultants HERE for a demo.
Comentários