Digital Transformation refers to the process of utilizing digital technologies to upgrade existing business processes and customer experiences or create new business processes and customer experiences to keep up with evolving consumer and market conditions.
Digital transformation surpasses traditional sales and customer service functions by reimagining new ways to engage with customers. Using digital technology for idea generation, planning, and creating empowers a flexible, future-proof business model. Digital transformation differs from digitization and digitalization in that it is a customer-focused method. Digitization is the conversion from analog (i.e. paper documents) to digital (i.e. computer files). Digitalization involves leveraging digital data to streamline workflows, essentially upholding the status quo but doing so faster. Successful digital transformations include digital innovations that use business technology in new inventive ways.
Digital transformation shifts the way businesses operate and is responsible for empowering entirely new sectors of business. Digital transformation initiatives look into internal systems and customer interactions and develop a transformation strategy that provides better customer experiences by enabling faster decision-making and increasing corporate efficiencies.
Digital transformation strategy involves leveraging digital tools and available technologies, such as big data, machine learning, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence to drive more informed business models. Digital transformation success happens when a business can realize the full potential of available technology.
Digital transformations can also revolutionize customer service for the digital age. The surge of social media has changed customer service for the better, allowing businesses to address their customer concerns directly on the digital platform each customer prefers. Call centers and customer service departments operate more efficiently with digital savvy built into their offerings, collecting customer information and easily escalating customer inquiries to high-level service agents.
The main challenge for organizations going through digital transformation is to not see this opportunity as a loose grouping of technology projects. Digital transformation involves reworking business processes, streamlining the customer experience, expediting workflow operations, and thinking about innovation in a way that adds value for the customer, not just the bottom line.