The top 4 things you need to know about digital transformation

1. Technology vs thinking

Digital transformation takes place in two major spheres: the technology your business is using to conduct its work, and the shifts in thinking the business may need to make. In terms of technology, you need to understand if your business is investing in best practice tech for your field. This is to enable greater automation, customer engagement and efficiencies. Some of the digital practices in this space include location-based marketing, mobile sales and social media communities.

The shift in thinking – which is the part that is most often ignored – is the paradigm shift that a business’s management must make to foster digital transformation. This begins with an analysis of the organisational culture, and then moves outward to look at cross-silo coordination, IT-business relationships, governance and skills development.

A study of over 400 organisations from MIT and Capgemini titled “The Digital Advantage: How Digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry” (2017)¹, showed that when companies address both the thinking and the technology components, they beat their competitors by up to 50% in terms of profit.

2. Digitisation vs digitalisation vs digital transformation

The second thing to know is that digital transformation is a process. It begins ‘digitisation’, which means looking at your business to identify all the processes and technologies that can be shifted from analogue to digital.

Next, you need to focus on ‘digitalsation’, which is exploring how digital tech can be used to improve your business models and processes. Once your business has brought about a coordinated effort at scale, through all the aspects of the business, then you will have completed the final step of your ‘digital transformation’.

3. Customer experience is king

Research shows that customer experience is now the key brand differentiator, beating even price². Since so much of how we interact with our customers is now online, we need to think carefully about how to construct the best possible online experience for them.

Local Cape Town-based business Cakes By Henno, for example, was hit hard by the Covid-19 lockdown. Business owner Henno Smit was eager to discover a way to communicate with customers online, allowing them to place orders quickly and easily. Cape Town based agency Arora Online analysed his business and came up with a winning strategy to digitise the process.

First, the businesses online look and feel was refreshed to pop on digital. Next, Arora Online set up WhatsApp for Business for the bakery, which allowed customers to browse a catalogue of cakes within WhatsApp and place their orders. Preprogrammed responses allow Henno to reply to FAQs with one click, so he has more time to focus on baking.

Once Cakes By Henno’s Facebook was linked to its WhatsApp for Business, Arora Online could use Facebook ads to allow customers to click through to the WhatsApp chat to place their orders. As well as taking the first step in their digital transformation journey by digitising the ordering process, Cakes By Henno gained 1000 new followers in four weeks, and saw an unheard of engagement rate of 53%.

4. Inform yourself

If you’d like to discover more about digital transformation, Arora Online is hosting a free webinar on the topic on Wednesday, 5 August from 1–2pm. In 60 minutes, we’ll unpack the most important digital transformation philosophies that can help you thrive in the online space. In doing so, no matter where you are in your digital transformation journey, you will learn to recognise further opportunities and how to create more value from digital.

Or contact us today:

• Phone: 082 553 1031
  
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• Email: az.oc.enilnoarora@ofni
  
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