Digital products and marketing strategies have focused primarily on generating cost-effective revenue growth. However, they should also look into optimizing and streamlining administrative and operational processes through digitalization.
Most of these tasks can now be done with ease through the use of a myriad of applications. A typical business owner will either have to do everything themselves. Others may work with a team to consolidate and analyze financial accounts, follow up with marketing channels, track sales transactions, and/or manage employees, among other tasks. For a start, businesses should explore subscribing to platforms such as those from Microsoft or Google. These options offer huge storage capacities to safely and securely store businesses’ important documents. This is in addition to a plethora of other tools for enabling flexible working engagements and communications. These also have tools to assist businesses in effectively automating certain tasks. Businesses will not only save on big IT infrastructure, such as servers and storage spaces, but it will also allow the business owner to focus on growing the business.
MAXIMIZING OUTCOMES FROM DIGITAL STRATEGIES
Maximizing Investments: Making the first few steps toward digital strategies is normally the easiest. The biggest challenge is for business owners to fully understand what was invested. Retail companies already subscribed to Microsoft 365 also has access to the suite of Microsoft office tools like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. To perform surveys on customer service, rather than using thir-party applications which require separate subscription, explore what is already made available on Microsoft 365. One may realise upon detailed review of the current subscription with Microsoft that there’s another application called Forms that could collect survey data sufficiently.
Enhance Employee Value: As business owners make the decision to embark on digital strategies, they too need to augment their mental models and approaches to address operational issues. For example, to manage the increasing number of accounts requiring processing and reconciliation, employing another accounts executive tends to be the most logical solution. However, there are also other solutions, such as robotic process automation, which could help the existing account executive program and let the “bot” perform the tasks on their behalf. The accounts executive role could now be redesigned to include a financial analyst role to help the business owner make better sense of the business’s financial performance.
This approach not only reduces the need for numerous headcounts, but it also allows the company to provide existing employees with the opportunity to upgrade. This could help increase their remuneration for the value-added role they can now perform. Hence, through digital strategies, businesses are able to promote employee value creation and enhance employee contribution. All this while keeping operational expenses stable.
Keeping applications relevant: Businesses who have embarked on digital strategies and invested in web applications should ensure that systems remain relevant, purposeful, and functioning. Businesses should not leverage on the pretext that they have an existing application to offer value to customers which turns out to be ineffective. For example, a property management company may boast about having an impressive web and mobile application. Upon using the application, it didn’t lived up to expectations. While it could be challenging to move away from such a service provider, given the complexity of the engagement with the customer, businesses should be mindful of the implications of improper adoption of digital strategies for their long-term sustainability.
Next: 04 of 04 – EMBRACING AI AS PART OF DIGITAL STRATEGY
