The Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated digital transformation across the industries, globally. It was a jolt, considering the usual slow pace and resisted acceptance of digital transformation. Businesses were forced to embrace digitization and automation to survive during this crisis. A research was conducted by Constellation Research in collaboration with WalkMe; they surveyed Fortune 500 CIOs and revealed that 77% of CIOs stated digital transformation as their ultimate budget priority for 2021.
Although the digital transformation during the past year was slightly staggered and quick, it does continue to provide lessons to learn and realize mistakes to not repeat while redefining digitization in 2021.
Customer- a key to winning the race
The pandemic has majorly taught us the importance of people. Hence, a business enterprise should prioritize its customers as the most important factor and therefore, digital transformation should primarily aim at providing a stellar customer experience. Technologies like AI and predictive analysis can be leveraged to decode customer needs and trends. Web interfaces are being used by numerous companies to track consumer behavior to implement changes in their product design according to the insights obtained.
Customer-interaction is also a decisive element to boost business growth. Today most customers can be traced through social media platforms based on their preferences. Enterprises should mainly focus on collecting regular feedback and act on the requirements and this will further increase the reach of their products to a wider audience while helping to gain customer loyalty.
Business Growth and automation
Automating business processes have had a huge impact. To consider an example, introducing robotic process automation (RPA) has proved to automate repetitive and mundane tasks at a faster pace with maximum accuracy, which relieves the workload off of employees and also helps them to focus on high-priority rational tasks. The pandemic has indeed accelerated the adoption of AI across industries
Implementing advanced automation technologies can provide business growth and efficiency. Thus, enterprises should majorly focus on solving the ethical concerns revolving around AI and embrace it to promote business intelligence.
Upskilling Employees
Digital transformation can happen only with the support of a skilled workforce. The sudden demand in digitization during the pandemic made the industries run out of time to upskill their employees. Also, many lost their jobs due to a lack of the necessary skill set required to support the growing digitization. The increasing skill gap needs to be filled up by constant upskilling of employees at the earliest by investing in training strategies.
Cybersecurity and Digitization
In 2020, most of the consumers, as well as organizations, shifted to online platforms for survival. Lockdowns saw the downfall of physical stores and alternatively, massively encouraged online services with an added disadvantage – a spike in cyber-attacks and data breaches. The short period in which all of this happened makes us realize that digitization has its apparent risks.
The shift to remote work ecosystems increased the data vulnerability across the web-interfaces and thus needs immediate, classified security measures. Additional security measures should be incorporated using AI, digital identity verification, two-factor authentication, etc., to ensure strong and modest cybersecurity. Businesses should focus on better strategies to implement digital transformation in the coming years and should be open to learning from mistakes.
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