All businesses benefit from a clear Digital Transformation process. Using cutting-edge technology to modernize back-office operations and client experience reduces costs, encourages growth and improves customer retention. This can be carried out through business process automation, adding functionality to a website or app, creating customer self-service portals and many other common digital strategies.
You don’t have to make this shift all at once. Instead, target high-priority parts of your business to focus investments that later serve as a proof of concept for continued financing.
Building a Digital Transformation strategy isn’t easy, but these five steps can simplify the process of planning and implementing Digital Transformation:
- Set goals and target KPIs.
- Identify core processes for meeting those goals.
- Choose the right Digital Transformation strategy.
- Onboard and deploy new tools.
- Continually audit and adapt your strategy.
Let’s dive into each of these steps and discuss what they look like in practice.
Step 1: Set Goals and Target KPIs
Before choosing an angle of attack, you need to define a target. While you may have many different goals at any given time, we suggest prioritizing goals that will manifest better profits to reap the greatest benefits of Digital Transformation.
Once you choose a goal, you need to define a few KPIs that you’ll track to determine whether you are meeting that goal throughout the process. Some of our clients’ most common goals and associated KPIs are listed below:
| Goal | KPIs |
|---|---|
| Improve Backend Efficiency | Average API Response Time: Measure the average time it takes for the backend APIs to respond to requests. |
| Server Uptime Percentage: Track the uptime of backend services to ensure minimal downtime. | |
| Database Query Performance: Measure average database query time and number of slow queries. | |
| Number of Code Deployments Per Month: Track the frequency of successful deployments to assess continuous integration efficiency. | |
| Error Rate: Monitor the number of backend errors per release to track code quality improvements. | |
| Backend Resource Utilization: Track CPU and memory usage trends to optimize server efficiency. | |
| Increase Lead Flow | Number of New Leads Generated Per Month: Measure the number of new leads captured through the software. |
| Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate: Calculate the percentage of leads that convert to customers. | |
| Cost Per Lead: Assess the average cost of acquiring a lead via software-driven channels. | |
| Lead Response Time: Track the average time it takes to follow up with a lead generated by the software. | |
| Traffic-to-Lead Ratio: Measure the percentage of website traffic converting into leads. | |
| Content Engagement Rate: Measure how often software content leads to conversions, such as whitepapers or demo requests. | |
| Modernize IT Operations | Time to Deploy New Features: Measure the average time taken to deploy new features from development to production. |
| Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): Track how quickly the IT team can recover from a failure. | |
| Percentage of Manual vs. Automated Tasks: Monitor the proportion of manual tasks replaced by automation. | |
| Number of Security Incidents Per Quarter: Track the frequency of security vulnerabilities or incidents detected and resolved. | |
| IT Support Ticket Resolution Time: Measure the average time taken to resolve support tickets. | |
| System Reliability: Monitor the number of critical incidents per month to ensure operational stability. | |
| Improve Customer Experience | Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Use surveys to gauge how satisfied users are with the software. |
| Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measure customer loyalty by asking how likely users are to recommend the software. | |
| User Retention Rate: Track the percentage of customers who continue to use the software over a defined period. | |
| Average Page Load Time: Measure how fast pages load, as this directly affects user experience. | |
| Task Success Rate: Track the percentage of users who complete key tasks without issues. | |
| Number of Support Inquiries: Monitor customer service inquiries to see if the software is intuitive and user-friendly. | |
| Increase Website Conversion | Conversion Rate: Measure the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as signing up or purchasing. |
| Bounce Rate: Track the percentage of users who leave the site after viewing only one page. | |
| Average Session Duration: Measure the average time users spend on the website, indicating engagement. | |
| Click-Through Rate (CTR) on Calls-to-Action: Track how often users click on calls-to-action like "Contact Us" or "Get a Demo." | |
| Form Submission Rate: Monitor the percentage of visitors who complete and submit forms. | |
| Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate: For e-commerce projects, measure how often users abandon their shopping carts before purchase. |
As mentioned above, businesses often want to target a few of these goals at a time, and cutting-edge technology makes doing so totally attainable. The process of choosing your goals isn’t there to pigeonhole you, it is simply a function of identifying how you will measure the success of any tools that you deploy or any processes that you automate.
Step 2: Identify Core Processes for Meeting Goals
By identifying these goals and the metrics you’ll use to measure them, you can identify the processes that directly affect them. These are the business processes that you’ll automate or streamline through new functionality with a website, app or software tool.
