Digital transformation is the use of digital technologies in various business areas, from customer service to warehousing.
It helps you optimize company operations, boost employee performance, and increase customer service. Above all, digitization encourages innovation.
If you have not digitized your business yet, here are several reasons why you should do that.
Freeing Up your Employees
Traditional paper documentation, confusing email threads, and overcrowded spreadsheets are often difficult to track and organize. Your team wastes their precious time finding the right documents, maintaining them, and sharing them with coworkers.
When storing your crucial documents in the cloud, you increase their overall visibility. The data is available to all team members across different departments. Most importantly, your employees can access data in real-time, regardless of their location.
Improving Customer Service
Today, consumers use various channels to communicate with businesses. They expect you to be available 24/7 and provide consistent customer support.
For starters, diversify your customer service by investing in new online channels. Apart from email communication, leverage live chat, social media support, and chatbots. Customer self-service has also become a big deal over the past few years. Consumers expect you to provide a detailed knowledge base and quality guides on your site, too.
To keep track of your customer service channels, invest in a CRM tool. These software solutions capture customer data across multiple channels and keep them in a central location. They create unique customer profiles, where your customer service reps can track users’ purchase histories, past interactions with the brand, etc. Most importantly, they can manage customer inquiries via a single platform.
Automating Business Processes
With the rise of cloud technologies, automation is not a privilege of big-budget businesses anymore. It is a necessary factor for any small business aiming to optimize business operations. With the help of automation, you reduce expenses, improve employee performance, and reduce the risk of human error.
Now, you can automate and orchestrate a wide range of business processes.
One of them is the check printing and mailing service. It helps you improve your check issuing efforts without compromising customer service or branding. You can also automate other aspects of accounting by investing in bookkeeping software. It lets you monitor cash flow, make monetary transactions via multiple devices, and send automated invoices to your customers.
Some business processes that require automation are:
- appointment scheduling
- social media management
- data backups
- lead nurturing
- customer contact information management
Streamlining People Management
HR managers often wear multiple hats. Their jobs incorporate numerous tasks, from employee management and internal culture to recruiting new team members.
Now, keeping track of mounds of paper documents and Excel spreadsheets can be inefficient and highly frustrating for your HR managers. That is where, again, business digitization helps.
There is a wide range of HR management tools that automate manual tasks. With software solutions, such as BambooHR or Staff Squared, you can automate employee onboarding, payroll, benefits administration, and employee timesheet tracking.
With employee engagement tools, you can track abstract metrics, such as employee engagement, involvement, alignment, innovation, company confidence, etc. Tools like Culture Amp use machine learning to analyze employee engagement data and interpret it into measurable metrics.
Finally, you can automate the entire employee recruitment process. With recruiting and onboarding tools, you can easily search your talent pool, create standardized applicant evaluation templates, and even filter the resumes you receive via email.
Enabling Remote Work
Since the Coronavirus outbreak, many small businesses have made a shift to remote work. While many were worried about the impact of the distributed workforce on business performance, it turned out to be an efficient employee management method.
By migrating to the cloud, you enable your employees to work from any location. One such example is cloud storage systems that let employees upload, share, and open business data via multiple devices and locations.
Project management tools increase the overall workplace transparency. Managers can create new projects, assign tasks, and set strict deadlines. Remote employees can track their assignments via a user-friendly platform without needing to comb through hundreds of emails.
Finally, you can invest in team collaboration software that increases employee communication, collaboration, and teamwork.
Over to You
These are just some of the numerous benefits of business digitization. It enhances employee management, improves workplace productivity, and allows for remote work. Above all, it improves customer experiences and helps you build a strong company culture.
How has digitization helped your business! Please, share your thoughts and experiences with us!
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