We keep hearing about businesses requiring agility: the ability to innovate faster, react more quickly to consumer needs and make both internal and external changes to meet the demands of a rapidly-changing environment. But what are examples of this in practice? Is it just another buzz-word? While there’s certainly a lot of buzz around “Agility” it is likely to become the single most important thing for the survival of your business.
To illustrate this, let’s look at some simple examples of new trends that your customers are expecting the businesses they patronize to follow. And if you haven’t made the changes necessary to accommodate them, then it’s time to ring the changes and jump through a few hoops, pushing your business’s agility to the limit!
1. Do You do Same-Day Delivery?
If you don’t yet offer same-day delivery, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. A Chicago delivery service says this is its top selling-point. After all, it’s what everyone wants right now. Customers want same-day service, and businesses who don’t have the logistics in place are partnering with delivery and courier businesses that are willing to do it for them.
2. Are You Selling Online?
Around 60 percent of consumers are now willing to make a wide range of purchases online. Will you be the one to get the sales? If your online infrastructure isn’t in place, you’ll lose customers to businesses that do. This particular investment may be a large one, but it will “future-proof” your business by making it easy for people to interact with your business no matter what. This won’t necessarily mean closing your local business’s doors, but it will mean opening a digital version that’s accessible to those who prefer to shop online.
3. Are You Building Relationships With Your Customers?
Even as we move more towards doing business remotely, we’re also expecting greater recognition. Whether you transact business from physical premises, online, or both, building relationships that keep your customers coming back for more will be vital to your business’s survival.
Just as a village store has a healthy relationship with its customers because it knows them personally, so your business needs to gather, analyze and use data to foster a feeling of “belonging.” Can you be better at this than your competitors are? Think outside the box and see if you can come up with some innovations.
4. Are You Automating Workflows?
Keeping pace when everything’s moving fast means being more efficient. You can realize real cost and time savings by automating workflows. It makes your business easier to manage and ensures that routine tasks happen without you needing to intervene. As a business owner or manager, you’re now able to focus your energies on the big picture, and that focus will help you to keep pace with the industry and market changes you need to keep track of.
As for your customers, there’ll be no need to apologize for forgetting to follow through on the processes that must be performed in order to serve them. Instead, it makes everything move more quickly and more efficiently from their perspective too.
If You Haven’t Begun Digital Transformation Yet, it’s Time You Did
Although we’ve used retailers as an example, there’s almost no profession that remains untouched by digital transformation. It doesn’t have to happen all at once, but it must! You’ll still be needed to make the big decisions, but you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions much more quickly. Without harnessing the power of technology, you’ll be left eating dust as your agile competitors forge ahead.
