Digital Transformation? In 2023?!? YES. While it’s a tired and overused term, our team won’t stop talking about it until people actually get it right. When everyone found themselves stuck at home in 2020 because of the pandemic, companies scrambled to get people productive online, to ensure business continues without putting the lives and livelihoods of everyone at risk. Fast-forward 3 years and all of us changed significantly – the way we work and even the way we live. A lot of us in the business world finally see the benefit of digital tools in collaboration & productivity – whether we’re back in the offices full-time, adopted a hybrid work arrangement, or have shifted totally to working remotely.
However, a lot of the digital strategies companies deployed at the start of the pandemic were hardly thought through. They were, for the most part, a band-aid solution because lockdowns were imposed seemingly overnight and a lot of us thought the lockdowns would only last 2 weeks – a month at most!
These days, companies – while already quite comfortable with working digitally – are looking for something more than just a bunch of software cobbled together. We called this “Chopsuey Digital Transformation” in a previous article – the act of just adding a bunch of tools together and hoping for the best.
And this is a good thing! Companies – and we presume your company is included here because you’re reading this article – are becoming more sophisticated, with their digital/IT teams now learning to be more empathetic of end-users and giving the right amount of concern over user experience as well as seeing the benefit of integration – both on a process level and a system level. In fact, we’ve been getting a lot of inquiries for custom or bespoke software solutions, primarily to cater to the needs of their customers.
However, what we’ve noticed (from the many inquiries we received in the past year or so) is that while companies want to go digital – have a fundamental shift in their business model by way of providing customers “digital offerings” – a lot of them are still not digitized. To know more about the difference between Digitization & Going Digital, read this article.
What does this mean? Companies want to jump into creating some digital service or product without having a solid digital backbone in place. It’s like wanting a flying car when the car can’t even move on the ground. To properly kickstart digital transformation, companies need to DIGITIZE FIRST. Digitization is essential in bringing the digital maturity you need as an organization in successfully going digital. Digitizing ensures your readiness in terms of data availability and process agility to support digital offerings. In a nutshell, it’s about doing two key things: make information available and accessible digitally, and automate & integrate processes. Without these two, any effort to create a digital offering would break – because the company does not have (internally) the right foundation to support the digital offering in the first place.
Let’s look at an example: say you’re a consumer electronics company and want to give customers an online channel for post-sales servicing. Most companies during the pandemic probably created a channel through Facebook or other social media platforms or through Whatsapp, Viber, or other direct messaging platforms to provide customers an easy way to submit tickets for maintenance, troubleshooting, or repair of their products.
But then you realize, it was way too messy to manage all the chats from these channels and it doesn’t necessarily provide customers an easy way to track the status of their tickets, nor it provides them an easy way to see the servicing history of the product that they bought from you.
Then you realize, maybe you need some kind of portal for customers to do this easily. While this is a good idea, there’s another side of the picture that has not yet been considered yet – your internal Customer Support team. If, in the first place, you don’t have a proper CRM or at the very least a ticket management system internally, then creating a portal for customers is going to be a headache. This is what we mean when we say you need a digital backbone first, before even thinking about creating digital offerings.
So what can you do about it?
As we previously mentioned, DIGITIZE first! Make information accessible and automate processes in one place. There are many ways you can go about this:
a) build an internal system from the ground up
b) buy a bunch of different software & integrate
c) go for a low-code/no-code platform.
Building a system from scratch can take at least 6 months – not to mention the cost and the headache of doing it – so we don’t recommend this. Buying a bunch of software is like that “Chopsuey Digital Transformation” we talked about earlier and we also don’t recommend it because having a unified platform to store data and automate processes offers less headache and better performance overall of the system. And we go now to the third option: using a low-code/no-code platform to create internal systems. There are many options out there, and it can be a daunting task to choose the right one for your needs. (we actually wrote an article about it that you can read here)
This is where we recommend you look into QuickReach. It’s a no-code operations digitization platform that brings your entire operations together by seamlessly blending processes, people, and systems in one place. Because QuickReach is a no-code software, it’s a great tool to quickly and easily digitize your organization – in a matter of a few hours! Not only that, the flexibility it provides in tweaking business processes makes it possible to support different kinds of digital offerings that you will create as you go digital.
Once you’ve successfully digitized, you can create custom software for your digital offerings. We actually have another solution to this called Xamun. It uses AI and bots to quickly create your custom software. Overall, from idea to software, it can take as little as 6 weeks! This is unheard of in the software world – until now.
If you want to know more about these two products, or if you want FREE ADVICE on how you can go about your digital transformation journey, you can book a meeting here.