Steer Your Small Business Towards Digital Transformation

Recalibrate your teams and operations on the vital aspects of digital transformation

What does digital transformation look like for small businesses?

Companies used to rely on analog means for documentation, inventory, employee tracking, retail, and more. Nowadays, there are tech solutions to enhance the accessibility, efficiency, and daily performance of any business. Especially, small businesses and startups across industries have started recognizing the impact of digital transformation.

With the right digital transformation approach, small businesses can improve customer experience and stay competitive in today's market. 

Unleashing the power of technology: Digital transformation strategies for small businesses

Digital transformation involves leveraging digital technology to redefine how a company does business. While most people see this transformation as a single top-to-bottom change in business operations, true transformation consists of numerous integrative steps and strategies, all aimed towards the same goal. Here are some of the key strategies that can help your small business unleash the power of digital technology to boost efficiency, enhance customer experience, and achieve sustainable growth.

Embrace the cloud

On-site digital infrastructure limits digital innovation. If you want to propel your business into a new age of agility and digital growth, embracing cloud solutions is one of the best strategies. Many businesses already use cloud platforms to store their data. Fully migrating your day-to-day operations to cloud-based platforms can improve accessibility and scalability while freeing you from the limitations of hardware systems. Adopting cloud computing as a part of your digital transformation strategy also helps overcome limitations like budget constraints, skill gaps, legacy IT infrastructure, and security concerns.

Automation

Automation in IT is using software applications to create repeatable processes to replace or reduce human intervention in IT systems. This definition alone already demonstrates the significance of automation in achieving digital transformation goals. Up to 97 percent of IT managers consider process automation to be an important strategy necessary to achieve digital transformation. Integrating automation as a key transformation strategy will help digitize routine processes faster, streamline operations, and reduce the cost and burden of digital transformation. 

Prioritize data-driven decision-making

Data holds the key to achieving true digital transformation. By gathering data, analyzing trends, and generating valuable insights, businesses can give direction to their digital transformation efforts.

Data highlights where and how you should move towards achieving digital growth. Making data-driven decisions is particularly valuable for small businesses because customer behavior is rapidly changing, and there’s a limited margin for error. Since digital transformation is aimed at radically changing how you deliver value to customers, knowing what the data says as far as customer behavior and experiences are concerned will help you figure out how to properly streamline your operations or adjust your product to meet their needs.

Focus on customer experience

Achieving digital growth can be anchored on different strategies. While some businesses focus on radically changing their technology or keeping up with competitors, one fail-safe approach to digital transformation is to anchor it on customer experience. 

Today’s customers prefer brands that understand their needs and provide an experience tailored just for them. Companies that achieve digital growth focus on harnessing the potential of customer data to drive ongoing improvement in how they deliver services to their customers across the various touchpoints or channels they use.

People-focused transformation 

Beyond technological changes, digital transformation involves a major shift in how your organization works. This means the success or failure of your digital transformation depends on your employees and stakeholders.

Getting employers on board by empowering citizen developers (business users with basic IT knowledge) to build and manage digital initiatives will help you achieve digital transformation faster. Getting people on board this way will also promote adoption and prevent cultural pushback, which is one of the main reasons digital transformation initiatives often fail. 

Navigating the digital landscape: Overcoming common digital transformation challenges for small businesses.

Although digital transformation holds immense promise and benefits for small businesses, navigating the digital landscape can be challenging. Small businesses have limited resources and cannot afford to experiment with change like bigger businesses can. However, by knowing what challenges to look out for, you can figure out how to navigate them on your way to digitally transforming your business.

Limited resources

As mentioned, one of the biggest challenges for small businesses in digital transformation is limited resources. Instead of trying to do a complete digital overhaul, small businesses must carefully evaluate their operations, identify gaps, and prioritize initiatives based on their impact and resource requirements. This will help maximize resources by channeling them towards the most rewarding initiatives. Start by defining your business goals and ensuring your digital transformation strategies align. 

Resistance to change

Change is particularly difficult for small businesses. The stakes are higher, and small organizations simply can’t afford the try-and-fail strategy employed by bigger brands. The key to ensuring the rapid adoption of digital transformation initiatives is to encourage a culture of openness and ownership.

Involving employees in digital transformation and equipping them with easy-to-use tools will improve the adoption and speed of digital transformation. Developing a clear roadmap for your digital change with specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives will make it easier for employees to get on board.

Technological complexity

Most small businesses lack the technical complexity to achieve rapid digital growth. To navigate this, it’s always best to start small and adopt user-friendly, intuitive tools to power your digital initiatives.

Measuring ROI

As a small business on the path to digital transformation, you need to measure results to track the effectiveness of your digital transformation plan. Start by defining clear metrics for each initiative from the onset. Track the progress of these metrics regularly and adapt your approach based on concrete data.

Siloed operations and data

Digital transformation is a collaborative effort. Departmental barriers and siloed operations will slow down growth and limit results. To avoid this, promote cross-functional collaboration and Implement systems that integrate data across different departments to facilitate seamless information flow across your organization.

Why must small businesses invest in digital transformation?

As the world increasingly moves online, digitization has become a matter of survival for small businesses to stay competitive. By digitizing their operations, small businesses can improve efficiency, penetrate new markets, build a stronger presence, and provide a better customer experience.

