Technology has made an impact across industries with new-age customer engagement and business process solutions. Pertaining to this, digital transformation is the need of the hour for companies to stay relevant and competitive in the market. The digitization of core activities of business operations calls for the CRM – the way forward to make businesses and sales processes more effective and efficient. Thus, the top CRM companies are focusing more on developing the best CRM software than just working solely on developing digital transformation solutions.
Without CRM, digital transformation efforts will be largely unproductive, if not meaningless. To know why, it is important to gain deeper knowledge of what digital transformation truly means.
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation means incorporating advanced technologies and automation to replace older technologies and manual processes to significantly improve the efficiency and productivity of an organization. To simplify it, digital transformation includes:
- Incorporating advanced technologies for business processes
- Integrating existing technologies to streamline business processes
When we speak of business processes in terms of digital transformation, we essentially mean 4 primary business areas that can be best revolutionized with digitalization.
4 areas of digital transformation
Business process
Transforming business processes is modifying the manner in which various business practices are carried out in order to achieve new organizational goals. To streamline these business processes, the goal is to recognize lags in current business operations and implement digitalization.
Business model
Negative impacts on business practices are often caused when organizations try to fix the outdated business models. Business model transformer requires the incorporation of digital strategies into the very basic block on which the entire organization was built. Corporates can extend their activities into unchartered territories and tap into new market opportunities by digitally transforming their business models.
Domain transformation
Domain transformation is an essential part of digital transformation. Businesses are exposing themselves to many new possibilities and verticals by heralding digitalization into daily business activities. In essence, this encourages businesses to reach new and promising domains that can produce added value. In Ansoff Matrix, this refers to either market development or diversification.
Organizational transformation
Organizational transformation refers to the total transformation of culture, traditions, procedures, talent, processes, and mindset of the company. This is also known as cultural transformation. To bring about greater agility in business functions and a change in the emphasis of employee tasks, an organizational transition in line with the contemporary digital age is a necessity.
The role of CRM in digital transformation
CRM is essentially the seed for digital transformation to flourish. It streamlines and digitizes customer engagements and sales processes to enhance organizational productivity. CRM develops in-depth customer insights that are easily accessible with the click of a button, helps in accurate segmentation, reviews business processes, automates customer interaction, generates accurate and highly convertible leads with efficient lead management systems, and much more.
This digitizes the core operations for any business and eliminates manual errors, frees up workforce to undertake other vital operations, drastically reduces the time taken to complete a task, and saves cost. The benefits of incorporating CRM include:
- Getting an in-depth customer insight to effectively anticipate customer behavior
- Automating complex business processes to save costs, time, increase efficiency, and simplify business operations
- Highly targeted messages to prospective leads by integrating CRM with communication platforms and tools
- An omnichannel communication platform to interact with customers across multiple platforms with the same consistency and full context
- Enhanced customer experience for higher customer retention and competitive edge
This is why CRM is such a big necessity in digitalization, without which, digital transformation will not be as effective. However, effective implementation of CRM to compliment digital transformation requires expert implementation. Thus, to strategically drive business transformation via CRM software, here are some expert suggestions on CRM implementation and its steps:
Identifying business objectives:
It is important to first identify why a business needs CRM, what core activities it requires the CRM to perform, and accordingly choose a personalized CRM software that is best suited for the business.
Planning the budget:
The next step involves developing a balanced budget plan that will give a detailed outline of all CRM expenses. It is advisable to allot more resources to the activities that are primarily responsible for generating revenue.
Choosing the right CRM vendor:
Considering the business objectives and budget plans for CRM, a business should then proceed to strike a deal with the best CRM company that offers the best solution, which is aligned with the two aforementioned factors.
Drawing a blueprint of the implementation progress:
CRM software do not give customer insights overnight. It is crucial to plan how to progress with its gradual implementation to make CRM an integral part of a business.
Analyzing and evaluating:
Finally, to ensure that a CRM software is yielding best results, it is essential to monitor its performance by setting KPIs and making changes whenever necessary to better align the system with business goals.
A successful digital transformation strategy can enhance the customer journey by consistently providing a superior customer experience across all touchpoints. A robust CRM software is the easiest and most effective way of implementing digitalization across all the processes and functions of an organization.
Talisma’s CRM suite of products can help you manage the customer lifecycle right from prospects to final customers. Know more about our end-to-end CRM solutions.
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