If your business doesn’t have a website in this day and age, you might as well not exist.
It’s 2022. Competition has never been more cut-throat. The economy is in tatters thanks to a chain reaction of events set forth by COVID-19. It’s a brave new world out there. How is your business going to fare?
In this article, we’ll look at how professionals are changing the way they think and work in the digital age.
If You’re Not Digitized, You’re Dead
In today’s world, customers expect every business in the world to be reachable on social media and have a website.
The digital age is here, and there’s no point resisting change no matter how well your business has done without digital technology.
The sad truth is that many business owners don’t realize this yet. They often spend the whole day running from client to project, running faster than ever, only to find they’re still standing in the same place and unable to outperform their competition.
Why?
The market is digitized, which means your competitors use ERP software, have omnichannel networking, and have a smooth funnel that works in tandem with their brick and mortar shops and online stores.
These are powerful tools that can offset periods of poor performance. Professionals that don’t adapt to the digital world find themselves seemingly doing everything yet unable to increase market share or finally break through into the market.
This is because digitization has completely changed the playing field from where it was decades ago.
Digital assets allow your competitors to assess project risks with futuristic technology once only dreamed of in science fiction stories — artificial intelligence is the key engine behind many genius insights today.
These insights allow your competitors to deliver work on time and manage pipelines, resources, and materials across all active and future projects, with many managers playing second fiddle to intelligence algorithms.
Service professionals are using these algorithms and other digital technologies to improve their value propositions.
Digitizing your business often yields improved user experience, better process efficiency, higher staff expertise, and superior decision making.
Your competitors are maximizing their value creation models thanks to digitization. And your business will find it impossible to get ahead unless you do the same.
Surviving In The Digital Era
Digitizing your entire business is a challenging task. But the benefits are well worth it. Three big trends are affecting the state of the professional service industry today as we know it:
- Increasing speed of business
- Digital delivery
- Outcome-based business models
Not only are customer expectations huge today, but the fact that digitization is making businesses more efficient is also lowering the barrier of entry to many fields.
Thanks to digitization, many tasks can be performed remotely, digitally, efficiently, and virtually at significantly lower costs.
It’s helping to eliminate paper trails and is giving way to more precise billing, faster estimates, and more accurate proposals.
Artificial intelligence is now considered an old hat, and cloud-based technology gives you accessible solutions regardless of your company size.
Service professionals that embrace digitization are often forced to rethink their existing strategies. It often entails mapping out how your customers locate and identify your business in the first place. This forces you to switch your mindset from being product-focused to being customer-focused instead. It’s impossible to digitize without placing the customer first.
And everything that is measurable can be improved and optimized. You can understand how your customer engages with your business at multiple points of your funnel and optimize your processes so that you guide them every step of the way in the direction that you want. The digital world gives you clear data on the consequences of your sales pitch and tells you exactly where your customers are losing interest with heatmaps.
Additional analytics help you understand the core demographics of your audience. You understand their past behaviors and spending habits with the help of cookies which learn their privacy data which is freely bought and sold. You can see which value proposition is yielding more profits. Digital technology also changes the day-to-day going on in your office. Your employees can work remotely with increased productivity because they no longer have to commute through traffic.
Then there are third-party resources that are powerful enough to become empires on their own. For example, online visibility, social media, and self-help portals help to manage your operations as you scale upwards, streamlining processes from initial inquiry to service delivery, all while keeping everyone involved updated.
Embracing The Digital World
If you’re a professional looking to find your footing in the digital world, the first step is to accept that digitization is an incremental process. You won’t get things perfect right away, and that’s okay.
You need to align your business partners with the right mindset first. Not everyone is going to be a fan of change. Your stakeholders will resist embracing new models when old ones serve them just fine. But explaining the benefits of digitization to them will help you convince them to get on board and increase your chances of success.
Then you’ll want to find a transformation mentor for yourself. They will help you flesh out your strategies and uncover any threats and gaps in your plans.
Finally, you’ll want consistent communication with your teams before, during, and after the transformation.
Your key stakeholders must be kept in the loop throughout your entire initiative. Any confusion during the transitional stages will put you a step backward because people are inherently cautious of big changes.
The pandemic has been a wake-up call for many. If your business isn’t digitized yet, you have no time to lose.
Digitize your business, and surviving the next pandemic becomes much more feasible.
Conclusion
Service professionals have to undergo multiple transformations to stay ahead of the competition and survive and remain where they are in the market. Therefore, constant evolution is basically mandatory.
Whatever the existing business model, professionals will need to embrace data-driven operations and digital technology in light of the recent market situation. Who knows what the future holds and how it could disrupt your business again?
As long as digitization is done right, the improvements will undoubtedly help you become more agile in the marketplace and achieve excellence and client satisfaction.
