3 Key Tools to Achieve a Healthy Digital Transformation

In these times when the entire planet is locked up in their homes and the amount of helpful content for your company has tripled, I am almost certain that there is only one constant in business matters. That constant is the way in which the world at once had to require digital channels to carry out all interaction and from now on our way of living together depends enormously on technology.

It is not something that I say, not even a few, it is a truth that no one can avoid. We are living the initial banner of an era in which technology will reign in our businesses.

Due to the great growth and advancement that technology has experienced, it is sometimes believed that to bring it to our companies we need to be large companies with huge budgets to implement the latest high technology, but this is totally wrong thinking.

Next, we will review 3 key steps and tools that can help us for a healthy digital transformation. Each of these types of systems have several providers, however, their functionality is not too different between the different brands.

1. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP):

ERP is a type of information system that facilitates the daily management of your company. This type of information management systems is responsible for automate and create workflows within the operational area of your company.

Enterprise resource planning systems, as the name suggests, are responsible for optimizing and ordering resource work. These resources range from products or raw materials (depending on the type of company) to the management of payroll and payments for the contracted services.

Tasks such as inventory management, cost management, purchase orders, invoicing, returns, payroll payments, sales projection, among others, can be done with the help of this tool.

We speak of ERP as a first step in broad strokes due to its great contribution to the order and productivity of a company. Just as a building begins with its foundations, an ERP adapted to the needs of your company works as a foundation to achieve a healthy digital transformation.

2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM):

A CRM, or in Spanish, Customer Relationship Management, "helps to comprehensively manage a customer's relationship with a company, usually managed by 3 major business processes: Marketing, Sales and Customer Service."

This type of system comes to collaborate in each of the contact points that the company has, both with the clients, who are the most important, and with the suppliers, who without them we could not satisfy the needs of our clients.

These systems are of great importance for digital transformation since, without them, it is very likely that all other efforts that are being made, on social networks or digital platforms, are being done with a high level of waste in investment. For this reason, CRMs manage to organize and store all the information of our clients and prospects in order to give them the best possible service.

CRMs store all customer information, from contact information, to tracking interactions, creating business opportunities, saving customer preferences, posting on social platforms, among others. Always bearing in mind that customer information is now universal and uniform for the entire sales team, thus allowing several salespeople to “get to know” the same customer in depth.

This is of the utmost importance because it manages to integrate into the ERPs of which we spoke above, acquiring all the general and billing information of the client, but at the same time, it opens the doors for us to enable the channels through which our clients will be able to contact us. . It is especially important not to move to the third step without having and using a CRM.

3. Platforms to interact with our clients

From now on it all depends on your environment or your type of company. In the 2 previous steps we laid the foundations to be able to handle the demand that will be faced in the best way and with this third step what is sought is to enable ways in which our clients can meet and interact with us.

Some of the channels that we can consider and fit into our software architecture are:

• Website (Responsive).
• Social Networks (Fb, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc).
• Support channels.
• Among others.

In recent years we have been told that we must publish photos and products on all social networks and that we enable all the digital communication channels that exist so that our company sells more. However, here the best recommendation you can receive is as my father used to say: "He who covers a lot does little squeeze." What we want is to generate trust through these channels.

It is important to study each of the channels well and analyze how well it suits our company and buyer persona.

Yes, being in all the channels that adapt to my business is an ideal if the architecture of its digital channels is well omni-channelized through CRM and excellent customer service can be maintained in all channels. If this is not fulfilled, it becomes a bad idea, better to be in a few channels but be fine.