What is Digital Transformation?
“Digital transformation is the adoption of digital technology by an organisation. Common goals for its implementation are to improve efficiency, value or innovation.”
– Wikipedia
Digital transformation is an unavoidable step in many businesses’ lifecycle. This makes it a hot topic, creating a very paradoxical situation.
There is so much information about digital transformation, that it makes it too hard for business owners to choose what is relevant info and what is not.
Clients tell us that all the time. As business consultants, our duty is to chime in and help businesses take the right steps for their digital transformation.
There’s only one main idea we want the business owners to remember and say ‘Yes! Finally!”
And this is…
Digital transformation is not the goal.
This is a somewhat controversial stance that we have. What does this even mean? Digital transformation by itself and on its own is not and should not be your goal.
Instead of viewing digital transformation as the goal your business strives to achieve, view it as a tool that will allow you to enhance your results and accomplish your actual business goals.
Digital transformation, even in its simplest form, ticks the common goals:
- Attracting New Clients – This is the motto of every marketing, sales, management, and related function.
- Improving Customer Experience – This has been THE goal during the pandemic. You don’t want to lose your customers, especially at this period. It will take longer to recover the churn.
- Growing Revenue – That is a non-controversial claim. From a business, perspective revenue means new investment possibilities, on top of just money in the pocket. Revenue comes from new, existing, and sometimes, recovered clients, and therefore has some complexities in the approach.
- Increasing Productivity – If you either want to produce more, in a more efficient manner or release your team from routine actions and let them solve strategic challenges, the objective is here to serve.
Now, that we have laid the groundwork and hopefully explained what we mean by digital transformation not being your goal, let us talk about the main tool we suggest meeting your business goals via this digital transformation.
Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is the cornerstone tool to achieve your goals as it bridges between Sales, Marketing, and Service teams – the critical revenue-generating functions of every organization.
In a decent CRM system, Marketing represents the first “Hello!” we say to our potential customers. Sales represent the rest of the conversation, and Service – our desire to make our customers’ lives better every day.
We prefer describing the CRM this way because it shows clearly this tool ties everything together from attracting new customers to taking care of the installed base (existing customers), all the way to winning customers back or making sure they return for yet another purchase. We have placed the diagram to visualize our definition of CRM on the website homepage.
Contact us to create a digital strategy for your business with Zoho CRM.