The world is shifting towards all things digital. Everyone, from your employees to your customers, is getting comfortable with digital technology and the transition to an online way of life.
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Knowing this, more and more businesses including most, if not all, of your competitors are fast adopting digital tools and subscription software. In essence, digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas (people and processes) of your business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to your customers.
This means bringing in tools and software to revamp how your business operates, leaving behind the traditional ways of pen and paper. And when you achieve an organizational state wherein all your employees have the capability to use digital tools to their fullest extent, you can say that you’ve embraced digital adoption successfully.
If you’re still unsure about investing in digital adoption, or if you feel it’s not going to be worth the time, effort, and money, then take a look at what successful digital adoption can do for your small business:
Digital Adoption Saves Time Spent on Manual Tasks
Time is money for small businesses and wasting it on completing repetitive tasks isn’t very sensible. By adopting modern digital tools, you can automate several internal processes and day-to-day tasks so that you and your staff can focus on doing actual work that reflects in the business’s bottom line.
For example, you can automate activities like invoicing and inventory management using tools such as Invoicera or Orderhive, but at the same time, make sure the people using these tools know how to make the best use of them. Using business software to its fullest abilities is what digital adoption is all about.
Similarly, digital adoption also extends to automating HR activities like payroll, employee onboarding, and training.
By automating all such repetitive manual tasks, digital adoption boosts productivity for everyone on your team as now you can spend more time working on tasks you love doing instead of mundane administrative work.
Digital Adoption Facilitates Teamwork, Time, & Task Management
In most small to medium-sized businesses, it’s not uncommon for employees to wear multiple hats. And when there are various different tasks to juggle at once, it can be easy to lose track of time and what needs to be done by when.
Introducing a task management tool like Asana or Trello and then making sure every employee makes the most of that software can be greatly helpful for employees in prioritizing tasks and managing their time more efficiently. Such tools also help in assigning tasks, tracking deadlines, and maintaining accountability.
Besides, as you know, remote working is a growing trend as we speak. Chances are, your small business has remote workers or freelancers who are working from home (or even other parts of the planet). Proper usage of digital communication tools like Slack or Skype facilitates continuous communication and teamwork irrespective of location.
If you think your workforce may have trouble adopting new digital technologies and there’s a need to simplify the online experience of new digital tools, you can consider using a digital adoption platform such as one of the WalkMe alternatives.
Digital Adoption Helps Enhance Customer Experience
Digital adoption is important not just for optimizing your small business’s daily activities, but also for your customers’ satisfaction.
In a world of endless choices and purchasing power, your small business’s primary goal should be to delight customers by providing an outstanding experience.
Customer experience, or CX, comprises every single interplay between your business and your customers. Each positive or negative experience that a customer has with your business directly affects the likelihood of purchase and also future purchases. In fact, a recent report from Forrester indicates that businesses that improved their CX had nearly doubled their conversion rates.
Using interactive kiosks and digital self-service devices is a great way to improve the in-store customer experience.
Furthermore, as buyers are increasingly turning to online purchases using their smart devices, businesses aiming to improve their CX must focus on improving their digital user experience (UX). This means using digital tools to create a modern, functioning, mobile-friendly website complete with a chatbot that serves as a helpful virtual assistant, guiding the visitor throughout their buyer’s journey.
Also, using customer feedback and analytics tools, you can leverage customer data to provide a more personalized experience to your customers which will translate to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
So, as you can see, excellent customer experience can be truly achieved only with effective digital adoption across your business.
Over to You
To sum up, digital adoption is essential to your small business’s present and future success. And while achieving complete digital adoption of your business does require some investment in terms of time and money, you would immediately start seeing the fruits of your labor.
From managing remote teams and automating internal processes to enhancing the customer experience and boosting productivity, embracing digital adoption is key to put your small business on track for greater profitability in the long run.
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About The Author:
Gaurav Belani is a senior SEO and content marketing analyst at Growfusely, a content marketing agency that specializes in data-driven SEO. He has more than seven years of experience in digital marketing and loves to read and write about education technology, AI, machine learning, data science, and other emerging technologies. In his spare time, he enjoys watching movies and listening to music. Connect with him on Twitter at @belanigaurav.
