Customer experience is a well-known benefit of digital transformation in almost any organization (more ways to optimize business performance through digital transformation are here). It is a straight-forward and expected result of a digital transformation strategy. But there are a whole lot more benefits to it, some of which come as a by-product, and some are sometimes neglected due to being a long-term benefit. Here are 5 of the underestimated benefits of digital transformation.
Ability to innovate
Innovation emerges as the top reason for digital transformation strategy success. The extend of the innovational capabilities depend on the maturity of the business and present a gradual process.
Typically, in the first two years of the digital transformation strategy execution products and services get the most the innovation efforts, followed by the business model and then internal processes. The outside-in type of innovation would work best to dominate the market and eventually set the new market trends.
Digital transformation enables businesses to continuously innovate and iterate. It provides the agility to incorporate new ideas and changes in existing business processes. A solid digital ecosystem allows businesses to capture and test the ideas at a comfortable pace to incorporate useful changes and determine the next logical steps.
Increased transparency
Digital transformation gives organizations better access to their data. Under the prism of the day-to-day workload, it gives employees access to project documentation and the ability to share ideas efficiently and in no time – online.
When all project members collaborate in real-time, it increases the visibility of every step of the project delivery and helps prevent drawbacks and missed deadlines. It also allows the management teams to instantly see the progress and provide guidance to the team without the lengthy and often unproductive meetings.
Cost reduction
Saving costs comes as a given in the process of digital transformation and should not be the main focus of the digital transformation strategy. Although, the benefit is worth mentioning as it often helps to jump-start the digital transformation roadmap, especially when operational costs exceed the norm.
Digital transformation strategy includes optimizing business processes and digitizing them. These two processes are key to saving money, and also giving a competitive advantage.
The “optimizing” part builds and simplifies operational infrastructure and data management to cut costs and leaving more room for innovation and competitive capabilities.
The “digitization” phase focuses on reducing manual labor, especially in internal and customer-facing processes. It provides a faster reaction speed and agility, reducing the costs of changing processes and systems.
Improved data collection and analysis
With advancements in internal data processing comes better management of external data. After all, the primary goal of digital transformation is improving customer experience and increasing sales. As sales efficiency is highly dependent on customer satisfaction and as importantly, customer understanding, 92% of global leaders use digital transformation strategies to improve customer experience.
Through conducting a comprehensive analysis of the customer purchase funnel, businesses can identify key customer pain points and areas for improvement. Such analysis also allows attributing lost revenue to the pain points experienced by customers in the funnel. As a result, companies gain a deeper understanding of the real customer experience across the digital journey.
Increased agility
Can you say your business is agile? And what is agility anyways? Now, for many, an agile business model means the ability to adapt to a fast-paced business environment. Agility in the concept of digital transformation means not only adapting, but continuously improving and developing new products, services, and ideas.
It is not only about the mindset. A strong digital transformation framework allows businesses to digitize processes into transparent and responsive workflows, accessible centrally throughout the organization. Centralization of all available data empowers businesses to maintain a data-driven decision-making process through both historical insights and data-driven forecasts.
New tools for business and new areas of improvement in organizations will be appearing even faster in a globalized community. A digital transformation roadmap allows for faster tool integrations and more room for innovation.
