Digitalisation involves using technology to transform and automate processes. Any manual process within your business is costing you money and can be very difficult to manage and measure. Without being able to track a process or time involved how can you track and know it’s true cost or value to your business. Digitalisation allows for the tracking, measuring and analysis to occur more frequently and allow you to adapt to the changing business environment. (to read more about digitalisation click here)
Digitalisation can start with simple tools, integrations or even converting your IP to custom software
When considering custom software it can be use to replicate an existing process and deliver quick wins in your business. It can now be tracked and measured allowing you to create a feedback loop that will give you the data that you need to continuously evolve the process. In the beginning you may not have the budget to invest in customer software. Here are a few tools that help you digitalise your business and start seeing those benefits quickly and efficiently.
How to Digitalise Workflows
What would happen to your business when one of your “key staff” takes leave, goes on holiday or heaven-forbid leaves for greener pastures? Does it cause confusion or panic in the office? Are you on top what they are working? Do you know the processes and procedures that they are implement on a day to day basis?
When you have a manual process and information is passed around ad-hoc there will always be problems that arise. You won’t be able to track or measure progress, see if things are on track or if your people are meeting their KPI’s.
Move to Trello, or for more advanced features Jira, and implement a very simple task-based workflow. You can create a task, assign it to a user and upload all the required data to a task (allowing it to be found in one place). Now at glance you will be able to see where tasks are up to, have they been completed or are they lagging and new more resources.
How to Digitalise Data Capture
Do you record data on notebooks or paper? Do you have a field team that fills out custom-designed forms with a pen and paper?
How much time is spent double or triple handling that data? Do you have to Digitise is by scanning it in? Or do you re-type into another system or a Word document?
Why not consider moving to an online From System that will allow you to not only create custom forms that can be filled out online but provide you with a way to search through all submissions ever made. Automation can now be introduced, when a form is submitted your can be notified, or a new “Task” can be created in a workflow or transitioned to a new status.
How to Digitalise Support
You might think you can’t do this, people expect to have another person on the other end of a support call. But what they really expect is a solution to their problem. Did you know that 53% of customers are more likely to shop with businesses that they can message (Outgrow, 2018). In the end, if you can deliver a great service with technology and provide your customers with options you will deliver great value.
Implementing a Chatbot and allow customers to ask for the basics without having to deal with a person will be a must moving forward. 64% of internet users say 24-hour service is the best Chatbot feature (The State of Chatbots Report, 2018).
Implement a support ticket system which introduces in own workflow and automatically keeps the customer up to date and provides reminders for things that are overdue or not responded too. Why rely on a paper-based system or Excel to try and manage this process?
How to Digitalise simple tasks
How many times have you thought I’d love to be notified of this when something happens? Or would you like to copy data to another system when you provide it in one? Would you like to integrate with an existing system and get notifications from it or move tasks to other states?
IFTTT or Microsoft Flow allows you to set up rules that use external events to trigger actions e.g. When I post something to twitter, post the same thing to Facebook. Or getting notifications within slack any time your company is mentioned on social media. Or sync tasks between Trello and Todoist… The possibilities are infinite.
