Since no organization or industry sector is immune to the disruptive effects of digital and mobile technologies, digital transformation services are imperative for all kinds of businesses, from minor to enterprises, and there’s no way around it. This message comes through loud and clear from every panel discussion, article, keynote, or study related to how companies can stay competitive and relevant as the globe becomes progressively digital.

Even if you’re not re-inventing a whole new category or turning an existing one upside-down, becoming “digitally mature” will be essential to your survival and competitiveness in the long run. Digital transformation services will allow you to handle customer experiences and the increasingly intense competition from market rivals that have already exploited digitalization to optimize their operation and drive down costs. Moreover, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has brought new urgency to meet digital transformation goals and forced many companies to speed up their transformation efforts.

However, it comes as no surprise that many business leaders have difficulty understanding what digital transformation means and how they should incorporate it within their organizations. Is digital transformation just a catchy phrase to say moving to the cloud? What specific steps need to be taken to transform your traditional enterprise into a digital one? What parts of your business strategy will you need to change to prepare your organization for this transformational venture? And finally, is it really worth it?

Enterprise digital transformation is all about becoming a digital company—an organization that utilizes technology to evolve all aspects of its business processes steadily. And as technology evolves, so should your company. At this point in history, it’s not about enterprises choosing to transform; it’s more about deciding how to transform.

So, if you’re feeling stuck in your digital transformation efforts, bear in mind that you’re not alone. In this blog post, we’ll cover everything from what digital transformation means for enterprises and how to get started with the process to positioning priorities, focus areas, and the advantages that digital transformation services will put on the table for your traditional business. Without further ado, here’s everything that you need to know to master the art and science of digitalization.

Overview Of Enterprise Digital Transformation

First of all, you should know that digital transformation will look different for every organization out there, so it can be difficult to pinpoint an exact definition that applies to all.

However, in general terms, digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization, for instance, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, or blockchain, to digital optimization and the invention of new digital business models. Typically, digital transformation services refer to the implementation of digital technologies to objectively evolve or generate new and better business processes.

So, what is digital transformation for conventional enterprises, and what does enterprise digital transformation refer to? In a nutshell, it’s the process of interpreting customer requirements and leveraging technology to enhance the end-user experience. End users could be both employees and customers, so organizations need to consider the opinions of both to drive the transformation process successfully.

Digital transformation perfectly epitomizes the process of evolving your business further by experimenting with new technology and reconsidering your existing approach to common company issues. And since it’s an evolution and not a finished process, enterprise digital transformation doesn’t necessarily have a clear endpoint. It should be thought of as a continual adaptation to a constantly changing environment and an ongoing process of seeking ways to improve end-user experiences.

This could be done by migrating data to cloud services, leveraging artificial intelligence to improve customer experience, offering improved on-demand training, and more.

Key Focus Areas Of Digital Transformation Services For Enterprises

Adopting digital transformation services and becoming a digital enterprise is a quantum leap forward that every serious organization should take. Because if you’re not keeping up with the pace, you’ll have a growing digital gap to fill. This will make it even harder for you to compete in a market that’s already highly competitive and advanced.

For that reason, you should be aware that there are several key focus areas where your enterprise could implement early adoption strategies and kickstart the process of enterprise digital transformation. These focus areas include:

Artificial Intelligence

In more recent times, technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and related cognitive computation tools are necessitating the enterprise's digital transformation. They are becoming increasingly leveraged to automate various business processes and increase efficiency throughout organizations while simultaneously reducing operating and labor costs.

For example, AI-powered solutions like Y Meadows' latest software can help you start the process of becoming a digital enterprise and help improve the overall customer experience efforts and reduce costs at the same time. The software utilizes machine learning and natural language processing to read through the text to identify the customer's complaint, can be easily integrated into your enterprise's systems, and gather relevant information on multiple channels before a single agent gets engaged. Such cognitive techniques are a driver, an enabler, and a compelling competitive differentiator in modern-day times and one of the primary focus areas of early digital transformation.

Cloud Computing

We can’t speak about critical digital transformation services without mentioning the cloud revolution, one of the key contributors to the digital revolution. Gone are the days when enterprises needed their own IT infrastructure. Nowadays, you can entirely rely on a third party to provide these services both efficiently and cost-effectively.

Enterprises are migrating to the cloud at an accelerated pace, mainly because of the storage of their essential applications. This technology permits them to be more responsive to the changes in the market and develop solutions that are custom-tailored to their needs to launch new cloud-powered initiatives and products faster.

Machine Learning

Organizations face exponentially growing amounts of data that can overwhelm employees’ decision-making ability, but machine learning as a branch of artificial intelligence provides a powerful method for helping companies improve decision-making bandwidth, responsiveness, accuracy, and consistency of results.

In brief, machine learning is the ability of computer systems to automatically learn and improve through the experience without being explicitly programmed. Today, when data-driven decisions keep businesses running, machine learning aims to make systems independent of human assistance and interventions to take appropriate actions of their own.

Some of the key areas where machine learning can help with the enterprise digital transformation efforts include:

• Predicting likely outcomes and deciding on actions by analyzing identified patterns.
• Identifying previously unknown patterns and relationships within the company data.
• Categorizing and cataloging information like accounts, transactions, people, etc.
• Detecting anomalous, unexpected, or new behaviors and events from data.

How Machine Learning Is Optimizing Customer Support

Among others, customer support is a prime-target area where your enterprise could implement machine learning technology to evolve digitally. See, companies have a lot of unstructured data (information that they haven’t sorted or tagged or told the computer what’s important about it). This unstructured data, which is generally created via everyday conversations with clients, contains a lot of insight that can be helpful to understand what customers are thinking and doing.

