Is Your Company Ready For Digital Transformation?
January 3, 2024
There's no shame in stopping to ask a few questions when considering whether to digitally transform your business. Whether it's determining what needs to change or the more complex question of deciding whether you're prepared for change, gaining insight into your company's operations is valuable. Even if the conclusions suggest no immediate action, it's worthwhile.
Three Straightforward Questions To Ask Before Making The Leap
With that in mind, here are three questions to ask yourself before diving headfirst into a digital transformation initiative.
1. What do you want to achieve?
Digital transformation boils down to boosting speed and efficiency. Ask yourself which repetitive tasks within your company can be automated and consider the costs you want to eliminate or reduce. For instance, using AI and chatbots can expedite customer response times, reducing the need to handle calls. Or maybe you're looking to deploy automation to streamline collaboration and project management.
Alternatively, digital transformation has the potential to enhance your advertising and marketing efforts through data-driven strategies, such as geo-targeting and personalization. Skillfully leveraging data presents a significant opportunity for businesses across all sectors to refine their marketing strategies. Regardless of whether your marketing strategy relies on first-, second- or third-party data, incorporating data provides a solid foundation to better align with your audience's desires in resourceful and entertaining ways. With the right blend of data, strategy and creativity, you can offer your audience precisely what they want, which I believe is the holy grail of advertising.
At STAUFFER, we find that search campaigns, social media campaigns and email marketing campaigns are great places for our clients to kickstart their digital transformation through data. Take Chipotle's Cannes Lions-winning "Doppelganger" email marketing campaign, for example.
By analyzing Chipotle app data, the company created personalized alert emails when two people ordered the same thing simultaneously in different cities. The concept itself is pretty wild considering there are more than 4 million possible combinations at Chipotle, as they claim on their website. But apparently, ending up with two of the same order is more common than you’d think.
What made this data-driven campaign so successful is that it turned a typical online ordering experience into a fun and surprising shared moment. The inclusion of fun “Doppelganger” swag for purchase and social tie-ins contributed to high marks in opens, clicks and revenue.
2. How much will it cost?
The ultimate goal of digital transformation may be to save time and money, but getting there requires an upfront investment. As an example, we recently took on a project for a client that automated the repetitive tasks of 25 jobs. The engagement cost was significant, but the reduced payroll resulted in our client breaking even within six months. After that, the subsequent benefit was pure profit, minus ongoing costs to support the new technology.
The expense of digital transformation can appear daunting at the outset, but a medium- to long-term cost analysis provides perspective. Time spent waiting may waste resources that could be reallocated to profit-generating activities.
3. Is it the right time?
No matter how eager you are to digitally transform, the timing has to make sense. These initiatives aren't one giant leap but a series of leaps. You’re never done. You are just getting better at it. That's what digital transformation is, and timing is everything.
Volume and scalability will help you determine whether the time is right. The greater the number of repetitive tasks that can be automated, the stronger the value proposition. Implementing cutting-edge technology to automate activities performed only a few times a day might not be sensible. However, when said activity occurs a thousand times daily, the numbers increasingly support the case for digital transformation.
It helps if the problem you want to solve is common enough that it's already been solved. In such cases, the time-intensive work has been done, enabling your team to tailor an existing product rather than build out a new solution from scratch.
In Conclusion
Ultimately, in the purest sense of the term, digital transformation is enhancing your business' efficiencies and outcomes. The three questions posed in this article just scratch the surface and will undoubtedly present a plethora of new questions, so get granular and consider every aspect of your operations and bottom line.
For most businesses, particularly in the corporate sector, improving profits through digital transformation is usually the end game. However, the path is more akin to three-dimensional chess than checkers. The game is winnable if you equip your tech partner with all the game pieces, which means doing your homework and presenting them with a clear picture of your operations and audience inside and out. In doing so, evaluate your pain points and ways you can not only improve your product or service but also the experience of your employees and customers alike. It's truly the first step in mastering digital transformation.