Recently, Gartner released a report with executive perspectives on digital transformation. The report sheds light on how digital document management can contribute to company goals. The 2016 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey is part of Gartner's research into CEO and C-level business executives’ concerns, priorities and attitudes regarding technology issues. For this annual survey, 396 responses were collected from leaders of large companies in over 30 countries, online and by phone.
These successful CEOs were interviewed during the fourth quarter of 2015 on their thoughts as digital initiatives become the focus of growth and business development. Not surprisingly, half of CEOs expect their industries to be substantially or unrecognizably transformed by digital.
According to the report, “As economies slow, competition intensifies. No surprise, then, that there was a noticeable leap in CEO mentions of ‘customer’ explicitly in top business priorities for 2016.” The report recommends that CEOs and CIOs should collaborate to prioritize tech initiatives that focus on end-user customers and new core talent. What could businesses do to make customers happier and more engaged and, above all, to encourage customer loyalty?
What approach keeps you in line with market forces as well as customer concerns and goals? We believe enterprise content management (ECM) is the solution that many of these CEOs and CIOs are leveraging – or should consider leveraging – to help in this area.
ECM helps companies take business-critical processes digital in order to improve the customer experience and positively impact business outcomes. ECM powerfully improves your processes and interactions. It continues to evolve with the market and is a key aspect of successfully managing your company through a digital transformation.
What Does Digital Transformation Mean and How Does It Improve Customer Experience?
In a digital transformation, you reinvent your organization through digital technology to improve the way it performs and serves your customers. Think of your digital transformation as the act of investing in your people, systems and processes to upgrade how your business works in the digital economy. Digital transformation helps you and your staff, but it is ultimately customer-focused.
According to the Gartner report, your business should “re-set portfolio weightings to favor projects that improve customer experience in such areas as user interface design, reducing waiting times, simplifying and improving service, and rewarding customer loyalty. Pay particular attention to end-user issues, where digital competition for hearts and minds is strongest, not only sales processes and buyers.”
ECM is used for positive impact in this competition to improve things for your customers. A digital customer experience enables your business to intake information digitally and streamline it within a workflow that expedites response and service. Customer portals provide instant access to documents and information files in the ECM system. Using digital document management and workflow in your internal processes replaces unorganized digital assets and paper-based processes that put a massive drag on customer responsiveness and staff efficiency.
Focusing on Hiring Talent in the Digital Age
Another focus of Gartner’s recommendations is in the area of talent acquisition and management: “Ask what more can be done with technology to help seek out new skill sets, speed recruitment, improve average candidate quality or to improve current employee survey satisfaction scores.”
ECM is helpful to support the digital transformation of HR, enabling more streamlined recruitment processes and modern HR onboarding, as well as digital management of employee files, annual reviews and other processes. Digitizing files and workflows with ECM is the way to make this happen.
A more effective and respected HR department contributes positively to your business’s first impression on candidates and new hires. It then serves to keep them happy throughout their tenure at your company. If you frustrate new hires with a slow, old-fashioned HR process, you risk losing them to a more modern company with a higher level of digital savviness. Digital HR is critical to attracting, managing and retaining top talent.
The Importance of Freeing Up Resources to Devote to Digital Transformation
Finally, Gartner recommends that you “consider reallocating resources from other support functions that may have become a little less critical this year, such as regulatory or finance.”
Digital transformation is a large-scale and resource-intensive undertaking for businesses, and ECM plays a role here as well.
Departments such as finance, accounting, records management, compliance, procurement and legal trim costs by improving efficiency in their processes through reduced reliance on paper or automated records and file management for regulatory and compliance purposes. In this way, the new processes free up budgets for higher-impact projects.
Of the CEOs interviewed by Gartner, three-quarters expect those digital industry changes to bring higher profit margins. If your organization is able to harness the power of a proper ECM strategy and successfully partake in a digital transformation, you can experience higher profit margins in the near future.
For information on how to integrate ECM in your organization, download our free e-book.
Source: Gartner, 2016 CEO Survey: The Year of Digital Tenacity, Mark Raskino, April 5, 2016
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