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Any business could run successfully by operating offline a few years back. Customers would directly come to your store and buy items as per their needs. If they like your service, they will visit again and gradually become loyal to you. The point is, it was not that challenging for business owners to gain and retain customers back then. Fast forward to now, the business landscape has completely changed with constant technological evolution. As more and more customers join the digital universe, establishing an online presence has become imperative for businesses to stay relevant in todays highly competitive digital-first world, without which they will only end up turning obsolete.

The Covid-19 pandemic has already pushed businesses to adopt digital technologies. In fact, going digital was the only alternative for traditional players to continue operations during lockdowns. And this worked really well for MSMEs and startups. 28% of these businesses recorded exponential growth between 100-500% in their sales through online mediums. Apparently, their ability to digitize themselves to continue serving customers and finding prospects was one of the key survival measures.

Against this backdrop, heres how digital transformation will help organisations scale up their businesses to new heights:

Business optimisation

By investing in digital technologies like AI and IoT, businesses can get access to rich consumer insights. This will help them understand the customer and their needs better and devise solutions to address their pain points accordingly. Chatbots are a great example. Most companies leverage this innovation to respond to customer queries and address them instantly. Further, business owners can analyse these inputs to study customer preferences and stay prepared with exact solutions that customers might look for in the future. Clearly, technology makes businesses highly efficient by enabling them to make informed decisions and serve customers more seamlessly with the right solutions precisely in sync with their expectations.

Customer engagement

To win customers, it is pivotal for any business to create an interactive website and establish their presence on social media. It is essential to creatively market your products online to attract customers and eventually persuade them to buy your service. Also, businesses must equip themselves with robust feedback mechanisms to understand customer queries and address them ASAP. Most importantly, ensure that the users shopping experience is impeccable. Because when happy customers do word of mouth, the chances of securing more prospects ramp up. With the help of these digital tools, one can not only delight customers but also keep them engaged and intact to the brand.

Boosting employee morale

Digitising a business means automating most of the manual functions, which consume a lot of time. When a company becomes tech-driven, it provides employees with more time in hand, which can be spent on other critical tasks. When employees get enough time to work on particular projects, they get to experiment with their creative skills and thus deliver better performance at every point possible. Overall, technology boosts their morale and motivates them to work smarter, not harder, ensuring quality work and happy customers.

Better decision-making

A significant part of the world has already gone digital with the rapid adoption of smart gadgets in their everyday lives. This transition leads to the generation of massive data every second. However, since this data is primarily raw and unstructured, how can we make the most of it? By data mining. By extracting relevant insights from large data sets, businesses can observe and understand the evolving consumer patterns, market trends and much more. Learning this enables them to serve customers with more tailored and personalised solutions. Access to the right data also allows business leaders to smartly modify their sales and marketing strategies in sync with consumer expectations. As a result, data mining is pivotal for businesses to analyse customers and their needs and make better and more informed decisions.

Wrapping up

We have already seen how digitalisation can help businesses enhance their operations and win more customers. However, since the competition is also high, investing in the right technology alone is not enough. Business owners must also know how to use them the right way. For this, they must host interactive webinars and knowledge sessions to train their employees and help them master different digital tools. Businesses that tick off these factors will undoubtedly rule the world, while those who fail will go obsolete sooner or later.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Why digital transformation is the key to your survival in a competitive world? - Times of India