After years of being the technology industry’s favourite buzzword, digital transformation is now well and truly on the roadmap for 2022.
Many businesses, however, are facing a dilemma: their size of their budget doesn’t match the size of their ambitions. They may want to embrace AI, foster a digital-first culture and reap the rewards of the data they’ve gathered over the years, but financial constraints mean they’re left trying to wrangle competing priorities and stakeholder opinions.
Fortunately, digital transformation is possible on a constrained budget. In this blog, I’ll share 3 strategic approaches you can take to achieve the maximum impact for your money.
1. Design and define projects in the context of your organisation
The briefest of Google searches will turn up hundreds of different digital initiatives your business could pursue, each one promising to offer increased operational efficiency, profit and customer loyalty.
Instead of getting swept up in all the latest trends, you need to carefully plan digital transformation projects in the context of your organisation. That means collaborating with stakeholders to set clear business goals and then designing projects that help you meet them. This will allow you to focus your time and, crucially, money on projects that offer the most value.
As well as helping you prioritise projects more effectively, this planning and collaboration will also help get key stakeholders on board with digital transformation. With this more comprehensive and progressive buy-in, you’ll be better positioned to embed transformation rather than just implementing a few front-end innovations.
2. Identify technologies that drive the most operational efficiency
Forking out for new technologies can seem counter-intuitive when you’re working to a strict budget, but they can often drive higher value and efficiency than legacy systems.
If, for example, you want to lower call centre costs and reduce call volumes, one of the most impactful things you can do is invest in call deflection technology and conversational IVR. Indeed, at Engage Hub, our retail clients have used call deflection solutions to re-route over 65% of their calls to digital self-serve channels, saving over £4 million a year.
As the old saying goes: sometimes you have to spend a little to make (or save) a lot of money.
3. Incorporate scalability with APIs
Digital transformation isn’t a ‘one and done’ job. It’s an ongoing process that continuously evolves as your business needs (and customer demands) change. The technology you invest in, therefore, needs to be able to adapt with you.
The easiest way to do this is by integrating your systems with third parties via the magic of APIs.
APIs are the backbone of digital businesses. They enable different systems to talk to each other and share data, which in turn allows you to deliver seamless, hyper-personalised journeys and experiences to your customers.
Transforming your entire organisation – from its technology and systems to its culture and ways of working – can be both daunting and expensive. But by taking time to set clear and incremental goals, you can ensure your efforts help drive increased efficiency and profitability – while giving you competitive advantage in an evolving market.
Want to start your digital transformation journey today? Get in touch to see how we can help.
