The Ultimate Guide to Business Transformation

What is Business Transformation?

Business transformation is an extensive terminology that refers to making fundamental changes in how an organization or business runs. The changes include processes, personnel, and technology.

Business transformation helps organizations to compete more effectively and become more efficient.

Transformative changes are bold and heightened shifts that organizations make so as to accelerate change and growth beyond the basic incremental advancements that would otherwise be hardly achieved.

Business transformation translates into different scopes and strategies for different businesses.

It could be taking up new businesses or introducing changes to the operating models.

Your business needs transformation as a means of creating additional value. It could burst into unlocking the greatest potential of your employees, harnessing all the intellectual property of all your human resources, or becoming more efficient and maximizing the optimum potential of your company.

Gone are the days when transformations would take many years. With the urgency of changes needed and the support available to implement them, you can accelerate a complete transformative wave through your business in just a couple of months.

You need to lead your management team into driving transformative change throughout your business with the goal of positioning your company for sustained success and growth for the foreseeable future.

Types of Business Information

Undertaking a meaningful business transformation requires you to rethink all aspects of how your business operates. It is an absolute necessity to maintain growth in the current highly competitive marketplaces.

To successfully transform your business, you need a unique strategy that is focused on the customer and the people in your company that get the work done.

Three main strategies are used to achieve effective business transformation. In most cases, they are adopted independently, but some companies employ the use of all of them as they work to increase the value they deliver.

It includes the application of new technologies, focusing on solutions, and leveraging data.

1. Digital Transformation

Digital transformation applies the use of new technology to improve all aspects of the customer experience. It includes the development or adoption of the right technologies to modernize the end products and the underlying processes and services that offer support to them.

Digital business transformation goes beyond building up new digital capabilities. It requires an in-depth understanding of what modern customers are looking for. It involves rethinking the entire business models with a strategic digital mindset.

To incorporate digital transformation into your business, you could incorporate technological advancements into new as well as existing products.

The digital-first type of customer expects smart and connected products that are continuously being improved with new exciting functionalities.

Your business needs to experience a transformative change that provides integrates and frictionless customer experiences regardless of the different channels of delivery.

You could utilize self-service digital mediums such as websites, social media, mobile, and email while also offering offline support through call centers and physical locations. Your business needs to leave no loop through which a customer is stranded at any one given point.

Replacing the legacy systems and infrastructure with modern technology stacks changes the way your products and services are consumed. It could involve changes such as moving from on-premises to cloud-based models.

A business transformation consultant is key in helping your business realize how technology is driving deep changes in the way organizations operate and the ways customers consume services.

It is notable that even analog companies are faced with the dynamics of technological changes making it paramount for them to develop new skill sets to understand the potential for innovation driven by technology.

To experience optimal results from digital business transformation, your business has to change how it operates and categorically choose the hiring process to ensure technology is made a key competency.

Benefits of Digital Transformation

Investing in the right technology will help your business deliver more satisfying experiences for your customers. Some key advantages of having your business embrace digital transformation include:

• Innovative new products and services create opportunities for growth in new and existing markets.
• Your customers will enjoy exceptional customer experiences that are personalized and responsive and are given hassle-free, end-to-end services.
• Enjoy high-efficiency gains through the automated workflow process and clearly streamlined business operations.

Your business will enjoy growth and success as a business.

Digital transformation allows you to acquire, retain, and assist customers in the most effective manner while at the same time reducing the expenses incurred.

2. Solution Transformation

Business solution transformation primarily focuses on solving the challenges experienced by customers in a holistic manner. It involves rethinking how products are built, moved, and sold to provide a remarkable and complete product experience for the consumers.

Embracing solution transformation will realign all the parts of the organization to be centered on what customers really want. It is a common method that significantly affects well-established companies that have built and acquired numerous products over time but still approach the market with an isolated set of point solutions.

Solution transformation seeks to understand the problems that customers are trying to solve. It shifts the mindset of the organization to think about the value or outcome yielded from a collection of products and services.

Such efforts recognize the fact that customers do not make use of given products in isolation but as part of a broader ecosystem that needs to be integrated seamlessly across the entire category of solutions provided.

Transforming your products as services to provide all the support and maintenance required as an integrated package that delivers high value as the product remains in continuous use.

Solution business transformation addresses the customer challenges and needs in a complete way through redefining how products are built and sold.

Your business needs to shift from concentrating on individual products and instead focus on delivering a better end to end customer experience.

Benefits of Solution Transformation

Shifting the focus of your business to be customer-centric and solution-oriented will make it easy for you to do business with different organizations.

