In today’s growing age of cut-throat competition, businesses need to have an edge for the survival of the fittest! The business world is like a malleable alloy, which changes with the environment it is in. Gone are the days of direct sales. Hail the era of indirect sales at the subconscious level. It’s high time for a radical makeover!
Customers, though invaluable, are like pampered children. All the credit goes to ‘big fish’ such as Google, Apple, Adobe, and Amazon. Customers, today, are tired of repetitive proposals, expect swift services, and sick of sweet-talking political hacks. They want time-critical turnkey solutions that are real-time based and location-based with little to no errors.
Digitization means converting data at machine level analog into a user-friendly readable digital format. It may involve the integration of old skills and new technologies and trends. There are a lot of benefits such as overhead costs reducing by a whopping 80% and improved response turnaround times. Taking the example of a travel company, it can provide location-based services such as developing mobile applications that provide travel-friendly navigational information, the shortest path to reach nearest hospitals, restaurants in a new city, country. If one is an avid trekker or wildlife photographer, he can benefit from an app that gives all the information on a species of flora or fauna in minutes after scanning a picture the person has just taken from his mobile phone.
The port of Hamburg today has digitized the system that scrutinizes traffic for almost half a million vehicles per day. Another major help is getting invaluable customer feedback from ever critical and zealous clients. Using Geographical Information System software’s such as ArcGIS, Erdas, and cartography, we can digitize maps adding in detailed features. Remote Sensing can be used to study endangered species and also to do a reconnaissance of military movements. Social apps play a major role in formulating media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Let’s also not forget that organizations that are experts in digital marketing have the power to manipulate and change the business trends as per their whims.
Thus, in retrospect, digitization helps an organization to be more alert to changing business values, customize products and responses with clients on a personal level, and, most importantly, to streamline and automate all processes so that workers can focus on things that really matter most in business, the ‘human touch’! In short, we can say to increase the presence of a company in the society, and in turn raise more awareness and goodwill in the environment, digitization really is the ‘lifeline’ of any business.