In today’s digital landscape, customers expect you to deliver products and services in a fast and efficient manner. Heavyweights like Amazon and Google have set a bar in terms of operations, and they’ve set it high. An increasing need for more streamlined and efficient processes, combined with advancing technologies has made digitization a priority across a range of sectors of the global economy. When faced with the decision to actively embrace the digital wave or to avoid it, experience tells us the ‘wait and see approach’ will not serve your business well.
Although reinventing business processes can seem like a daunting task, it is possible to break digitization down into four tangible (and data-driven) steps.
Creating periodical reports is labour intensive, requiring data gathering, standardising and processing information in spreadsheets. And once the report is out, the data becomes less and less relevant with each passing day.
A better approach is to use real-time business intelligence systems. By approaching BI in real-time management can direct the company towards its objectives by always having the relevant KPIs to hand. This approach, ensures your business adopts a data-driven approach to operations as all projects will need to show measurable results.
To make this possible, you’ll need a robust way to gather data in real-time, data will need to be stored in a structured database, you’ll need equally as robust models, as well as a system of dashboards to display the results. Sounds complicated, right? Lucky for you, there are several great products out there like Microsoft’s PowerBI, Tableau, Looker and Sisense, which turn abstract data into easy to understand visual displays.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system manages interactions between businesses and existing or potential clients. CRMs prevent a workplace from descending into chaos. They are a one-stop-shop to house all your client information.
A CRM system is a great place to begin digitizing. For your customer service team, a CRM can help automate many communications processes. It can help your sales team manage their pipeline and allow your marketing team to execute and measure campaigns.
