In this modern era, digital transformation is considered a necessity instead of a luxury. Utilising digital resources and developing digital skills can help a firm become more efficient and cost-effective while also creating a flexible and adaptable organisation for the future business environment.
How can digital transformation help with business continuity – and beyond? This question was answered and discussed in our recent webinar, Accelerating Digital Transformation. Is this the way to business continuity? , where experts from YouBiz, Google Workspace and Exabytes discussed how digital transformation can accelerate the opportunities and possibilities for your company.
The webinar was held on the 15th of December 2022 from 3 pm- 4pm via Google meet.
The esteemed speakers for the event were Roger Lew the Country Manager of Exabytes Singapore, Yinghui Xu the Head of Cloud Partnerships, ANZ and SEA from Google and Kevin Lam, the Chief Operating Officer of YouTrip.
An overview of the panel discussion that was covered by our distinguished speakers is provided below for you to get a better understanding on whether digital transformation is a necessity for your business.
Is Accelerating Digital Transformation the way to business continuity?
- It is critical to perform in enabling people to work from home across markets by equipping them with the tools to help them stay connected and collaborative in real time.
- Besides, it helps businesses respond as quickly as possible to customer’s needs 24/7.
- Google Transformation tools can be used to assist in the effectiveness of operations of assets by automating manual processes and reducing human errors.
- Helps businesses spend more time on higher value products
Businesses today are facing many global challenges like rising interest rates, inflationary pressures, incoming GST and even a potential recession. So do you think that digital tools and skills are necessities or still a luxury and how can adopting digital tools and talents drive business sustainability today?
For a larger part of the business community, digital transformation using digital tools is definitely important. Businesses should start going online as the customers themselves are going online.
For Google Workspace, the priorities go down to how do we make sure that Google Workspace as a product allows customers to go online, either in terms of being able to automate processes but also being able to reach and access new customer segments and business segments.
With this in question, are we as a business willing to be left behind or do we want to move ahead with our customers, merchants and suppliers.
Today, everything we face, we meet, we do, all related to instantly or maybe “fast”. In order to do that, human capability may always have limitations. But if we can start to adopt digital tools or skills into our business, for example:
- You can adopt a sales digital tool on your website that will help you with instant response to your prospect/client and improve your conversion rate.
- You adopt digital collaboration tools that help your team work much more efficiently.
- You could also try a multi-currency expense management platform, that allows you to manage your expenses in all different currencies.
In conclusion, adopting the digital tools and skills will definitely improve our production, operation, or even the response time to meet our client expectations.
During the pandemic, many companies leveraged on technology to earn a living, Many people used digital or technology to sustain a business and even a total reinvention of their business to stay afloat during the pandemic. What would be the one golden simple piece of advice that you would give our audience today who run business post pandemic on the adoption of digital technology?
For digital transformation, you can do it according to the stage as adopting the digital tools cannot happen in a day or month, so you should plan the new way to operate your business towards digitalization and plan a way to train your employees towards it as well.
If you are not going to start your digital transformation now, your business might disappear from the market in the next five years.
For example, Nokia. If you were to look back to 20 years ago, Nokia was well known as a phone that had many uses.
However, when smartphones such as Samsung was released, Nokia refused to follow the change in technology causing it to fail in the market. An advice to SMEs would be to start small now rather than do nothing.
Another advice would be, you do not need to be the first one to start. You do however need to focus on how to be the best to last in growing the business and adopting new digitalization strategy.
Furthermore, it is never too late to start as long as you get the right focus, as you will find a way to grow the business further.
The final piece of advice would be, we need to always stay close to our customers and let them lead the way. It is important for business to use the tools that customers are most familiar with to get them to engage them best.
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