Benefits of Digital Transformation

8 Benefits of Digital Transformation

For many companies, the driver for digital transformation is cost-related. Moving data to a
public, private, or hybrid cloud environment lowers operational costs. It frees up hardware and
software costs while freeing up team members to work on other projects.

1. Enhanced data collection

Most businesses are collecting mountains of data on customers but the real benefit is optimizing
this data for analysis that can drive the business forward. Digital transformation creates a system
for gathering the right data and incorporating it fully for business intelligence at a higher level.
It creates a way that different functional units within an organization can translate raw data into
insights across various touchpoints. By doing this, it produces a single view of the customer
journey, operations, production, finance, and business opportunities.

2. Greater resource management

Digital transformation consolidates information and resources into a suite of tools for business.
Rather than dispersed software and databases, it brings together company resources all into one
place. The average number of applications used in enterprise businesses in 2020 is 900. That
makes it exceptionally difficult to provide a consistent experience. Digital transformation can
integrate applications, databases, and software into a central repository for business intelligence.
Digital transformation is not a department or functional unit. It encompasses every area of a
business and can lead to process innovation and efficiency across units.

3. Data-driven customer insights

Data can be the key to unlocking customer insights. By better understanding your customer and
their needs, you can create a business strategy that is even more customer-centric. Using both
structured data (personal customer information) and unstructured data, such as social media
metrics, these insights can help drive business growth.
Data enables strategies to provide more relevant, personalized, and agile content.

4. An overall better customer experience

Customer expectations are sky-high when it comes to their experience. Customers have gotten
used to having endless choices, low prices, and fast delivery. Customer experience (CX) is the
new battleground. Gartner reports that more than two-thirds of companies say they are
competing mostly on customer experience. In 2020, they expect that number to rise to 81%.
Accenture reports that CX “has emerged as the key driver of sustainable business growth.”  They
suggest that even a single point increase in CX scores can results in millions of dollars in annual
growth.  
5. Encourages digital culture (with improved collaboration)
By providing team members with the right tools, tailored to their environment, digital
transformation encourages a digital culture.
While these tools provide an easy way for collaboration, they also help to move the entire
organization ahead digitally. This digital culture will be crucial in the future. It forces the
upskilling and digital learning of team members to take advantage of the benefits of digital
transformation.

6. Increased profits
Companies that undergo digital transformation improve efficiency and profitability. Consider
these results reported by the SAP Center for Business Insights and Oxford Economics:
 80% of organizations that have completed digital transformation report increased profits.
 85% say they have increased their market share.
 On average, leaders expect 23% higher revenue growth than competitors.

7. Increased agility
Digital transformation makes organizations more agile. Borrowing from the world of software
development, businesses can increase their agility with digital transformation to improve speed-
to-market and adopt Continuous Improvement (CI) strategies. This allows for faster innovation
and adaptation while providing a pathway to improvement.

8. Improved productivity
Having the right tech tools that work together can streamline workflow and improve
productivity. By automating many manual tasks and integrating data throughout the
organization, it empowers team members to work more efficiently.

CRM BENEFITS
A CRM system can benefit your business by helping you centralize, optimize and
streamline your communications with customers, and become better in these 6
areas.
1. Better knowledge of customers
As simple as it may sound, but a mere fact that you have all information stored
on each contact in one place makes CRM a super powerful communication tool.

Like a cheat-sheet offering easy access to key information, a CRM system gives
your sales, marketing and customer service teams a competitive advantage.

Not only do they know a contact’s full name, email address, telephone number,
postal address, website and social media accounts, but also such critical
business facts as a contact’s position in the company, his/her relations to other
contacts in your database, the language they speak, and even their birthdays.

With all this information at your fingertips, personalizing your communication with

a contact becomes a breeze.

Secondly, with the help of CRM you can save all activities, projects, sales, live
chat messages, email exchanges, invoices, orders, contracts, or customer
service requests that a contact has ever been involved in.

In other words, a CRM system allows you to know better who your contacts
are and what they want.

