Nowadays, more than 85 % of the world’s senior business leaders are prioritizing business digitization. In fact, over 65% fear that failing to digitize business processes will reduce their competitive edge, thus impacting their company’s profitability. This is why many organizations are working seriously to accelerate their plans for digitization. Here, we’ll know What Digitization of Business Processes is, and why you need it.
What Digitization of Business Processes is?
Digitization of business processes means applying similar principles of online business to your current real-life processes. Digitization of business processes means documenting the processes you are currently using in a cloud-based, visual platform to prove the processes while using technology to automate and streamline those processes whenever possible.
Why You Should Digitization of Business Processes
There’re many different reasons why businesses choose to go through digital transformation, but let’s take a look at some of the most common:
- Reduce costs: Companies can save much time and money with some digital applications, especially those that use AI and machine learning to seamlessly complete some essential processes.
- Manage innovation and efficiency: A lot of businesses have come up with their own programs that were transformative in their industry and provided innovative and efficient solutions to their customers.
- Get ahead of the competitors: Some companies are still hesitant about digitization, and you’ll have more business if you show customers that you’re more willing to embrace innovation than your competitors.
- Anticipate change: We never know what the future holds, and in these uncertain times brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, people are looking for some security in their lives. If you are able to make some predictions about the changes that are about to happen, it will be much easier to cope with them when they do come.
Now that you have a common idea of what digitization is and why it is important, let’s take a look at the different ways in which you can digitize your business.
How to Digitization of Business Processes?
Digitization is an exciting process that opens up a world of opportunities for your business. While the process of digitizing your business may seem overwhelming, there are steps you can follow to understand what your business needs to incorporate digitized enterprise solutions:
1. Set Digital Protocols
The basis of what is required to digitize your business is planning. It is important to consider how digitization will affect your business and its processes in order to prevent your company from introducing a series of ineffective programs and protocols that cause negative feedback from customers and target audiences. As many companies rush to digitize, the market is becoming increasingly competitive. Your launch should exemplify your strengths, not your weaknesses.
Begin digitizing your business processes by considering how they connect and interact with each other. For example, if your organization focuses on documentation, how do you create, store, edit, send, and finalize those documents? Which programs will support the digitization of your business, and are they compatible with each other? Overall, your team should aim to establish a set of protocols that streamline your digitization and improve customer experience and employee productivity.
2. Provide Mobile Support
Mobile support is an important component of digitizing your business. Today, more than 75% of Americans own smartphones, emphasizing the need for a digitization plan that includes mobile support. If your employees, customers, or target audience are unable to access your external or internal digitization facilities on their mobile devices, it will negatively impact your company’s profit, growth, and productivity.
If you are collaborating with a third-party service provider to digitize your business, make sure their product provides mobile support for Android, and iOS devices. It’s also crucial to verify that their mobile experience offers an easy-to-use interface that delivers a seamless experience for all parties. In many cases, providers will supply a free trial or live demo, allowing your team to assess every option.
3. Incorporate Cloud-Based Technologies to Digitize Your Business
The development of a business digitization plan often includes some cloud-based technologies, such as customer relationship management (CRM) programs and knowledge management systems (KMS). Both programs aim to provide a centralized location for quick management of select information, like leads, wikis, and more.
Depending on your company’s services, you may want to consider additional cloud-based technologies to complement your offerings to customers. If you’re an organization in the medical, financial, or insurance sectors, for example, you may need a secure and compliant service for delivering or faxing digital documents to customers. When comparing any provider, review their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as well as the quality and hours of their customer support.
Compared to traditional faxing, moving to cloud-faxing keeps your information secure by saving everything already in the cloud. Documents can be sent by programs that use email or other web communications. This process is more secure than using expensive hardware or software that runs the risk of sensitive information being stolen in physical form.
4. Establish Provider Partnerships
Expanding your team and adding third-party service providers can make it seem like your company is increasing its costs. However, the digitization of business processes – especially those that are information-intensive – can bring significant gains in profit. In fact, your company can reduce its expenses by up to 90 percent and speed up turnaround times, such as for the decision process for loan approval.
Consider the return on that investment when you choose your third-party service provider and build your in-house team that can grow to accommodate your business digitization efforts. In some instances, the expansion of your in-house team may be temporary to meet your internal deadlines or provide necessary support following the immediate launch of your digital landscape.
5. Target the End-to-End Customer Experience
Digitizing your business processes should involve employees from different teams, as you want to provide an end-to-end customer experience. As a result, you will need to compile and set up a group to digitize your business processes. Build a productive team by selecting exceptional members from your departments with strong communication skills.
Depending on your existing talent also digitization goals, you may require to hire additional employees with specific skill sets. Two possible roles to add include user-experience designer and data scientist, who can provide critical support and insight during the design and maintenance of your company’s digitization efforts and have a positive impact on its success.
6. Reduce Potential Bottlenecks
For several companies, carrying out the digitization of the business is a priority. That’s why it’s important to avoid and prevent potential bottlenecks, as well as to emphasize that the digitization of your business processes may not happen for years, as in traditional IT-intensive programs. If your current team is unable to meet the strict deadlines set by your employer, consider requesting additional funding to hire temporary employees.
In some cases, organizations will choose to integrate their legacy IT systems. If your company is following this option, it may take more than one year to digitize your business processes. One way to accelerate this process is through low-cost offshore resources, which will allow your team to retrieve the data in your systems and an IT interface in parallel while giving consumers access to beta versions of your digital offerings. Will build
7. Review Customer Feedback
For all companies, it is important to evaluate customer responses. As a result, it is essential that your team assess user feedback at every point in development, from alpha to beta. Their feedback will help your team figure out where you need to make changes, spot potential bugs, and identify areas for user experience improvement.
Before implementing your digitized business processes, consider developing some technical resources and reference documents for employees and customers to answer common questions, resolve common troubleshooting issues, and provide appropriate contact information. Be directed to support tickets. If you are partnering with a third-party service provider, like document delivery, they will likely provide support as well, reducing your team’s workload.
Summing Up
Digitization is one of the great things you can do for your business in the 21st century. And this is not only because several of your competitors have already gone through the digitization process.
Another reason you need digitization is that technology will make your business more efficient, enhance company morale, and increase customer satisfaction. But only if you do it right.
It all probably sounds complicated to you right now, but there is no need to worry because many companies can help! There is also a multitude of resources available that can help you on your journey to digitization.
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