Digital transformation is reviewing your business and seeing how you can update your digital and data technology. It provides businesses across all industries an opportunity to boost their business growth.
This is just as true in a retail business as anywhere else. There are so many ways that technology can help your business. You’re probably already using plenty of techs, but there are always more options out there to try.
Keeping up to date with tech and making good use of your data helps you cut down on inefficiencies and provides your business with opportunities to develop further. This article covers a few of the ways digital transformation could benefit you.
Modernizing digital tech
Often the first step of a digital review is to have a look at your existing tech. As businesses grow, they often develop their IT systems in a fairly organic way. You purchase solutions when you discover you need them, but then don’t really consider them again.
It’s common to see businesses building up collections of legacy tech that they don’t really need anymore. These can be wasting space or, even worse, wasting money.
Take a critical view of all of your business’s tech use. Try to identify every function of everything you use to locate any overlaps between them. If solutions do overlap, you may be able to simply cut one of them from your operating budget.
Technology does develop rapidly, and it can be hard to tell when to update and when it’s fine to stay where you are. Making big changes with relatively untested technology can be daunting. But, there are lots of strategies to try.
You could take the time to update your online presence and revisit your website. Alternatively, there are ways digital tech can improve your supply chain. These changes can go a long way towards helping you reinvent yourself.
Data driven marketing
It can be tempting to try simple mass-marketing campaigns – and many have fallen back on them recently – but it might be time to consider more data driven techniques.
Every business collects vast amounts of data that they don’t do anything with. Instead of just letting it sit there, you can use it in your marketing.
Your sales data can give you a detailed insight into your business’s customer base. Understanding what your data is telling you can help you tailor your marketing to better fit your customers. More personal communications will help your business reach its audience better.
Marketing is an incredibly varied field that comes with a range of challenges, but using data can give you the guidance needed to navigate it successfully. What does a marketing director do – he or she is the main point person to lead this business mission.
Streamline your customer services
A customer that’s purchased something from you before is incredibly valuable to your business. It can cost as much as 25 times more to gain a new customer than secure a sale from a returning one. So these are people you want to keep happy.
In retail, problems can happen with your products. Whether they’re faulty or never even arrived, your customer needs to feel confident that they can get the support they need. You won’t keep a customer who feels you let them down.
Customer services are crucial to customer retention, and they’re also something that digital technology can help you with. Consider adding chatbots to your service team.
Even fairly basic chatbots can handle many of the simplest customer service requests. Where before, one of your employees would have had to handle the low-level requests, now their time is freed up to aid the more complicated ones that really need them.
Streamlining your customer experience helps you get more customers satisfied, and faster. Keep them happy, and you’ll keep them spending.
Helping to fix problems isn’t the only way you can use chatbots, either. Chatbots can help across many areas of business-to-customer communications, from answering questions to asking for customer feedback.
Improve accuracy with predictive modeling
You can never be certain of what the future will bring. When you’re trying to do strategic growth planning, that’s something you’d like to get as close to as you can.
Deciding which strategies to use comes down to the predictions you make. You look at your market and use your understanding to decide what effects you think a change will have. This is something that data can help with as well.
By using your customer data, and possibly more beyond that, you’re able to build a statistical model of your market. This looks at your market’s past interactions to generate statistical predictions of its reaction to various changes.
When you want to try out a new strategy, you’re able to model the future and gain more accurate predictions than using your experience alone. You can then use the results to inform which ideas you want to prioritize.
Ease internal communications
Being able to communicate quickly and effectively helps your business use its time better. Retail is built on a complex web of connections from the storefront, to stocks, to logistics and purchasing. An efficient communications network keeps them working together despite their disparate roles.
Digital transformation can update your systems so that your departments can talk to each other effortlessly. One of the most useful ways of doing this is improving automation.
Setting up automatic communications and data sorting cuts down on the time spent keeping track of all of your products and staff. It can help keep popular items stocked, or manage your credit system for you.
Find what works for your business, and technology can help you run all the more smoothly.
Boost your business growth
As you can see, technology has an unignorable role to play in connecting your business to your customer. A more efficient and well-informed business can reduce waste and improve the quality of interactions with its market.
Less cost and more sales that are easily maintained will keep your business growing. A digital transformation is a tool that can’t be underestimated.
Understanding all of IT is like trying to understand all of the business, no one has the time to keep up with it all. When you’re trying to keep up with both, it’s even harder. Consider adding a digital expert to your business’s Board of Directors.
Involving tech in your business at a strategic level will make the process much simpler. A Part-time IT Director from Boardroom Advisors could be what your business needs. They’re able to find a flexible contract that suits your business’s needs.
