What is Digital Transformation?

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas, processes, and operations of a business. Digitization fundamentally changes the way a business operates and delivers value to its customers. In other words, it means that businesses use digital technologies to change, improve, develop and change their existing business processes.

Today, the main problem of businesses is that while their customers and employees are rapidly digitalizing, they try to continue to do their jobs with analog methods. For this reason, it is vital to provide a parallel and integrated digital experience at every point where the digitalized customer comes into contact with your business, product, or brand, to keep your customers in your hands, to meet their speed and flexibility expectations, and to increase your sales.

Digital transformation projects often focus heavily on improving the customer experience, leveraging digital technologies to change the way customers interact with businesses and their products, and improving how businesses serve their customers.

Why is Digital Transformation Important?

While every company has unique goals for digital transformation, the primary goal of any digital transformation is to improve your existing processes. For any business that wants to grow and stay ahead of the competition in a digital-first world, digital transformation is a necessity rather than an important one.

Digital transformation increases productivity while reducing labor costs.

Using technology to work more efficiently is one of the most effective ways to transform your business. For example, the time and money businesses spend on training new employees and updating digital resources can quickly spiral out of control. Undoubtedly, the segment that generates the most benefit from the application of new technologies in companies is the employees. Having digital solutions and/or tools greatly assists your people in their tasks and enables them to achieve not only better but also faster results. Automating repetitive or manual processes and turning them into a digital process helps your employees produce more with their existing time and resources.

Digital transformation increases customer satisfaction.

Customers who have too much technology in their daily lives want to contact companies and brands at multiple contact points such as mobile applications, social media, e-mail, live chat and want to have the same experience at all these communication points. Digital transformation is the driving force behind improved customer experiences. The application of technology and digitalization at every stage of the customer's adventure with your business from the first to the last moment will significantly help to retain your customers, as well as to achieve better satisfaction rates.

Digital transformation makes you more competitive.

Your competitors are turning to digital transformation, whether you are or not. Not putting digital transformation on your agenda means making a firm decision to stay behind the competition. Reducing costs thanks to digital transformation, increasing efficiency thanks to automated processes and thus enabling employees and managers to focus more on improving their work, technological knowledge base, corporate memory and collaboration tools supporting innovation within the organization, data that is recorded and controlled and compiled where and when it occurs. Being able to make fast and accurate decisions thanks to the smart reports obtained will be the main factors that will make you stand out from the competition.

Digital transformation strengthens your collaborations.

Companies that work with suppliers, distributors, subcontractors, and expert consultants to produce products and services that appeal to customers are becoming more and more dependent on each other. Collaborating with these business partners based on mostly printed documents and manually maintained data using traditional methods will waste your time in the digital age where speed is vital. With digital transformation, you can redesign your communication and cooperation with all your partners and suppliers. You can create digital platforms, internet portals, where you can share information and documents with your business partners, automate your processes such as order delivery and invoice collection, and make them a part of your information system that produces and uses data.

What Does the Digital Transformation Framework Cover?

The question of "How and where to start the Digital Transformation" is on everyone's mind. Finding the answer to this question first requires you to examine all the processes and operations of your business one by one within a certain framework and to ponder over which aspects you can digitize. Workcube, which is the companion of its customers in digital transformation projects, is based on the digital transformation framework developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Customer Experience: Companies that offer a disconnected experience at touchpoints and fail to see the critical data they need to improve the customer journey must make radical changes to improve and digitally enrich their customer experience. For example, the inability of the customer representatives in the store to access the customer's online order history and to make the desired product change may anger your customer. Digital transformation in customer experience covers all changes that need to be implemented in operations, data and technological infrastructure, customer touchpoints, and other aspects. Digital transformation projects should be defined and implemented with a perspective that covers countless areas, from customer-tailored emailing to mobile applications, from the design of the ATM interface to digital content to be shared on social media, from providing customer service via the WhatsApp line to making presentations and taking orders on the tablets of your field sales team.

Operational Processes: Digitizing processes means using digital technologies and managing data digitally to transform processes into more efficient, more productive, more profitable, and efficient processes. Automating certain processes can enable companies to refocus their employees on more strategic tasks. Providing virtual tools for employees to easily manage their work from home or office, mobilizing employees, transferring information and document sharing to a central and digital environment, investing in digital tools that will support your employees in communication and cooperation are also one of the main topics you can benefit from digital transformation to streamline your processes. Beyond having a better knowledge of the digital transformation you will make in your processes, it actually makes your strategic decision-making process accurate, fast and based on real data.

Business model: The digital transformation framework in your business model is for you to approach your business with a perspective that goes beyond digitizing your existing business and processes. It means developing digital transformation projects to offer new business areas digital products or digitally enriched products and services using digital technologies. Changing your business model is about changing the value chain and creating an absolutely new supply of products and services. The transformation of traditional film production companies into digital media players is one of the best examples of this. It can be counted as an example of a digitally enriched product when a bicycle manufacturer supports the data obtained from his bicycle with a digital panel that reflects all the effort of the user as mileage and physical condition information.  

CONCLUSION

The Digital Transformation of a Business presents tremendous opportunities for innovation and competitive advantages that will require a complete rethink of the organization. It requires planning and considering cultural, strategic, technological, and operational changes as a whole.

Now that you know why digital transformation should be one of your main agenda items and not just a technological investment, you may be considering the next step. How and with whom will you achieve this?

This is a difficult question to answer as you need to take into account not only the performance of your software solution in which you will invest, but also the strategic approach before, during, and after implementation, operational and technical support, and methodologies to facilitate your work. Digital transformation is not an easy task, but when you set off with the right companion and technologies, the results you will achieve can be much more beautiful and successful than you imagined.

At Workcube, we are here to make your dream come true as a companion in all your end-to-end processes.