To help you visualize what this process looks like, here are business processes connected to the same goals as the section above:
| Goal | Related Business Processes |
|---|---|
| Improve Backend Efficiency | Data entry, data organization, internal communication, finance, logistics, warehouse management, etc. |
| Increase Lead Flow | Marketing, lead nurturing, lead organization, customer relationship management, etc. |
| Modernize IT Operations | IT service management, asset management, change management, etc. |
| Improve Customer Experience | Web development, customer success, customer education, self-service, etc. |
| Increase Website Conversion | Web development, website mapping, self-service, online forms, etc. |
By connecting your goals with their related business processes, it becomes clearer what software tools can be leveraged to meet them.
Step 3: Choose the Right Digital Transformation Strategy
Once you’ve identified what you’ll be transforming, you can choose your Digital Transformation strategy. Typically, this means looking at available software providers, developers or consultants that specialize in the type of tool you need.
There are two common ways to get this done:
- The “Piecemeal” Strategy: Buy multiple out-of-the-box software tools to transform different aspects of the business and rely on a few different providers for software and training materials.
- The Custom Developer Strategy: Hire a custom software developer to assess your needs, create bespoke software tailored to your processes/goals and provide training materials for your staff.
We recommend the Custom Developer Strategy, as it provides custom solutions, top talent and full support.
The “Piecemeal” Strategy
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔ Cheap | ✘ Generic and limited feature sets |
| ✔ Easy to train staff | ✘ Have to accommodate multiple timelines |
| ✔ Relatively bug-free | ✘ Expensive to add features |
The cheapest option on the list is purchasing multiple out-of-the-box software tools, but you get what you pay for. However, these tools do have select advantages: they’re often relatively bug-free since they are sold to multiple companies and have dedicated bug-fixing teams, and they usually have comprehensive libraries of user training content.
Outside of these benefits, though, these tools can be troublesome. For firms looking to meet multiple goals, it can be frustrating to deal with several different service providers with varying timelines and processes. These tools are also generally not custom-tailored to your goals, and many businesses find themselves getting nickel-and-dimed for “extra” features to get an end product that is truly valuable to them. As a result, we can really only recommend this option for firms with a single, simple goal, like adding chatbot functionality to a website, easier payment processing on a shop page or other similar use cases.
The Custom Developer Strategy
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✔ Custom-tailored solutions | ✘ More expensive than OOTB software devs |
| ✔ Top-tier development talent | ✘ Development staff aren’t in-house |
| ✔ Accessible training and support | |
| ✔ Full onboarding assistance |
Hiring a custom software developer is the option that provides the most value by combining the benefits of in-house staff with the benefits of hiring third-party developers. A quality custom dev will do a deep dive into your business and its processes to understand your exact pain points and Digital Transformation opportunities. The team will work with your company to create and deploy premium software with cutting-edge technology. You can usually expect them to staff exceptional talent since they specialize in creating purpose-driven tools for niche industries, and they are generally more available for staff training and user support since they are used to the process of introducing new tools to businesses of all sizes.
The drawbacks are that they tend to be a bit more expensive than OOTB software, and you don’t get the benefit of having your developers in-house. High-quality custom developers like 7T try to alleviate these cons by providing quick and comprehensive support and enough value to ensure that your Digital Transformation always generates more than enough income to negate the cost.
Step 4: Onboard and Deploy New Tools
Once you’ve decided on your Digital Transformation strategy, you can begin the onboarding process. This is where relevant staff are introduced to the product, have time to operate it in a pre-deployment state to understand how it works and recommend changes that will allow it to better fit their workflows. For OOTB tools, these changes may not always be accessible, but in-house teams and custom software developers will be able to turn feedback into tangible improvements to your Digital Transformation solutions.
It is important to plan a long enough period of time for this process—at least a couple of months—as a rushed deployment can often lead to serious operational delays and the loss of important company data. Give your leadership time to truly understand the new tool enough to train their staff and your IT staff enough time to backup vital information in case issues arise.
Step 5: Continually Audit and Adapt Your Strategy
Once you have officially implemented your Digital Transformation strategy, keep a close eye on the KPIs you selected in Step 1 to make sure things are going to plan. Additionally, you’ll want to constantly ask for feedback from your staff and customers that interface with your new software tools. Use this information to guide changes to the software, the way your staff uses it and the way you educate your clients/customers on how they can better take advantage of it.
Build a Digital Transformation Strategy With 7T
At 7T, we use a problem → solution approach to create genAI solutions for our clients across countless industries. Through our custom-built platforms, machine learning and AI technology can provide significant operational advantages with a robust ROI. Our team will audit your organization’s challenges, often by showing up on-location for a time to embed ourselves within your business and understand your needs from a first-person perspective. Then, we’ll architect a value-generating solution to transform your vital processes and meet your goals.
7T is based in Dallas, Houston and Charlotte, NC, but our clientele spans the globe. If you’re ready to learn more about building a digital transformation strategy, contact 7T today.