Three elements are essential for a small business: streamline operations, reduce costs and increase efficiency. These 3 elements can be achieved by embracing digital transformation initiatives. 

Digitally progressive small-businesses can:

• Engage and retain audiences
• Deliver error-free work
• Increase productivity
• Secure virtual assets

Gains of Digital Transformation for small businesses

Amid a competitive industry, digital transformation can drive growth and profit. Here are the key benefits of moving away from manual workflow into a hybrid or fully digitalized business:

• Enhances data collection and security

Digital transformation maximizes business intelligence by creating a more cost-effective, secure, and easily manageable system for your business. 

• Boosts customer experience

Digitalizing the buying process, customer service, and rewards can help enhance customer experience, ensuring that your niche remains satisfied and loyal.

• Optimizes daily workflow

With integration options, automatized capabilities, and process innovations, digital transformation brings various teams together to collaborate and discuss matters much more closely.

• Saves time and money

Digital transformation helps execute a better workflow with data integration systems, and other AI apps, allowing teams to access files anywhere on a given platform. 

Tips to remove Digital Transformation roadblocks for small business

Digital transformation is not a one-time thing. Small businesses should engage in a continuous process for the long term, not just spur-of-the-moment projects. 

Here are our recommendations for solving common roadblocks:

• Lack of technologies

At the heart of every digital transformation, the effort is technology. Building an in-house system is overwhelming and will require huge capital and a highly skilled IT team. One of the best solutions is to outsource the most crucial technological needs, designed to customize your business' digital transformation requirements. 

• Lack of collaboration

Digital transformation requires a step-by-step change in organizational mindset. Unfortunately, some businesses find it hard to execute employee uptake effectively. Organizations must foster more robust collaboration between in-house IT and management, enabling every team member to be more productive in the long-run

• Lack of streamlined processes

A common struggle for startups is how to start the digital transformation journey itself. It will be extra hard if the company will not utilize outsourced help. By utilizing a robust automation platform, small businesses can create and launch intuitive apps and automate processes. They can also execute a more agile, redefined workflow.

• Lack of budget

To maximize a startup's digital transformation budget, it has to find a reliable IT provider that can scale costs according to what the company should prioritize. Robust tech platforms like Kissflow are focused on digital transformation and provide exactly that avenue for small and medium businesses. They help you plan how and where to implement technologies. 

How Kissflow empowers small businesses to achieve digital transformation

Kissflow offers a comprehensive digital transformation platform designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, from large enterprises to the smallest companies. As a low-code/no-code solution, Kissflow helps organizations with limited technical capabilities achieve their digital transformation goals without relying on IT teams to build and deploy the tools they need for digital growth. This helps save time, effort, and resources in implementing digital transformation strategies.

Kissflow democratizes IT, making it easier to embrace cloud operations, introduce automation, and achieve people-focused innovation with the help of business users. This fast-tracks digital transformation for small businesses, leading them towards innovation and agility.

Ready to accelerate digital transformation for your small business? Contact us to discuss how Kissflow can fast-track your digital transformation journey.

Here's how Kissflow has helped small businesses

Greencube Global
GreenCube Global is a global business intelligence company that has multiple branches with a growing clientele. With employees and resources distributed, keeping track of expenditures incurred by the organization was exceedingly difficult. The COO of the organization was seeking a robust system to track their travel expenses and payment approvals.

With Kissflow, they were able to automate their travel expenses and payment approval processes. The employees of Greencube Global were able to simply initiate a request with supporting documents and track the status of the process as and when required. 

Tahiti

Tahiti.com is a world leader in the travel, leisure, and adventure destination tourism business. To meet the surging expectations of clients, the Tahiti team keeps a tab on a whole lot of details to put forth a good show. The team assigns and manages the tasks via emails which eventually led to miscommunication and loss of data. This affected the client experience and the Tahiti team’s productivity.

The Tahiti team was looking for a solution that would allow them to build process flows, assign tasks and modify them whenever required. Kissflow enables the team to create forms and workflows and track processes and approvals with a lot more ease. 

JourneyOne

JourneyOne is a business consulting company that offers a range of services to large successful organizations in Australia. Their team handles numerous projects and clients, requiring lots of contracts to be signed. The company used emails and calendars to manage the contract renewal process, which was tedious and time-consuming. The approval process got delayed due to back-and-forth email transactions. 

By using Kissflow, JourneyOne was able to track contract renewals with ease as the chances of data being distorted were reduced greatly. The automated process of contract renewals helped increase the veracity of contract invoicing and improved the possibility of restructuring profitable deals. 

What customers say about Kissflow

Kissflow is not complex and has really been easy to build our processes on. It helps us to evaluate the process in hand and we always find ways to improve.

-Matthew Robinson, YMCA Of Metro Chicago

The beauty of Kissflow is how quick and easy it is to create the apps I need. It's so user-friendly that I made exactly what I needed in 30 minutes.

-Oliver Umehara, SoftBank Telecom

Seal cracks, send approvals, and have fun doing it. Kissflow has streamlined our ability to track reports and processes.

-Robert Hulak Jr., Atlas Roofing

Implement easier, and better digital transformation initiatives with Kissflow - Get Started