There are four primary ways that customer support teams could benefit from machine learning technology:

• Tagging incoming conversations. ML technology could help you route chats to the right person. For instance, if you tag a discussion with what language it's in, what it's about, or the customer's sentiment, it becomes pretty straightforward to tailor the response to that case. Machine learning algorithms can increase the message's priority or send the message to a person who speaks the correct language or has an inside-out product knowledge.
• Predictive support and advice. For commonly asked questions that only demand a straightforward response, machine learning can precisely predict what clients need to hear. By implementing the Y Meadows’ machine learning-influenced solution, you can provide your customers with personalized responses to address their support issues and streamline your customer support efforts even further.
• Customer insights. When you have a bigger customer support team of, let’s say, 50+ agents, it can be near impossible to decide the most crucial customer gripe to focus on and identify trends. Even with smaller teams, human employees struggle to make precise assessments of trends because of their emotional attachment to a particular customer or feature. Enter machine learning. By analyzing customer conversation data, machine learning can uncover customer insights and specific trends that the support team didn’t even think to look for.
• Improve knowledge base by analyzing search activity. In recent times, customers help resolve their inquiries by using a knowledge base or help center. This is great for both sides because it’s often much faster for the consumers to get help, and it’s more cost-effective for the company to provide support. Machine learning can help you improve your knowledge base through two strategies: improving the search functionality to display more relevant help and highlight gaps in available content.      
  

Despite the benefits that these key priorities and focus areas may bring to the table for each enterprise out there, many industry leaders fail to utilize these technologies to their full potential. This occurs either because executives are not familiar with what these solutions entail or due to the sheer volume of data and its complexity, which renders decision-making a challenge. As a result, enterprises miss out on utilizing the aforementioned digital transformation services and pass over on many lucrative business opportunities.

The Advantages Of Digital Transformation

While there are many ways to calculate the ROI of enterprise digital transformation, and it depends on various factors, adequate technology implementation can significantly improve the ways your organization functions and how your customers engage with it. The most significant benefits, or advantages, that digital transformation services bring along involve:

• Increased productivity while cutting down labor costs. Utilizing modern-day technology to work more efficiently is one of the most impactful ways to transform your business. For instance, the time and money they spend on educating and training new employees and updating resources can quickly get out of hand for enterprises. With the proper tools and technologies like artificial intelligence, you can keep costs down and productivity up.  
• Digital tools mean improved customer experience. Tech-smart clients want a great experience through numerous touchpoints. That includes mobile apps, social media, email, live chat, and more. Digital transformations are perhaps the most prominent driving force behind improved customer experiences. Hence, enterprises need to work on refinement and optimization of their business strategy in a way that enables them to deliver a first-class experience to the next generation of tech-smart consumers.
  

• Digital transformation will help you be more competitive in your industry. Bear in mind that your fierce competitors are looking into digital transformation services regardless of whether or not you are as well. Choosing to disregard digital transformation is basically deciding that you don't mind being left behind. On the other hand, if you choose to implement digital transformation strategies within your field of work, it means you're preparing your company to stay competitive and relevant for the years to come.
  

How To Become A Digitally Mature Enterprise?

Realistically speaking, simply investing in digital initiatives is not enough. Digital transformation services can indeed help you offer better customer service and enable your in-house departments to work more cohesively. They will also allow you to make better use of data in decision-making.

Nevertheless, to reap the actual benefits of digitalization, enterprises need to take a highly coordinated and controlled approach to the whole process. Below, we’ll display the most significant actions that will help you turn your traditional company into a digital enterprise.

Have A Strong Overall Vision Right From The Start

Have a solid overall vision right from the start that will help everyone in the company picture how the enterprise will be different in the years to come and get to the center of what value the enterprise really delivers for its clients. See, customers are willing to challenge everything—each process, function, product, and more. But customers measure success in terms of the value they get out of digital initiatives, not the company's volume of effort and activity.

Develop The Appropriate Cultural Environment

Developing the right cultural environment will help you drive through enterprise digital transformation, with engaged employees who aren’t only entirely on board with adapting to the modifications that digital technologies will bring but also understand the enterprise’s vision well enough to suggest new opportunities. Enterprises on the road to digital maturity should also not be afraid to broaden their capabilities by recruiting new people with specific skills from other departments and companies.

Establish Strong Cross-Departmental Relationships

Ensure everyone involved is fully committed to a shared vision and is willing to redefine how things are done. This will help your company not lose time and move rather quickly supported by infrastructure and processes that facilitate agile development. To achieve this, you need to establish a solid cross-departmental set of relationships and motivate different people to work together on a project that will set the enterprise on the road to success for the years ahead.

Create Effective Rules For Investing

Investing in digital transformation services and coordinating multiple initiatives at the same time is never a straightforward proceeding to complete. Rather than spreading the same level of expenditure and action across multiple areas and delivering average performance in all of them, focus on achieving excellence in one or two areas initially, like customer experience and internal collaboration. Once your enterprise has conquered one area of digitalization, you can start building a strategy for the next one and exploit the synergies between both.

Understand That Enterprise Digital Transformation Is A Process

Enterprises become digitally mature when they can modernize steadily, consistently look at how they can get more out of existing systems and applications, take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies to improve current processes and respond to business innovations by competitors. In other words, it takes time to become a digital enterprise, and the whole operation is a process, not a one-off project. That being said, make sure you start by making a few carefully chosen investments and go from there.

In Conclusion

How successful will your digital transformation be and which road of enterprise digital transformation you will choose is totally up to you and your team. Nevertheless, the goals you’ll set and the digital transformation services you use to achieve those goals will define what your transformation will look like. Irrespective of how you choose to transform your enterprise, proper planning, and good follow-throughs are always crucial.