Examples of Digital Transformation In Sales, Marketing and Service To Inspire Your 2022 Resolutions

Digital transformation is undeniably changing the face of competition across industries in the century. Countless companies have implemented digital transformation to completely change the way their businesses operate and tap into opportunities that were never possible before. The example of Netflix is a common inspiration to many companies looking to digitally transform and benefit from new digital opportunities that technology unveils. Today, we are going to look at examples of digital transformation in practice and understand just how it has changed the way we do business. We going to look at digital transformations in marketing, sales, and service sectors and how it has allowed businesses to build closer customer relationships and empower employees in all areas in all industries.

Examples of digital transformation in marketing

At superior levels, digital transformation’s major goal is to find more customers while allowing the company to spend less money in the process. In an exact sense, digital marketing generates more quality leads and helps any business get closer to all of its customers, whether new to your brand or those that have been loyal to your brand over the years. Moving from analog to digital marketing materials supercharges your marketing strategies in two major ways.

It is cheaper to produce and distribute digital materials.

Generally, digital materials like emails are much cheaper to produce and distribute compared to print-and-mail campaigns.

Digital marketing opens the door to marketing automation.

With digital marketing, you can easily plug in marketing automation, dialogue with customers and analytics tracking in a manner that analog cannot even in a million years. With digital marketing, you can run away from a one-size-fits-all trip down the funnel kind of planning and move on to build one-to-one customer journeys that utilize customer behaviors to personalize the experience for each buyer. In analog marketing, marketers use instinct and gut feelings, but with digital marketing, data-driven insights to help craft everything relating to their customers.

Examples of digital transformation in sales.

There’s a good reason that the traditional roles of marketing and sales are being redefined in the digital age. It’s all about the data. Data has redefined the traditional roles of marketing and sales in the digital era. Because of the ability of marketers and sales teams to collect large amounts of precise data on consumers and their behaviors, the natural bond between sales and marketing is now stronger than before. This natural bond is strengthened by the fact that both sales and marketing teams can now look at consumers as individuals and study their behavior from the first point they interact with the business to the very last point on their buying journey. If both teams combine and nurture this bond, a lot of magical things can happen.

Data makes every sales rep productive.

Access to more and better sales data benefits salespeople more than any other group in an organization. For information to flow freely in an entire organization, both marketing and sales teams need to share information across a central CRM. Individual salespeople also need to populate the pipeline and keep their sales activity up-to-date on the CRM. This in effect has two major advantages. First, because more eyes see the same information, there is a chance that opportunities of sharing intelligence across your business arise. A sales rep’s note about a prospect in this CRM may be seen by someone from marketing who may share marketing campaigns that are relevant to the prospect. Second, because information flows and gathers within your company, you may be able to deploy cutting-edge digital innovations such as artificial intelligence to provide analytics and product matching and suggestions to prospects.

Digital transformation creates AI-driven sales techniques.

Because AI-driven systems can come through large amounts of data to identify useful patterns and insights, it is very easy to analyze sales and marketing data from the end-consumer standpoint. This analysis is likely to reveal the effectiveness of some strategies and techniques that can be revised to match the best output desired. For example, with AI, it is possible to predict which demographics are likely to buy a product during a particular time of the year or even provide information about which sales strategies have proven most effective with time. AI can also give information on promotions and product bundles to drive revenue. As more and more data sets become available from external sensor sources, we can use AI systems to determine sales history and mine marketplace information. With this information at hand, AI can look for patterns, correlations, or anomalies that are likely to give a competitive edge to our teams when going after accounts of interest. The ability to combine AI-driven insights with our tribal knowledge of the teams that we have put in the field is probably the best and ultimate realization of the impact of digital transformation in sales.

Social selling strategies are a key component of digital transformations.

Today, social media is not only for interpersonal connections. We use social media to mash up news and entertainment and even our brand interactions. A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that up to 78% of consumers are in one way or another, influenced by social media in their buying process. In the same report, 50% of consumers revealed that most of their buying behavior was directly influenced by the reviews and comments that they found on social media regarding the brands and products that they are interacting with. Today, it is no doubt that consumer participation in social media has influenced and changed the buying process and any successful digital transformation must incorporate and focus as well on social selling strategies. For the savvy salesperson, the social media platform provides a medium full of opportunities to connect and build relationships that are targeting not only current prospects but also longtime customers.

Examples of digital transformation in service.

The customer service department has not been left out by the digital transformation wave and has been affected in almost equal measure just like other parts of the business. This could even be more. In the service industry, digital transformation has resulted in an on-demand economy that has grown from a few upstart apps that hire errand runners and hail cars for the busy urban class, to a global movement that seems unstoppable. This is what Forbes is calling the Uberise the entire economy movement. The overall effect is the creation of a world in which anything you might want is simply a swipe and tap away around the clock, made possible through a combination of smartphone ubiquity, electronic payment systems and mobile apps designed to match consumers to supply in real-time. This is what digital transformation can do. It makes everything almost possible at your fingertips, from simple pizza delivery to childcare. As the modern customer evolved, they are now expecting more and more companies to use the digital platform as their primary means of doing business. Consequently, customer service departments are now required to be available 24/7to solve customers’ problems on their channel of choice. This is also an opportunity to delight buyers and create more business.

Social media is the new customer service desk.

For those that are just starting with Twitter and LinkedIn apps on their phones, listening and responding to customers on their favorite social media channels may sound very daunting. However, by just deploying tools designed for social media service, it then becomes very easy to meet customer needs, integrate social channels into service workflows and measure brand sentiments and activity across the desired social media platforms where the customers are. The secret to winning more business in this digital world of today is to meet the customers where they already are. This, therefore, requires that a digital transformation mindset must be plugged into how we approach our social service. This can prove to be the difference between companies that are struggling to keep up with customer needs and those that have taken the challenge to turn this into an opportunity to convert service calls into more business thereby striking the growth gem.

Self-service is a service agent’s best friend.

Back in the day, most products came with a toll-free customer service number that provided the only avenue for you to reach out to product manufacturers for product questions or warranty claims. Although call centers are still existing today, digital transformation brings so much flexibility in helping companies to find the right medium for serving customers in more flexible ways. An example in this area is the emergence of the self-service portals that provide avenues for customers to resolve simple issues like password reset, service requests and find information regarding their queries in the knowledge base. Other tools in the self-service portals that provide an even more personalized customer experience include chat services, collaborative spaces, and social media feeds that have relevant information feeds that relate to the customer issue.

AI plays a key role in the digital transformation of service.

Of late, the emergence of AI-powered chatbots gives a perfect example of the power of artificial intelligence. Chatbots are now able to respond to level one inquiries which give more time to service agents to handle more sensitive cases. Chatbots also function to welcome customers to your site and reduce the waiting time. If the chatbots are unable to provide the support needed and cannot find relevant information from the help information base, it will forward the ticket to a real service agent to proceed with the session. All these show the impact of digital transformation on how we do business. If your organization is struggling with developing a winning digital transformation strategy, talk to Plumlogix for help.