5 Tips to Guide a Successful Business Digital Transformation

Business owners are constantly looking at ways to increase their business productivity and efficiency and have always turned to technology to help their business stay competitive. From email taking over post, to cloud computing replacing hardware, businesses have had to adapt to new technology to future proof their business.

With 92% of businesses stating that technology is critical to their survival, it is clear that business owners understand the important of embracing change and developing a digital transformation strategy now more than ever – that’s where we can help.

In this blog, we will explain what the popular term ‘Digital Transformation’ really means, and how embracing it can truly revolutionise your business in all areas.

What is Digital Transformation Important? 

Digital transformation refers to the adoption of digital technology across a company, with the aim of creating new business processes or improving existing ones. It’s about embracing digital technology across the whole of business and re-examining existing processes to see if they still work.

Digital transformation isn’t just about changing the way your business operates. It also involves cultural and organisational change. There’s no point implementing new technology and processes if the bulk of your employees are still in the ‘paper’ mindset.

Why is Digital Transformation Important? 

With Sage reporting that untapped tech adoption could boost the UK economy by £232 billion annually, it is clear that businesses embracing new digital technologies will be extremely valuable to the UK economy. But what are the other important factors?

Benefits of Digital Transformation

We interviewed Tom Taylor, E-Sign Managing Director on the five ways a company can use digital transformation to take it to the next level.

1. It will always reduce your costs — if you invest the time (mostly time, even more so than money) and implement a digital service properly and effectively then you’re automatically going to win on costs. Research we conducted with Liverpool John Moores University, shows that medium-sized law firms would save approximately £400,000 annually by reduced printing costs, completing administrative tasks quicker and minimising storage costs for paper documents by using e-signature software.
2. Instantly improves your customer experience — Most people don’t have much patience these days — they want the path of least resistance. Keeping your customers happy means retention. A client of ours who provides security locks for high end apartments in London gave us feedback that their end customers were much happier with their service once digitisation of documentation was adopted.
3. Business survival — digital transformation can future proof your business. During COVID and beyond, strikes and postal services were affected. By helping numerous healthcare providers provide contactless prescriptions and consultations, our technology has allowed vulnerable people to access the medicine they need.
4. Verification — our secure technology can instantly verify someone and ensure there are no safeguarding issues, for example for candidate vetting selection during an HR process.
5. Industry compliance — when GDPR hit, we were inundated because businesses realised that you had to comply with data processing standards and stay on the right side of it. Our secure software enables our clients to be compliant and accredited with standards such as ISO9001, often a requirement of tenders and procurement.

Our Top 5 Tips to Guide a Successful Digital Transformation

If your business is looking to start your digital transformation journey, here are our top 5 tips for you.

Vet your current processes

Before you can transform the way you work, it’s important to examine your processes, as well as evaluate your current level of digital maturity. This will help you understand the level of digital transformation needed across your business, as well as help form the basis of your digital transformation strategy.

Maybe your business already uses digital technology and will need to focus more on improving the integration and interoperability of your software. On the other hand, your business may still rely heavily on paper-based processes and may need to focus on digitising first. Vetting your current processes will help to guide you on your digital transformation journey.

Find the right technology

A large part of the digital transformation is the digital technology itself. Finding and implementing the right technology for your business is therefore essential. But with so many choices of SaaS applications out there, it’s difficult to know where to start. Establishing your business goals and needs can help to narrow down your decision, as well as address any gaps in your current processes.

It’s important to do your research before you opt for expensive software. No matter what software you opt for , to get the most out of your digital transformation, you need  to ensure that the platforms and systems  can integrate and communicate with each other.

Promote/hire the right skillsets 

Digital transformation isn’t just about implementing the right technology, it’s also about hiring and promoting the right skills sets. Digital transformation can be difficult; around 70% of digital transformations fail.

To ensure your transformation is successful, it’s wise to put the right technical skillsets in the right places. Research shows that around 70% of organisations change their top team during their digital transformation—most commonly when leaders who are familiar with digital technologies joined the management team.

Research also shows that businesses that have an engaged chief digital officer (CDO) are 1.6 times more likely than others to report a successful digital transformation than those without.

Convince your employees 

As we’ve established, digitally transforming a business is hard. It takes strategic planning, investment, patience, and commitment. But all of that may still not be enough if you can’t convince your employees to embrace your operational changes. This is why it’s so important for a simultaneous cultural shift to occur. Around 70% of digital transformations fail, most often due to resistance from employees.

Many employees can be stuck in their ways and see any changes to their processes or technology as extra work for themselves. Communicating the new changes to employees, as well as the benefits and reasons behind it, can help your employees embrace new technology, software, and processes.

Ensure you offer training 

If you’re going to be implementing new applications or software, it’s vital you offer your employees the proper training they need to get to grips with their new way of working. Failing to engage and listen to the people that will carry out these new processes could see your transformation efforts doomed to fail. Disengaged employees may revert back to old, inefficient ways of working.

Ensuring your employees are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and support to use any new software can help increase engagement and buy-in with your new processes. Every employee in your business will be at a different level of digital maturity, so catering for each individual is a must.

How eSign Can Drive Digital Transformation

At E-Sign, we know just how important a good electronic signature is during the digital transformation process. E-Sign offers all this and more, including our digital document platform, payment gateway, ID Checker, API and connectors. Here’s how E-Sign can help to form the basis of your digital transformation:  

Eliminate Paper

Our electronic signature can help to end your business’s dependency on paper, encouraging you to make the switch to digital. Create, e-sign and send documents in just a few clicks, with the ability to manage your templates and outstanding and signed documents from the E-Sign platform.

Keep Processes Digital 

Eliminate the need to print, scan and post by keeping your documents digital. By using a digital signature, you can streamline your processes and eliminate unnecessary steps that slow down progress and take up your employees’ time.

Add Automation 

Add automation into your document processes with Microsoft Power Automate and Zapier. With a range of pre-set triggers and actions, we’ve made it easy to add automation into your processes. Automation helps to eliminate repetitive admin tasks and frees up more time for higher-value work, so your employees can make the most of their working hours.

Customise with our API

At E-Sign, we understand that all businesses will have different needs and requirements. With the E-Sign API, you can create a custom-built digital ecosystem for your document and e-signature processes. Our Developer Hub provides all the info you need to tailor our software to the way you work.

Try out E-Sign

If you’re looking for an electronic signature to help your business on its digital transformation journey, try eSign for free today. With our no-strings-attached demo, you can try out the E-Sign software free for 14 days, without having to provide any payment details.