Did you know that today’s college students have never licked a postal stamp?
That’s according to research done at Beloit College in Wisconsin.
As shocking as this is, it’s more than just a generation gap. The deep divide between stamp-lickers and email users is evidence of the digital transformation of communication technologies.
Your enterprise exists in the world and for the world; your technology needs to be up to speed if you want to be competitive and bring a high quality service to your clients.
Here, we’ll discuss some digital transformation pros & cons to help your enterprise adopt new technologies with more profit and maximum safety.
Digital transformation pros & cons — the positives
1. Makes your business more competitive
According to the IDG’s 2018 Digital Business research, 44% of enterprises already implement a digital-first business strategy.
This means your competitors have probably already adopted new technologies.
Plus, every new player in the market is focused on successful digital adoption in order to put their start-up at the forefront of their niche. More conservative competitors will get left behind.
Well-suited technologies allow your business to be more flexible, efficient, and productive, improving ROI. As far as digital transformation pros & cons go, this is a compelling argument for making technology adoption a priority.
2. Makes your employees more productive
Digital transformation begins with your employees; if their performance is improved by effective use of technology, the performance of the overall enterprise improves.
For both white and blue collar workers, automatization of production has historically yielded positive results. Assembly lines, robotization of processes, and AI have all freed up time for more intellectual work for humans.
Modern technology is designed to optimize office processes. For instance, CRMs were originally created to combine and facilitate accounting and client management, while minimizing repetitive tasks in marketing and sales.
These accelerators exist to give employees the ability to fulfill their potential. Even simple programs like messengers or cloud services can boost workers’ performance just by facilitating access to information.
In fact, according to The McKinsey Global Institute, the average productivity of employees increases by 25%.
3. Allows you to provide a better customer experience
One of the fundamental principles of business management is to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX).
The average US citizen spends about 12 hours a day in the digital space. Mining information, getting entertainment, and spending money are just a few of their activities.
The obvious answer is to be there in that space for your clients, facilitating their path to purchase with a seamless user experience of your digital platforms.
Digital transformation allows organizations to meet their customers’ needs better through clever use of technology.
Whether it’s through a better website, new app, or other digital offering, smart technology coupled with rapid customer adoption is the key to CX success.
Digital transformation pros & cons — the negatives
1. Never-ending change
As far as the negatives of our digital transformation pros & cons goes, this one is unavoidable. Technological progress is, for the foreseeable future, unending. That means your digital transformation must be an ongoing process.
The digital market is fast and furious in its evolution. According to Forbes, the governing trend in 2019 is steep growth in the IT industry. This should come as no surprise to anyone.
When new solutions based on scientific breakthroughs invade the market you have to be ready quickly for further digital transformation.
2. Effective implementation of new technologies takes time
While most of us already know how to use smartphones or send emails, adopting new enterprise management solutions takes a little more time and effort.
The Telegraph reports that one of the most pressing issues for entrepreneurs is finding the right technology. Indeed, implementing too many optimizing platforms can result in chaos.
Finding the most suitable tools for your business takes research and testing time. There there is the adoption time it takes to train employees how to use them effectively. For this, a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) is highly recommended to accelerate time to competency.
3. Can cause upheaval & uncertainty for employees
The burden of constant digital changes falls onto the shoulders of your employees. While 87% of employees claim they’re ready to learn new skills, every person has a different tolerance for stress factors.
This is why a personalized approach is required when training employees to use digital tools.
Using traditional training methods, this is prohibitively expensive and a logistical nightmare. However, using a DAP, employees can receive personalized training in real-time, without leaving the system they’re using.
In this age of constant digital upheaval, it’s important to provide workers with the support they need to feel motivated to give 100% and feel secure in their jobs.
Concluding remarks
In terms of digital transformation pros & cons, the positives to successful technology adoption are obvious. However, implementation can be a challenge.
The clear solution is to use a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP). As a platform agnostic, algorithmic layer, it can be applied to any enterprise system, and will provide contextual guidance to users actually at the time of need.
This accelerates adoption of digital tools, which improves employee productivity, morale, and performance — all of which result in better tech ROI for the business.
The benefits of digital transformation are significant and the investment in successful adoption via a DAP relatively small. The DAP helps your users, whether employees or customers, to have a better user experience. At the end of the day, this leads to greater business profits.
