Digital Transfo – WHAT?

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” Rupert Murdoch

For more than a year, the term Digital Transformation has been dominating my social media feeds, or “Echo Chamber” as it has become known since the US election last year.

I work almost exclusively with Small and Medium Businesses and have spent a lot of time in the last year discussing the underlying concepts with customers while also weeding through the jargon to better help their understanding of Digital Transformation and the potential and tangible benefits it can provide for their business.

The opportunities for small and agile organisations who wish to grow quickly are clear to me. I’d like to highlight a couple of them.

Empowering Employees

At Intuity we work with Office 365. This provides us with much more than the comfort of knowing we’re all working on the latest version of office.  It allows us to collaborate more effectively whether we’re in the office or on the road. As you can imagine, our roles in a technology company tend not to be 9-5 office based so knowing when someone is online and available is critical.

An internal “collaboration escalation process” has developed over time. Beginning with the green light of presence, the first step might be to send an instant message.  This could lead to a Skype call or a one to one video session. If required, we can all share screens to view or demonstrate or both while opening a file on our SharePoint site to discuss and edit documents in real time.  These collaborative practices also extend to our customer projects and ongoing support.

Having access to our project files and customer data securely from anywhere is key for our engineers and account management staff. Having a single view of our customers, shared across all departments in the organisation is crucial in ensuring we’re all driving in the one direction.

I see this staff empowerment as one of the primary ways that digital technologies are transforming our business.

Customer Engagement

I’ve always been an evidence-based decision maker and having a central repository of customer-related data is key to effectively managing what must surely be THE key relationship for any business looking to grow. Ensuring all your staff know your BEST customers is key to helping your organisation recruit more of the same.

We use our CRM system to communicate with our customers and prospective customers. It is vital that we know these messages are being received by the right people.

Shared data is at the core of ensuring that the Marketing, Sales, and Account Management efforts are effective and can feed into the organisation’s pipeline for capacity planning, resource scheduling and cash flow management.

Actionable insights from customer data can help your company market smarter and sell more effectively. These new digital technologies can help your organisation provide consistent customer engagement to help retain your existing customers and to gain new ones.

If you’d like to hear about how these tools (and more) can help your business to grow, then join us for our “Go Digital” event in the Clayton Hotel, Galway on May 9th.