The Digitization of Your Business Processes
Today, more than 85 percent of the world’s senior business leaders are prioritizing business digitization. In fact, more than 65 percent fear failing to digitize their business processes will lead to a loss in their competitive edge, thus impacting their company profits. That’s why many organizations are working in earnest to expedite their plans for digitization.
Why You Should Digitalize Your Business
Learning how to digitize a business is worth the investment for many reasons. Digital transformation will benefit every aspect of your business and increase your ability to understand what is happening in each area:
Low operational costs: Digitalizing your business will allow your data to be shared in cloud environments. As a result, the operational cost will decrease, as you no longer need hardware or software to store your data. You also don’t need as many people on your IT staff since there’ll be fewer structural technology needs.
More data insights: The insights you’ll gain after digitalizing your business will be one of the greatest benefits to your company. Because of these new insights, you can better understand and target potential clients. It’ll take some time to learn how to best capitalize on this data, but once you do, you’ll be able to improve every area of your business based on the insights.
Better customer service: Because the new data insights you get will be focused on your customers’ behavior, you’ll have the best understanding of how they function and how you can best reach them.
Efficient use of resources: The straightforward data you’ll receive will allow you to use your time and resources more efficiently. All of your data will be stored in one centralized location, making it easy for everyone in your organization to access.
Strong digital culture: If your company promotes digitalization from the ground up, you’ll build a digital culture that helps you stay ahead of the competition. Innovation is key to ensuring your business stays relevant and in the know.
How to Digitize Your Business
Going digital is an exciting process that opens up a world of opportunities for your business. Though the process of how to digitize your business may seem overwhelming, there are steps you can follow to help understand what your business needs to incorporate digitized enterprise solutions:
1. Set Digital Protocols
The core of what it takes to digitize your business is planning. It’s vital to consider how digitization will impact your business and its processes to prevent your company from launching a series of ineffective programs and protocols that lead to a negative response from customers and target audiences. As many companies are rushing to digitize, the market is becoming competitive quick. Your launch must exemplify your advantages, not your weaknesses.
Start the digitization of your business processes by considering how they interlink and interact with one another. If your organization focuses heavily on documentation, for example, how will you create, store, edit, transfer and finalize those documents? What programs will support your business digitization, and are they compatible with one another? Overall, your team should aim to establish a set of protocols that streamline your digitalization, improving the experience of clients and productivity of staff.
2. Provide Mobile Support
A critical component of how to digitize your business is mobile support. Today, more than 75 percent of Americans own smartphones, which emphasizes the necessity for a digitization plan that incorporates mobile support. If your employees, customers or target audience are unable to access your external or internal digitization features on their mobile devices, that will contribute to a negative impact on your company’s profits, growth and productivity.
If you’re collaborating with a third-party service provider to digitize your business, ensure their product provides mobile support for Android, BlackBerry and iOS devices. It’s also essential to verify that their mobile experience offers an easy-to-use interface that delivers a seamless experience for all parties. In many cases, providers will supply a free trial or live demo, which gives your team the chance to assess each option.
3. Incorporate Cloud-Based Technologies to Digitize Your Business
The development of a business digitization plan often includes a few cloud-based technologies, such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program and Knowledge Management System (KMS). The purpose of both programs is to provide a centralized location for the expedited management of select information, such as leads, wikis and more.
Based on your company’s services, you may consider additional cloud-based technologies to complement your offerings to customers. If you’re an organization in the medical, financial or insurance field, for instance, you may require a secure and compliant service for delivering or faxing digital documents to clients. When comparing any provider, review their Service Level Agreements (SLAs), as well as their customer support quality and hours.
Moving to cloud-faxing over traditional faxing safeguards your information by keeping everything that’s already in the cloud there. Documents can be sent through programs that use email or other web communication. This process is safer than using expensive hardware or software that risks sensitive information being stolen in the physical form.
4. Establish Provider Partnerships
The expansion of your team and the inclusion of third-party service providers can make it seem like your company is increasing its cost. However, the digitization of business processes — especially those that are information-intensive — can lead to significant gains in profit. In fact, your company can reduce its expenses by 90 percent and expedite turnaround times, such as for the decision process for loan approvals.
Consider that return on investment as you choose your third-party service provider and build your in-house team, which may grow to accommodate your business digitization efforts. In some instances, the expansion of your in-house team may be temporary to achieve your internal deadline or provide essential support following the immediate launch of your digital landscape.
5. Target the End-to-End Customer Experience
The digitization of your business processes should include staff from a variety of teams, as you want to deliver an end-to-end customer experience. As a result, you’ll need to compile and establish a group to digitize your business processes. Build a productive team by selecting standout members from your departments with strong communication skills.
Depending on your existing talent, as well as digitization goals, you may need to hire additional employees with specific skill sets. Two potential roles to add include user-experience designers and data scientists, who can provide critical support and insight throughout the design and maintenance of your company’s digitization efforts and positively impact its success.
6. Reduce Potential Bottlenecks
For many companies, it’s a priority to complete business digitization. That’s why it’s critical to avoid and prevent potential bottlenecks, as well as emphasize that the digitization of your business processes cannot extend across years, like traditional IT-intensive programs. If your existing team is unable to meet the strict deadline set by your employer, consider requesting additional funds for hiring temporary employees.
In some cases, organizations will opt to integrate their legacy IT system. If that’s an option your company is pursuing, it will likely take longer than a year to digitize your business processes. One way to expedite this procedure is through low-cost offshore resources, which will let your team rekey data in your systems and build an IT interface in parallel while still providing consumers access to a beta version of your digitized offerings.
7. Review Customer Feedback
For all companies, it’s vital to evaluate responses from customers. As a result, it’s essential that your team assesses the reaction from users at every point of development, from alpha to beta to live. Their opinions will help your team discover where you need to make changes, find potential bugs and identify areas for improvement in the user experience.
Before implementing your digitized business processes, consider developing some technical resources and reference documents for employees and customers to answer common questions, solve common troubleshooting issues and direct support tickets to the appropriate contact. If you’re partnering with a third-party service provider, such as for document delivery, they’ll likely provide support, as well, which will ease your team’s workload.
Digitize Your Business Processes With Softlinx
At Softlinx, we’ve supported the digitization of business processes for more than 20 years. By delivering secure and compliant solutions, such as document delivery and cloud-based faxing, we have provided medical, financial and educational institutions with a reliable and trusted solution, as well as 24/7 support from a qualified team of professionals. The result is optimized digital business processes that lead to increased growth and profits.
Learn more about our cloud-based services by contacting us today.