Digital transformation can mean different things to different businesses, but at its core, it is the process of using technology to create value for customers or businesses. Making processes more efficient and cost effective with less effort. While many people associate digital transformation with enterprises or large business, smaller businesses can also benefit from it. In fact, digital transformation can be a great way for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) to get ahead of the competition.
The definition of digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, resulting in changes to how the business operates and delivers value to its customers. In fact, smaller businesses often have an advantage over larger ones as they can often more easily adapt and change their processes to take advantage of new technologies.
Some of the many benefits of digital transformation, for SMBs are:
- Increase customer engagement
- Integrating multiple systems to speed up processes
- Reduced cost to serve
Increase customer engagement
A digital transformation strategy that includes adding a CRM and marketing automation tool, integrated with your web and social channels can result in a meaningful increase in customer engagement. This is often a key metric of success of many digital transformation projects, as engaged customers are great sources for repeat business and referrals. Email in particular is still a vital tool to contact and engage with your customers and by making it easy for you to engage with your customers, they in turn will engage with your brand and you can create a loyal customer base that will keep coming back for more.
Integrating multiple systems to speed up processes
In modern business it is becoming increasing common for there to be multiple software platforms serving different functions. You might have Xero for accounting, WordPress for your website, Mailchimp for email newsletters and other services to manage bookings, inventory or sell products. Switching between all these systems can be time consuming, require logging in and out, copy and pasting information and results in you spending more time working on the business that in it doing what you do best. A SMB focused digital transformation, one that connects and integrates all these silos of information can save countless hours in administration busy work and let you get back to focusing on what your business is all about.
Reduced cost to serve
Digital transformation projects that focus on improving customer service can also have a significant impact on reducing the cost to serve your customers. By making it easier for customers to find the information they need and providing them with self-service options, like an integrated booking and invoicing system, you can reduce the amount of time your staff spends working on the customer transaction process and more time talking and engaging with your customer. We all know that relationships are key when it comes to customer engagement and the money you save in servicing your customers can help build those all important relationships.
It isn’t as hard as it sounds
If all of this may sound daunting, too technical or just too expensive, then you maybe surprised. While large businesses do spend very large sums of money on consultants and enterprise software like Salesforce or Hubspot, it doesn’t have to be that way. For the small and medium business market there are some cost effective ways to create no code solutions utilising large open source platforms like WordPress which can be implemented relatively cheaply.
If you’re not sure where to start, consider enlisting the help of a SMB digital transformation consultant to help you define what digital transformation means for your business. Or contact us today about how LemonBop can deliver what you need to make your business and customer engagement more efficient.
