Digital transformation goes hand in hand with a change in a company's thinking, culture, and leadership. It's about welcoming innovation and embracing technology, new business models, and working practices to deliver greater customer value.
Through digital transformation, you can revolutionize the experience of all your stakeholders (employees, suppliers, partners, and customers) through better technology and the digitization of assets.
In other words: it’s a complete overhaul of the status quo; shedding archaic processes and legacy technology and moving towards innovation, agility, and data-driven success.
What’s the big deal about digital transformation?
Not to put too fine a point on it: it’s a matter of survival. 84% of companies agree that digital transformation is important or critical to survival in the next five years.
The pace of digital change today is rampant, and if businesses want to be along for the ride, they must be able to evolve and meet the operational and customer demands of the moment.
While digital transformation will vary widely based on each company’s specific challenges and needs, the reasons for it will be the same.
1. Gaining the competitive edge
With superior technology bringing one-hub joined-up thinking, powerful AI capabilities, and automated processes, is it any wonder that 70% of companies embarking on digital transformation cite competitive pressure as their main reason, with over a third fearing losing out to competitors should they fail. In fact, many that have yet to embark on a digital transformation journey believe they have less than a year to do so before they start losing market share.
2. Creating the ultimate customer experience
Now that the customer experience is more important than either product or price as a key differentiator, the 360-degree data gained through fully integrated multi-channel technology is essential. It enables super-sensitive personalization, pin-point relevancy, real-time feedback, and market agility. With such cutting-edge digital technology, a company can conquer new markets and target new segments while delivering seamless omnichannel experiences to their customers.
81% of companies consider customer experience to be a competitive differentiator and 84% of companies that improve their customer experience see an increase in revenue.
3. Exceptional business growth
According to Gartner, digital improvements have led to revenue growth for 56% of businesses and organizations that have embraced digital transformation are more profitable than their peers. So is it any wonder that many marketers are prioritizing better audience segmentation and targeting, with just under half saying that driving growth through digital transformation is their top strategic focus?
4. Better business and market agility
Agility is the ability to adapt quickly and to continuously improve. 68% of companies view business agility as one of the top three drivers of digital transformation as it optimizes business performance and efficiency. Technology that increases agility can reduce time to market by at least 40% thanks to parallel workflows, automated processes, data analytics, marketer empowerment, and centralized digital assets.
5. Enhanced working processes
52% of organizations consider “digital business” to mean enabling worker productivity through tools and AI-assisted processes and 68% of executives believe that collaboration between people and AI will be key to the future of businesses. Collaboration tools like workflows and versioning; automated processes like content translation and marketing automation; and AI-assisted data insights can sky rocket a team’s productivity and get them doing amazing things faster than ever before.
6. Future readiness
Forrester echoes that digital transformation is all about driving value. And as the world is a whirlwind of innovation with new technologies emerging all the time it’s clear that embracing digital transformation will future-proof businesses and how they deliver that value to their customers.
Look how quickly social media became essential for businesses to be engaging their audiences through. Full-scale IoT is incoming much faster than any of us like to believe. But businesses not ready for the next big thing will get left behind. Choosing technology that will not just bring you up to the now but will set you up for an unknown future is where the power lies.
Your starting point: transformational technology
Digital-first organizations are more likely to realize their business goals than their peers. Technology is where digital transformation is born. Get it right, and you can’t go wrong.
Kentico Xperience is a digital experience platform (DXP) whose goal is to enable and empower you to deliver a superiorly smart and seamless personalized experience across all channels and devices and to improve in-house efficiency and productivity while you do just that.
Its architecture is designed to integrate easily with the tools and vendors you already love through APIs to create one fully connected solution accessed through one user interface.
It can be used to consolidate data across multiple systems, so no matter how many applications you add to your technology stack or how often you make changes to it, everyone in the company can be working from the same data and with one core digital asset library.
The built-in artificial intelligence (AI) organizes all relevant incoming and stored data to bring unprecedented insights for unparalleled analysis and personalization power. No more siloes or operational glitches involving email or copy and paste. Just everything you need in one place and one super-consistent, memorable, and highly relevant customer experience.
Powerful collaboration tools like workflows, versioning, permissions, and third-party translations eradicate friction from internal procedures and accelerate productivity and time to market at every level. All while bringing better cross-departmental visibility, and highlighting inefficiencies and optimization opportunities.
And it’s the definition of agile. The loosely-coupled architecture supports Continuous Deployment, so you can launch, test, learn, and repeat to your heart’s content. It also means your developers and marketers can be working independently and concurrently to make changes and improvements to different parts of the platform without impacting on one another.
Benefiting from cloud availability and accessibility, you can scale individual applications up and down on the fly and never be paying for more than you use. Plus, you’re buying into higher security than you’re likely to afford on your own and getting superior back up and disaster recovery with it.
Next steps
If you’re looking to take your company through a smooth but powerful digital transformation, Kentico Xperience should be your first port of call. Because it is designed to take you from wherever you’re at, to where you want to go quickly and painlessly.
But whatever you do, don’t wait!
The time for digital transformation is now! It’s a matter of survival. But that doesn’t mean it has to hurt. You choose.
Why not take Kentico Xperience for a spin? Choose a time that suits you, and one of our experts will happily walk you through how you can leverage a DXP for your digital transformation journey.