2. Better segmentation
Nobody wants to do business with a faceless crowd. Everybody wants to deal
with a perfect audience.

You can do it by segmenting contacts (customers and prospects) into target

audiences. And there’s hardly anything else out there that does segmentation
better than a CRM.
CRM allows you to break down data by categories and criteria, making it easy to
create focused lists. Used in sales and marketing, such segmented lists allow
you to run specific customer marketing campaigns (and account-based
marketing campaigns) and analyze your sales process and lead pool.

When you know whom you’re addressing, you can consciously tailor your offer,
your tactics, and even your sales pitch!

In a nutshell, a good CRM system helps you know better who is really interested
in what you have to offer, who is still being on the fence, and who’s cold as ice.
3. Better customer retention
Apart from being a great asset in finding and nurturing your potential and new
customers, CRM is also a great tool for keeping your existing customers happy.

A CRM system comes up with a handful of “customer retention” benefits: it will

help you keep your promises by reminding you about appointments or when to
send follow up emails.

But what makes the real trick here is that CRM can also prompt you to reach out
to those customers who have not been contacted in while, and perhaps feel
neglected.
After all, keeping an existing customer is 6 or 7 times cheaper that getting a
new one, claims the report by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company.

To sustain your customers’ interest, a CRM system can also help you orchestrate
your marketing activities: send email campaigns, free trial offers or post-purchase
customer surveys, etc. – all at the right time!

4. Better anticipation of needs

We feel more confident when we know what to expect.

The same applies to business. It’s easier to cross-sell or upsell a customer when
you’ve been tracking their buying habits.
And since one of the key benefits of having a CRM system is to help
salespeople sell more and sell faster, it is the access to customer interaction
history through the entire customer journey that allows sales reps to anticipate
customer needs.
If you know the contact’s purchase history – what they bought and when, what
contracts they were offered, what buying habits they demonstrated, and even
how they became your customers, you can be proactive and come up with new
or better offers at the right time!
A CRM system is also indispensable in providing great customer service. The
access to interaction history makes it easy to offer timely customer service.
Just a few clicks and you know whether a contact had any problems with your
product, how their service requests were handled, and whether they were
satisfied or not. And if they complained about something in the past – it’s your
chance to redeem your reputation and offer a much better customer experience.

5. Better and speedier communication

Not making your customers wait by quickly replying to their requests is a sign of
professionalism.

Saving yours and your customers’ time is the CRM system, which offers you a
set of customizable, ready-to-use email templates, letters, documents, proposals,
quotes, invitations, newsletters, etc.

Speaking of ready-made templates, here's one for you.

Our most recent edition of the Customer Service Benchmark Report found
that 90% of companies do not use autoresponders to acknowledge they have
received a customer service email.

Simply copy the template below and upload it in your CRM system to stand out
from the competition:
Another benefit is that a CRM system can also help you draft SMS and emails
and schedule their dispatch weeks or months in advance.

And when it comes to dealing with customer service requests, speed is

everything!
With all contact interaction history just a click away, CRM allows you
to personalize your communication, send replies offering quick solutions to
recurrent problems, send links to FAQs and videos, not to mention that phone
calls can be made straight from the system.

6. Better protection of data privacy

Finally, let’s address the “buzzword of the last few years” – the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR)!

In order to comply with the data privacy requirements of the new EU regulation,
it’s über important to have a CRM software that has inbuilt GDPR-related
functionality.

The main benefit of CRM here is that it will save you a lot of time and effort, as
being GDPR compliant is a job in itself, not to mention all the unpleasant legal
consequences if you violate this privacy law.

With GDPR, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

A CRM system can help you obtain and document your contacts’ permission to
store and use their personal details (consents), send automatic notifications to all
new contacts informing that you would like to store their data, manage your
customers’ subscription to email communication preferences, and even set up
rules to update personal details for groups of contacts – all at one time.

Doing this all manually will take most of your time and you also run the risk of
making mistakes. But, setting up a CRM system to do that for you is a quick, safe
and reliable way to make your communications with customers GDPR compliant,
which in turn builds trust as you handle your customers’ data with respect.