Digital Transformation - Tomorrow is at your Fingertips!

We tend to change something only when it is broken. Otherwise, we are reluctant cause we think that it is doing well so why change? This could be the case with businesses too. You see your company doing good and hence when someone makes a suggestion to alter something or make an amendment, there could always be a tiff. With businesses like direct selling, digital transformation cannot happen overnight—it could be an evolution that gradually transfigures your business's entire thought processes and functioning.

Understanding Digital Transformation

Digital transformation integrates the most sophisticated digital technologies into your business to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Definitely not simple as it sounds, it is an elaborate, intricate and expensive affair that could remake your entire company culture, customer experience, business models, and technology stack. According to the World Economic Forum, $100 trillion will be added to the world economy through digital transformation by 2025. Also, interactions driven by platforms are expected to enable roughly two-thirds of the $100 trillion value at stake from digitalization.

Reinvent the Direct Selling Arena

It is imperative to upgrade to state-of-the-art digital technology as you ascend with your business. Digital transformation could encompass integrating digital technology into the direct selling business and all of its areas, especially with the way you operate and the values you deliver to your customers.

To enable transformation, there has to be a clear-cut understanding of where your business currently stands, where you want to take it, and what resources would be needed to get there. The process can help you revamp your business models using e-commerce and electronic delivery and thus improve customer experience by delivering the best of features and services.

So where do you think you should start?

• Automating your business through artificial intelligence and automation would be step one to creating a better workflow that can simplify your operating models, increase productivity and deliver better services to your customers.
• Adapting to the change is as crucial as implementing the change. Legacy technology needs to be modernized to run on modern infrastructure and engage with the latest applications. It adds system and process resilience and incorporates data from your leads and prospects.
• A deeper understanding of market trends, competitions, customer behaviors, and expectations through various digital technologies can help create products, services, or devices faster according to the need of the hour.

Integrating e-commerce into a direct selling business is the stepping stone to your digital transformation journey. Putting together your business activities like lead generation, recruiting, promotional and selling activities under a digital umbrella is how you make way for the transformation. This could help build businesses with cost-effective solutions and strategies and compete with multi-million dollar enterprises thus creating a business metamorphosis.

Digital transformation could thus pave way for your direct selling business to acquire the vast array of solutions and services from your direct selling ecosystem, industry solutions leaders, and multiple cloud service providers.

What’s Trending?

Like George Westerman said, “When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.”

Digital transformation isn’t an alteration that could happen overnight. Especially with an industry like direct selling that is susceptible and quickly heeds to changes, investing in sophisticated digital infrastructure and not knowing how to utilize it wouldn’t help your business attain transformation. Even after transforming your business digitally, it is important to follow up with changing trends that happen often. The leading digital transformation trends are:

• Cloud computing - With the hybrid pattern of work setting in, organizations have invested heavily in cloud and collaborative services. It is cost-efficient that doesn’t cost companies to purchase hardware and software. Integrating this into your system would benefit your business for its security, reliability and productivity.
• Data and Artificial Intelligence -  Incorporating these into your business will help you draw conclusions from the humongous set of data your company has. Putting it together with AI will help you improve your customer experience and overall business performance.
• Hyperautomation - Automating your business with state-of-the-art technologies like AI, RPA, ML and NLP would help effectively implement strategies and business processes for significant growth.
• Cybersecurity - According to Statista, global investment in digital transformation is expected to be twice more by 2025 growing by 2.8 trillion U.S dollars. Hence, it is important to be aware and invest wisely in digital defense mechanisms too to safeguard customer information and build brand identity too.

Way Forward With Digital Transformation

The future is definitely online. With virtual experiences taking over everything from schools to work to households, digital transformation is definitely a revolution to look forward to. While many direct selling companies have already gotten into the wagon, active implementation and its results are for sure to take time. However, various surveys show more than 51% of the customers prefer ‘online’ over traditional and in-person purchases and selling, powerful and intuitive tools are inevitable for a seamless customer experience and hassle-free, secure transactions.

With multiple risks that the industry and its distributors are poised to face in the coming years, having a sound digital backup is significant in every way. One cannot delegate digital transformation to your organization, but it has to be adopted and embraced by every employee from the top down for it to be effective and add value to the company.