What Are the Benefits of Digital Transformation?

To give a proper reply to the question of what are the benefits of digital transformation for a business, I will start with two terms used broadly by digital transformation agencies. Those two terms are fear and greed – if you don’t do it, you will lose money from the competition or the market, but if you do it, you can be one of the winners.

That sounds like a cheesy consultant chat, we realise, and we apologise for it upfront.

So, what are the benefits of digital transformation for your business?

A lot of businesses are bloated. They have a way of working that’s worked, up to a point, for a number of years.

Maybe they have grown during that time and what worked when they had 10/100/1,000 employees is still kind of working now but creaking at the seams.

Technology is not accelerating them but slowing them up.
That’s when digital transformation, or frankly sometimes common sense, makes sense. (Is that good English?)

The process would start by creating your Digital Transformation Strategy:

This would start by:

1. Understanding your business holistically
2. Mapping out a true customer journey – from first contact all the way through to them being an ambassador for your brand
3. Looking at each step in your process to understand how they work and could work better
4. Coming up with a plan to implement Quick Wins and Long Term Wins
5. Assigning KPIs and targets for each improvement

By getting to grips with the above, focusing on how to improve conversion rate in your customer acquisition journey, or minimise friction in your operational journey, a large return on investment can be achieved.

It may be because my background is very much in Business (Private Equity and finance), not in Digital, but I want to ensure that there’s ROI on anything done digitally, not just pretty things that don’t tie up – I’m sure you do too.

What about some examples of the benefits?

We have been lucky to have done some cool things which have helped companies make a lot of money.

Frankly, I wish on some we’d agreed to a small retainer and % of upside instead of a straight fee – but that’s another story.

Without going into (confidential) details:

1. We worked with a food retailer to:

– Increase conversion on their eComm store from 3.0% to 4.5%. if that makes no sense to you – let’s put it like this – every 0.1% improvement was a lot of money;
– 5x more abandoned carts are now recovered;
– Their email list is now an asset generating ongoing revenue, not just a monthly MailChimp cost

2. Another business we worked with was bricks and mortar type business, and we worked with them to create a virtual reality app as a fun marketing ploy that grew into a BIG revenue channel and customer acquisition channel.

Why is that digital transformation?

How is it not! Leveraging digital opportunities to serve your clients better, help spread the word about you, and generate data insights on what your customers love… that’s an awesome level of transformation!

3. Final example was working with a FTSE 100 company to create for them an app for iOS, Android, Web and (eurgh) Microsoft (sorry, but what a technical challenge to serve c. 0.9% of their user base).

This app leveraged an insight that customers really wanted their advice, but the client did not have the time to serve them properly.

By creating a large (and secure) database of info, some artificial intelligence (AI), a pinch of common sense and a large dose of technical skills, we created for them a new communication channel with their clients that gives live data to their sales team to close out the largest deals.

That’s neat, right?

Long story/ article short, what’s the potential benefit for you?