The raging pandemic, evolving customer expectations, wafer-thin profit margins, and the competition beefing up delivery on all fronts – sound familiar? Almost all companies face similar challenges and, in a bid, to defend their competitive positioning, are at different stages of undertaking their digital transformation journey.
However, most companies are creating a digital façade.
Let’s take a closer look – digital transformation is a prominent point of discussion in all prominent board and strategy meetings. Companies are investing heavily in buying shiny new technology applications with the hope of reaping some long-term rewards. Couple this with hiring expensive consultants to shepherd their digital transformation journey. The cost and time implications are huge, almost a distraction to the organization's day-to-day functioning. ‘Innovation’ is often identified as a pillar of the organization and vanity metrics are highlighted to showcase management’s continued commitment to digitally transforming the organization.
The results? Well, they are far from expected.
Research suggests that as many as 70% of digital transformation initiatives have failed. IDC suggests that the projected value of direct investments into digital transformation between 2020-23 is expected to be a whopping US$ 6.8 trillion. A substantial amount of this investment into digital transformation might not even meet expected results. A research study by Accenture indicated that as of 2020, as many as 30% of companies are still considered laggards in technology adoption and innovation.
This indicates that while investments and resources are being plowed into digital transformation, the results don’t meet the expected outcome. Most companies still grapple with digital transformation and executives are forced to write off a large majority of investments as sunk costs and hence the argument that most companies are looking to create a digital façade as they undertake this all-important transformation journey, which under probability if executed correctly, would become the bedrock of their future growth.
The Key Challenge: Current Business is Jurassic
Since many employees still rely on paper or Excel-based methods of input, it gives rise to several inefficiencies in the system. The organization is heavily reliant on manual methods of working and interactions with stakeholders – customers, partners, and vendors are still dependent on manual interaction methods.
This gives rise to various problems in the organization, the following being the most important ones:
Operations are a big, hot mess- The operations of the organization are heavy on paperwork, making the machinery of the entire operation unscalable and inefficient. The organization is limited by old, clunky, and legacy systems which often do not communicate with each other. Often there is a high cost of client servicing. The organization is plagued by low employee morale within the internal teams due to repetitive work.
Customer experience is almost always horrible- The customer experience dished out to the end customer is poor, which often results in lower satisfaction and significantly impacts customer retention. The customer must often deal with the anxiety of not knowing the status of the order or delays in fulfillment. The company also grapples with long or overlooked orders making it difficult for companies to manage customer expectations.
Going digital has always had its share of challenges, but the cost of NOT going digital is more than ever. Some of the most common challenges which companies grapple with while going digital include the following:
Figure 1- Key challenges in going digital
It’s Not Your Grandpa’s Company: Evolve or Perish
The go-digital imperative has never been more pronounced than now. Leveraging technology is no longer limited to larger companies. By leveraging on no-code technologies, you too can reap the benefits of digitization, automation, and AI. The No-Code approach to going digital allows you to have access to templates that business users in your organization can easily customize and launch the solutions in a matter of minutes to hours.
Your organization can start your digital transformation journey right by digitizing operations. This will ensure that all processes are automated and paper-based forms are digitized. This would ensure that inefficiencies in the system are removed, and the customer experience dished out to the end customer is significantly enhanced. This would involve interconnecting systems, moving paper workflows to digital, and automating logic-based decision making.
The future state of the organization would entail:
Smoother operations- By ensuring you start your digital transformation journey with operations, your organization would reduce wasteful activities to ensure a lower cost of order fulfillment. It also ensures your organization has better defensibility when compared to startups and can cater to the expectations of the evolving customer. A digitized operation is scalable and can ensure that your organization is ready for the growth ambitions which the management would have outlined. Finally, it ensures lower costs and higher profitability.
Figure 2- Progressively building a connected business
Improved customer experience- Another advantage of digitizing your operations is an improved customer experience while he is availing of the products and services. It also ensures 24*7 easy access, transparency, and ease of payment and the customer is always aware of the status of his request.
QuickReach: Upgrading Your Business by Going Digital
The no-code approach of going digital for QuickReach ensures that the digital solutions created on the platform can span across different departments whether you built from scratch or build using one of the templates. Examples of some of the solutions include:
Figure 3- Sample solutions built on QuickReach
A platform like QuickReach has innumerable benefits to help you kickstart your digital transformation journey, some of them being:
Much faster than full code- Since QuickReach is a No-Code platform, the time to assemble and launch software applications is faster than what it would have taken if your company was looking to develop the applications using the traditional methods. You could look to launch basic apps within hours using existing templates and slightly more complicated ones in a matter of days or weeks, unlike in traditional app development methods which could take anywhere between months to hours.
Faster and easier to integrate with existing systems- QuickReach makes use of rest API which makes it easier for companies to integrate with existing systems and bring them all on one platform which ensures visibility and interoperability. For legacy systems, QuickReach makes use of in-built bots to ensure that the systems communicate with each other, and data is not left isolated or unused.
Scalable- The modular nature of which QuickReach has been built ensures that the platform is scalable, implying whether it’s a department that is initially using the platform, or eventually the entire company is subscribed to the platform, its performance would not be affected. It is also interesting that you could identify a pain point and launch an application to solve it and then iteratively look to tackle pain points that are lower in priority.
Some of the other advantages of using a No-Code platform like QuickReach include:
Figure 4- The QuickReach Advantage
QuickReach would allow you to reduce significant pressure on the IT team in delivering countless digital projects in your company without the need for coding or any kind of technical intervention. The sophistication of the platform ensures that its more comprehensive than stand-alone workflow, form, and integration software.