Some of the benefits include:

• Your business will experience deep, lasting, and more meaningful relationships with customers that are based on the understanding of their needs and solving their problems.
• Various differentiated packages are highlighting the value of using a combination of your products to provide a holistic solution that will attract higher sales.
• Gain numerous cross-sell opportunities as your existing customers make use of the packages, including additional products and services that meet their greater needs.

Make use of this approach and enable your business to increase revenue by serving the needs of your customers in a more efficient and lasting way.

When you deliver complete solutions, your products will become a must-have for the customers you serve, and your business will become difficult to replace.

3. Data Transformation

A data-based type of business transformation changes the way organizations make decisions by putting information at the heartbeat of the innovation and product development process.

It makes it possible for companies to gain high levels of intelligence into all the different aspects that affect the customer experience and informs the areas of improvement.

Beyond developing new data management capabilities, your business must create a deep data culture that solely relies on business intelligence rather than opinion. Business intelligence should form the basis for which your business continuously tests, experiments, and learns what customers really want.

Your product builders should then ensure that the customers are actually using and benefiting from the newly introduced product functionalities.

Your business transformation consultant will help your business increase the use of data and analytics to better understand different customer segments.

Better understanding your varying customer need will help you deliver more efficiently and achieve high levels of customer satisfaction by understanding what each customer is asking for.

Analyzing product data will help you understand customer activity, identify patterns so that you are always on the lookout for a change in preferences will gain you great insights into the customer desires, needs, and problems.

You need to combine all the information obtained from all customer interactions to have a better perspective of the complete customer experience. It is the surest way for your business to identify great opportunities for improvement.

Satisfied customers will ensure that your business experiences sure and steady growth.

You must therefore create a strategy through which you will organize, govern, and analyze your information assets as data continuously becomes vital to the success of your business.

For your business to enjoy maximum data transformation, you need to create a data architecture that will combine data sets from critical systems.

The most key aspects include the product, sales, and marketing as well as customer service to support all the different elements involved in decision making.

You must avoid the mistake made by most established companies: do not deal with your data as an afterthought! Your business not only needs to be proactive in the utilization of the data collected but also ensure that it is not collected in an isolated manner.

Implementing data transformation in your business is a strategic business asset that will deliver a significant competitive advantage in the market industry. Here are some of the benefits of data transformation in your business:

• Enjoy faster and more informed decision making that will equip your management team to quickly analyze combined data sources within the full context of your business operation.
• Attain a high level of product and service development by developing the data acquired on deep customer insights that inform their preferences and user priorities.
• Protect your focus by strategically targeting to achieve customer satisfaction through predefined outcomes. Such outcomes could be increased conversion rates or reduced churn, all of which aim at making sure your customers are the happiest.

Your performance levels are bound to always be on the rise as you use your business data to experiment, measure, and refine new approaches.

Your business can use additional revenue streams! The aggregated data and analysis will prove valuable not only to you but also to your customers and other third parties as well.

As your business embraces data transformation, the right data strategy will keep your business focused on delivering better outcomes for your customers and yielding high levels of customer satisfaction.

What is Business Transformation not?

You may have come across a number of misconceptions that often surround the true and authentic meaning of business transformation in relation to technology and the place of processes in achieving meaningful change.

Whereas both are necessary to deliver better experiences for your customers, none of the two can single-handedly provide real value to your customers.

Transformation is not all about technology. Isolated technology initiatives do not deliver better customer experiences. Your business needs to utilize technology along with other strategies and shifts in operation to satisfy customer needs.

Transformation is also not all about getting lean or going agile. Whereas making changes to the underlying processes is a necessary aspect of business transformation, it should not be viewed as the primary reason for the transformation.

How work gets done is secondary to what needs to get and why. “Why,” “What,” and “When” should be clearly defined before you get to the “how.” Your business needs to understand what your customers are looking for before accelerating the development and delivery of new products.

Conclusion

Business transformation will revolutionize your business and secure it a position on the next level of performance in your industry.

Regardless of whether you transform your business through a digital solution or data transformation, or a combination of two or all three, what your only focus needs to be is delivering an exceptional and remarkable customer experience for all your clients.

Make use of your business transformation consultant and have your management team set a clear vision and strategy to get there.

Make your customers more than happy by transforming your business, and the ripple effect in your business will be mind-blowing!

About the Author

Eugen Spivak is a multi-award-winning author, business strategist, and a business coach. Eugen is the founder of the Canadian Institute of International Business, an organization focused on a better way to learn business!